Okay, sorry.
I’m not sure how I’m supposed to use the quote thingy, but until I figure it out I guess I’ll just have to leave it alone altogether.:o
Dibbs, I know I’m going to regret chiming in here, but…
You’re not going to have a chance in debates like this until you really come to understand Supply and Demand. More to the point, you have to come to understand that if you don’t like the results of Supply and Demand, you CAN’T (not shouldn’t) fix them through government fiat. Many have tried; all have failed. This is the reason that your dream of “philosophizing wages” (whatever that means) can never be anything but a pipe dream: If you try to implement it, it becomes a nightmare far worse than the problem you’re trying to solve.
Depends on how you look at it. If we all choose voluntarily how to spend our money, then the result is fair in that we bought what we wanted. I earned it, so I get to choose how to spend it.
If we all decide to spend it on watching basketball games, it’s not “unfair” that the players got rich. Clearly, what they’re selling is what we want to buy. If you THINK it’s unfair, that just means you don’t enjoy basketball as much as the people who are spending their money on it.
It’s not “the system” that does this. It’s the individual people choosing to spend the money they earned on entertainment instead of janitorial services.
You’re referring to the zero-sum game that has already been refuted in this thread. There’s not a pot of money that’s being improperly divvied up. The amount these people earn is NOT determined by what’s “leftover” from the amount celebrities earn. In fact, for most people, it’s the opposite: What gets spent on basketball tickets is what’s left over AFTER buying necessities like food and brain surgery.
If anything, the fact that LeBron is rich shows that there are a lot of people doing well enough to afford leisure activities like watching basketball games.
The big deal is that, when she is on TV, millions of people tune in to watch her. Why is that? I don’t really know. But I DO know that there are a whole bunch of other people TRYING to achieve this and failing, demonstrated by all the TV shows that DON’T have millions of people tuning in to watch.
Does that mean that Oprah is “better” than a janitor? No, it means a whole lot more people are interested in watching her work than are interested in watching, well, whatever else is on TV (or watching the janitor work).
You seem to be assuming that “earn” should equate with “effort”. It just doesn’t work that way. It just CAN’T work that way. Oprah is selling her personality and her ability to entertain. And here’s the key point: People are buying it. Voluntarily.
If what she’s selling is what people want to buy, then she IS EARNING what she gets. If you work your ass off trying to sell cow turds to homeowners, you won’t earn much, and it won’t have anything to do with how hard you’re working or how loud you’re grunting.
You seem to think that you’re a better judge of where money should go than the general public. Maybe you are. But here’s the deal: All these people who are enriching LeBron James are spending money that THEY worked and, potentially, grunted to earn. You want to see money spent differently, then go earn it and spend it how you think it should be spent. For instance, you could choose to have brain surgery every Saturday night.
It’s not a “contstruct”. It’s people making voluntary choices with their money. And what you keep calling “musical chairs” is not the arbitrary thing you make it out to be. It’s supply and demand.
Supply and demand. Learn it. Know it. Live it.
Most people never need a brain tumor removed. Most people look for entertainment several times a week. The brain surgeon is addressing a much smaller market, so there is less aggregate demand.
Also, there are quite a few brain surgeons, there is only one Oprah.
The case I always hear about is the deplorable state of teacher salaries. Since teaching is important, shouldn’t they make more? The answer isn’t about the “inherent value” (which is a meaningless combination of words) of teaching, it’s about supply and demand. If teachers earn low wages, it means there is too much supply for the demand. There are too many teachers. (In this particular example, I would say there are too many BAD teachers, but that’s a different topic.)
[Of course, I also hear about police pay, but I’m not sure how to evaluate the “value” to the public of killing innocent black people. Wait…was that out loud?]
If a big chunk of people suddenly went and trained to be brain surgeons, then brain surgeons would soon start making much less money.
One of the key tricks to being successful is to find a niche with demand that you (and not just anyone else) can fill. Alternatively, you can throw up your hands and say that the world is a giant game of musical chairs controlled by selfish capitalists–or some imaginary system that “corrupts the meaning of value”. However, if you look at the whole chain, you’ll realize that what you’re saying is that you don’t approve of the way people are spending the money that they’ve earned. Keep saying it all you want, but the majority of people really don’t give a shit whether you approve of their decisions.
You say, “I’ll take money from Oprah and give it to people who deserve it more.” Who are you–who is anyone–to issue proclamations on what is valuable? I don’t want a despot who might decide that creating and recording music is of no value, because I really like music. And for the record, I have bought a lot of music in my life, but–so far–I have not bought any brain surgeries. Probably because my values have been corrupted by “the system”.
For what it’s worth, I am the rare libertarian who thinks that income inequality in the US is a valid concern, and I DO think that part of the problem is structural (before everyone pounces, no, I don’t have a good solution in mind; if I did, I wouldn’t keep it to myself). However, you are making a terrible case for it, and your proposed solution is way way way worse than the problem you want to address.
-VM