Converation thread

Easy: teachers deserve extremely high pay because they are one of the most important and foundational jobs in society, whereas athletes do not deserve as high of pay because they are merely entertainers.

The invisible hand is a myth, it’s damaging to assume that the free market will simply remain free without government intervention to prevent monopolies, or at least, keep them from doing horrible things. Even Adam Smith was okay with preventing monopolies, and he literally created the concept of Laissez-Faire.

Excuse me, but this is about wage controls, not monopolies. You are, again, switching the focus of the argument to make your position sound better.

And what Adam Smith actually proposed was preventing artificial monopolies that can only survive because of state intervention, he did not criticise monopolies that naturally arise in free market conditions, only those that depend, for their survival, upon government life support and corporate welfare that necessitates legalised plunder (aka taxation.)

And I am saying that the free market will fail to pay teachers for what they are actually worth. Now, I didn’t read the full conversation, that’s on me, but I still don’t trust the general market to decide how much a teacher gets paid.

Forcing people to pay higher salaries for teachers will result in schools being forced to fire a bunch of other teachers in order to afford the higher-paid ones, and/or a tax hike, which will result in everyday people keeping less of their earnings and thus spending less on goods and services, which will result in local companies making less money, and potentially having to lay off workers or raise prices, creating a ripple effect.

Yet another reason that privatizing education below K-12 doesn’t, cannot, and must not happen. If the teachers are not being paid what they’re worth, their quality of teaching will drastically decrease, leading to nation-wide in efficiency, strikes, and teachers unions against this unfair pay. The end result even if you try this is the reinstatement of public education, because the government can actually afford to pay the teachers well enough.

Teachers will be paid what they're worth in the free market, under the price system, which determines wages based on the value of labor independently of government. The solution to inefficiency, strikes, and teacher unions is to fire inefficient teachers, fire strikers, and abolish teachers unions. I support the total privatisation of all education. Get the government out of it.

Okay, fire inefficient teachers I’m more fine with, but if they have no voice, no power, and no representation, they have no ability to counteract a tyrannical company, and the free market alone cannot handle that unless the company is small in size. They aren’t paid what they’re worth, we know that, and privatizing the entire system is practically GUARANTEED to leave a large swath of children uneducated, not to mention that leaves the responsibility of paying for education to the already overworked parents, which isn’t helped by being in an extremely individualistic society.

NO, because if we privatise education at first there will be a voucher system to ensure that children can go to private schools – the same money will be spent on education, just WHERE that money goes will be up to the parent instead of the state. Then schools that are better will be chosen by far more parents, creating competitive incentives for greatness among the private schools, who will push their students to work hard and produce an astronomical leap upward in the quality of education in this country. Currently there is next to. no competition, as each school can count on funding…  Read more pretty much no matter what, but switch to a voucher, and the great schools will be rewarded and the mediocre ones punished. Students and teachers will both benefit, as the private schools that do great will want to hire great teachers who demand more of a salary, and could negotiate that independently of government. This is a win-win scenario.