People on the right tend to have an almost blind faith in market capitalism.
But people on the left tend to have a blind faith in the government's ability to
distribute "Fairness". Nothing shows the perils of fairness more than when you
talk about how much different professions pay.
After all, what kind of world is it where a basketball player can make $10
million a year while a teacher only makes $30,000 a year? That, on the surface,
strikes many people as a reasonable question.
But the problem with that is that you end up having to make a value judgment
on which jobs are more worthy than others. Basketball players make a lot
of money because professional basketball, as an industry, generates a great deal
of money for the owners of basketball teams. Those owners make their money
largely based on how good their team is. Therefore, they must compete against
one another for the best players in the world, the price for the world's best
players drives the price up.
In contrast, teachers, a worthy profession, are much more common. And because
the government runs schools via tax dollars, there is no "profit" in the
education "business". Therefore, it's a simple supply demand equation. The
number of teachers or potential teachers is very high and therefore their
salaries reflect that. Those who wish teachers to be paid more should
demand that the government get out of the education "business" and let private
industry run a highly regulated education industry. There, schools would compete
against one another to get the best scores in various areas. That in turn would
create competition for getting the best teachers.
Now before someone emails me telling me of the dangers of making education a
private enterprise, my point isn't that we would be better off as a society,
only that teacher, or at least good teachers, would very likely get paid more
than they do at present. Any goal is going to have negative side effects.
I personally don't have a problem with the public school system. It works
adequately. But then again, I don't have a problem with teachers not being paid
as much as professional basketball players.