Except you still don’t get that the average baseball fan’s contribution to Ken Griffey’s salary is very very small. And his contribution to the salary of the nurse’s aide who changes his bedpan, and the nurse who administers his medication, and the doctor who performs his surgery, is very large. If you want to see a baseball game you turn on the TV, or buy a ticket. The ticket to the game costs a few dollars. A major health crisis will cost tens of thousands, or more.
Just because a few baseball stars make millions of dollars doesn’t mean we value baseball more than health care. We spend a lot less on baseball than we do on health care. That’s a fact. It’s just that what little we do spend on baseball isn’t spread evenly. Most baseball players make nothing, they play for free. A very small number of baseball players are paid enough that they don’t have to work at another job during baseball season. An even smaller number of baseball players have a really good salary. And an even smaller number of baseball players make millions.
Your problem is that you think like an employee. You think that work has value because it’s work. But that’s not why employees get paid. Employees get paid because the employer has some tasks that have to be done, and they have no other choice but to pay somebody to do them.
Stop imagining what you think an employee should be worth, and start thinking about what value that employee generates for the employer. Is water more important than diamonds? Sure, if you’re dying of thirst in the desert you’d trade a sackful of diamonds for a drink of water. So why do diamonds cost thousands of dollars, while tap water costs less than a penny a gallon? If you can understand why tap water doesn’t cost thousands of dollars a gallon, despite being absolutely essential to life, you’ll understand why a teacher makes $40,000 a year while some singer you never heard of makes millions.
Again, that singer isn’t an employee, he’s a businessman. He makes money depending on the number of tickets he sells, the CDs and mp3s he sells, the merchandise he sells, and so on. If he sells a million CDs, and gets $1 per CD (in reality the typical musician gets much less than $1 per CD), then how can you say he doesn’t deserve a million dollars? Because I guarantee that if a teacher could figure out a way to teach a million kids, that teacher would be a millionaire too.
If you imagine a teacher as a shopkeeper, selling his services to whatever customers drop in, you can easily see that a teacher’s work can’t scale up the same way as musician’s work can. A musician can record a song in one day, and that song can be sold once, twice, ten times, a thousand times, or a million times. A teacher can teach a limited number of kids a day. A teacher who teaches twenty kids a day can be compared to a musician who performs for twenty people a day. Neither is going to become a millionaire. But I can guarantee you that people pay a lot more for teachers to teach their kids than they do for musicians to entertain their kids.