I think it's fairly ironic that a social democracy like Norway doesn't have minimum wages, while the US do have minimum wages. Anyway, I don't think high median income in Norway is due to the absence of minimum wages, it's probably much more about the economy having been greased by oil money for quite some time now.

One thing we do have in Norway is pretty strong unions. In some sectors there are strikes almost on a yearly basis - notoriously, the air travels are affected almost every summer. In the sectors dominated by union workers, there are for all practical purposes minimum wages.

Some social benefits (notoriously, unemployment compensation - money one gets from the state after being laid off) depends on that one doesn't have a job, it's in my opinion quite ridiculous that in some cases one can get less money from taking a job than not to take the job. This also helps driving up the de-facto minimum wages.

I tend to agree with your point of view, you cannot fool the market ... one typical example is maximum payment for house rent, that is an extremely bad idea - the result is inevitable - some people win on it by getting cheap housing, but quite many people will fall outside the regulated housing market. If the purpose is to get affordable housing for everyone, then one has to resort to other tools, like giving subsidizes or tax cuts encouraging building houses, etc (we have that in Norway - from a tax perspective, one of the smartest things one can do is to take up a mortgage, buy a house with a separate apartment in the basement and rent out the apartment. This again causes problems, particularly in the more expensive towns as Oslo - we get a big divide between those who are creditworthy enough to buy such a house and those who have to rent the apartment, and the policy is heavily geared towards detached houses rather than bigger apartment buildings, and we need the latter if people are to find affordable urban housing). Another obscurity ... we had (probably: have) subsidized student dorms, but not enough of them - so the students applying for a student dorm wins subsidized housing through a lottery! That's just not right in my opinion!

We also have very strong labor right laws, i.e. every employee have the right for vacations, rights for paid sick leave, there are strong regulations wrg of overtime work and such - even if the employee wants to work as much overtime as possible and wants to skip taking vacation, it may become a problem for the employer if the worker is working too much. It's also very difficult to get rid of workers, you can't sack someone without a very good reason. I'm enough of a socialist to agree with the purpose of the laws, but I believe the true cost of those labor rights is that it's harder for the unemployed or temporary employed to get employment. Case of point: the public sector is often having a ridiculous amount of employees on temporary contracts or hired through Manpower etc. The real reason is probably because permanent employees in the public sector have too many rights.