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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
This is a neat way of writing the obvious. But my comment was a response to GGG's post in which he criticized low teacher pay. "Low" is relative, gauged against "high," and the high pay crowd includes, as you note, people like lawyers. So when a lawyer says, "It's greedy people who starve teachers," he's referring in part to himself.
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Oh, bullshit. Has GGG ever, to your knowledge, voted against higher pay for teachers, or for the sorts of things (Prop Two and a Half in Massachusetts) that squeeze the governments paying them?
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Teachers are paid what they can extract from the system, and the system - which benefits the lawyers here (and many other places) - has enormous leverage over teachers, and so pays them shit. If you really want to pay teachers well, you have to remedy the market structure that allows us to pay them so little. That would involve goring the oxe of people like, lawyers.
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I think this, too, is bullshit. Teachers get paid very little because the entry barriers are low and because the benefits of good teaching are hard to measure, diffuse, and a common good.
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And I'm not talking about merely taxing lawyers more to pay teachers more. That would only drive up lawyer salaries even more. I mean reevaluating what's important, and paying people more based on actual societal value.
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Explain this notion you have of transitioning from capitalism to paying people more based on actual society value. I'm all ears.
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Salary disparities like those between teachers and merchant class professionals result from policy choices, not pure market dynamics. We could pay teachers a ton and lawyers like shit. The average teacher could go to law school and do what we do. We've decided to set up a license leveraging system (Milton Friedman's term for law and other non-hard science/non-physical-trade professions requiring licensure) that has caused the value of lawyers to rise much higher than that of teachers. That could be cured.
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On the margin, maybe, but as you look back through history I do not think you will ever find a time and place where teachers were paid more than lawyers, and there might be reasons for that other than policy choices.
