Society / country where cops, fire-fighters, schoolteachers are paid more than accountants?

[BigT]

@Machine_Elf

All of this requires outside agencies that claim to know, better than a free society, how many people should work in each profession, and artificially manipulate the supply and demand accordingly through propaganda and/or subsidies.

This sounds a lot like a centrally planned economy, which has a poor track record in the history books. With a few stubborn exceptions, every country that has tried this has moved (or is in the process) of moving away from it toward a free market economy.

No it doesn’t. It means that the people elect someone to make those choices. This means that you don’t have to pay money in order to vote, as capitalism’s “vote with your feet” requires.

The only people who have the ability to control the wages of accountants are the ones who can afford accountants. The free market can very well say they are worth more, while the free society says they are worth less.

Free market capitalism may have it’s virtues, but the idea that it lets society decide the cost of things is ridiculous. And, in fact, you may even argue that that’s a good thing.

[Machine_Elf]

@BigT

No it doesn’t. It means that the people elect someone to make those choices.

How is that not a centrally planned economy?

@Wikipedia

Planned economy is an economic system in which the state directs the economy. It is an economic system in which the central government controls industry such that it makes major decisions regarding the production and distribution of goods and services.

[AndyLee]

Also firefighters aren’t active for all there shift. There may be times when they are active all their shifts and work overtime. There may be days where no calls come into the firestation. They are being paid what the market will bear.

There is also a sense of security. Sure firefighters are let go, but they will be last on a list. Accouting and IT are often the first to go, becuase those things are easily outsourced. At my last job, the company kept the CFO and outsourced all the accounting. Then they moved all the IT over to India and have a $10/hr kid going to college manage the day to day affairs. If he gets stuck he calls the high level support in India.

To be honest this worked out just as well. That happened over 2 years ago, and the company didn’t experience any decline in quality.

Office work can be delegated as well. You can have an office worker doing say, 10 jobs per day. You can lay him off and give one of his ten jobs to 10 other workers that are staying on.

A firefighter or teacher you couldn’t do that.

Again you can ask this question about anything. There is an overabundence of actors and script writers. They outpriced themselves. The result was reality TV which has replaced much of the current TV content.

In the old days, the big stars were being paid more than the average Joe actor, but today the scale difference is astronomical compared to the salaries of the studio system.

In short, you don’t pay people for what they are worth. As the mother from Malcolm In The Middle told Malcolm, “They will pay you less than your worth but just enough to keep you from quitting.”