Free market competition has a history of creating jobs, creating new products, new opportunities and wealth. Government control of the market fails.
Thomas Sowell points out in Basic Economics IIRC, that you can’t compare the official government prices in places where the government controls prices. Instead you have to look at the blackmarket price for goods. Since the blackmarket is almost always a free market, it is much more likely to be properly indicating the correct signals.
A signal is how much a person is willing to pay for a good or service.
If somebody is staying in the same job, even though they aren’t “getting paid enough”, then the company is being signaled that they price they are paying for labor is correct. If they can’t hold personal and/or they can’t hire new personal then they are being signaled that they are not paying enough. Paying enough includes all the extras a job includes.
Maryland has a fairly high income tax. The income tax is both a state income tax, a county income tax and a city income tax. Originally there was no limit on what the county and city tax rate could be. The different counties had different rates. People made decisions on where they lived based on those rates.
In order to “help” the people from being ripped off by the county and city taxes legislation was introduced that set the maximum rate that could be charged. With fanfare it passed.
Within a very few years every county and city had exactly the same tax rate. That maximum allowed by law.
… it of course being more equitable when nobody can get anything, rather than the better off being able to afford more.
.
Oh, wait, that won’t really change with price controls. It’s just that the “breakpoint” where you can get what you want, moves to a higher (perhaps much higher) level of wealth and / or connection. And it shoves a lot of the activity into the black market, arguably more dangerous for all participants – especially the people who had no prior experience dealing in black markets and are thus naive about how to go about it. (Myself included in that category.)