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Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
Another great case in point these days is the teacher rebellion.
The endless desire to genuflect to lower taxes means advocating people get paid shitty wages. In a world where you don't have an economy without education, the Red States have been killing themselves for the last couple of generations because of their fealty to the anti-tax religion.
I don't care what someone's ideology or religion is, in the 21st century, if you can't run a school system, balance its budget, and attract decent talent to teach, you shouldn't be anywhere near government, anywhere in the world.
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The market is not all-knowing and perfect. And its greatest imperfection is rewarding the undeserving such as us, brokers, finance people, salesmen, etc. (the half parasitic, minimal value-add sectors of the work force) and depressing the wages of the deserving (GPs, teachers, first responders, etc.).
But how does one upend a system that values people like us at many multiples of a teacher's salary? How is that perverted situation remedied?
Well, you have to have a severe enough crisis to shock the system so badly that people begin to ask why a lawyer, or a broker, or some hedge fund analyst, makes so much money. You need a situation where either the market, or society, depresses the wages of the undeserving in favor of raising the wages of the deserving, such as teachers.
Supporting interventions that protect the current system is never going to do this. Never. Ever. Barring a crisis that all but reconfigures our society, we will never see a situation in which a teacher or a firefighter is paid like a decent analyst or lawyer.
Supporting intervention to protect a system that keeps your retirement safe is siding with unfairness. The class system, the false barriers to entry, and the wage protectionism for the affluent and connected in this country is turning us into an English class system. You and I are part of that. Sure, we're willing to fix things at the margins. We're willing to give a few thousand here or there, vote for the right candidate, perhaps donate our time. But when the next crisis hits, we will both demand that our national Handicapper General step in and protect us from the economic forces that should wipe out a system as fragile as ours. It's crazy to do otherwise, of course, as self-preservation comes first. But those crazy Libertarians? They're willing to live through the natural selection and evolution that moves a society forward. They are, in fact, progressives in this regard. And you and me? We're conservatives, trying save our stuff... saving our asses.
