[mmirate]

Ignoring that your average first-grade teacher is an employee of the State rather than of any kind of private entity ...

... it's a question of ephemeral facts. In a given area, companies who employ software developers, able to retain personnel who perform to those companies' subjective satisfaction, by paying them $X; and analogously for private schools in the same area it is $Y for first-grade teachers. How does $X compare with $Y, today, yesterday, and in all the millions of possible tomorrows?

In other words: the beauty of the free market is that we don't have to answer those questions normatively/prescriptively in any one central place.

[Emma_Goldman]

You can't brush away the misvaluation of teachers by blaming the state. Education is a public good. It's something with huge social value, but that value isn't and can't be captured by the educator. That's inherent in the activity. Capitalism only values something insofar as it can be directly exploited for personal profit.

[mmirate]

> that value isn't and can't be captured by the educator.

Oh, but it is. Quality of education is clearly valued by parents. And depending on which school-district you live in, your property tax rate varies, and the quality of the local public schools correlates rather strongly.

While I don't have personal experience with this situation ... I can easily imagine that a good private school's elevator pitch would be something to the effect of "you and we are both located in $D1, which has cheap property taxes and questionable public schools; by living here you will pay less property tax over your adult life than you would by living in $D2; however, not only can our school make your kids smarter than $D2's acclaimed public-schools can, but we can do that without costing you more tuition than that lifetime-difference in property taxes."

> Capitalism only values something insofar as it can be directly exploited for personal profit.

Personal profit is precisely the best way to motivate humans to do anything that is valuable to society.

If someone is doing something of value without profiting personally, the next question about that activity is "what info am I missing about how they profit?".

[Emma_Goldman]

The point is that a sufficiently large part of the value of education is a non-excludable public good - i.e. it has huge collective benefits for society as a whole - that if you privatised the education system it would be extremely injurious to everyone. Of course, education also gives people, if you want to use that language, a certain amount of 'human capital' which tends towards a higher earning potential. But it is because so much of the value of education is a public good that it's misvalued, and necessarily so under capitalism.

Also: "If someone is doing something of value without profiting personally, the next question about that activity is "what info am I missing about how they profit?".

As someone else mentioned, this is frighteningly sociopathic. But it's also ideologically blinkered. It's an elementary fact of anthropology that human societies for most of history have lived on a communal basis without property. People act from personal profit because of the structure and cultural sediment of capitalism, not because humans are inherently selfish.

[snikeris]

> It's an elementary fact of anthropology that human societies for most of history have lived on a communal basis without property.

Interesting. I've assumed that primitive communities were run from the top down with the alpha male effectively owning everything.

I found this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_communism

But it states:

> There is also no agreement among later scholars, including Marxists, on the historical extent, or longevity, of primitive communism.

[fallingfrog]

>If someone is doing something of value without profiting personally, the next question about that activity is "what info am I missing about how they profit?".

That is a sociopathic statement that ignores all of human morality, denies any human feeling of empathy or acts of kindness, and pretends culture does not exist. It is certainly the logic of modern capitalism though.

If you saw a child about to fall into a well, and nobody else was around, would you help her? Of course you would. When you are eating thanksgiving with your family, does the strongest member of the family steal the turkey and then charge everyone for pieces of it? What you are saying is patently ridiculous.

[JoeAltmaier]

I read it more softly than that. Of course we get 'paid back' for making the Thanksgiving turkey - by goodwill. I'm paid for moral acts by a reinforced self-image and satisfaction. There are lots of forms of payment.

[fallingfrog]

Right, but those feelings are the result of the culture you were raised in and the normal feelings of compassion you have as a member of a highly social species of animal. The whole reason society works at all is because I teach my kids to share, and not to hurt each other. If everyone starts believing that they should only do things out of pure self interest, then I'd say you're looking at a society that's about to degenerate into warfare, slavery, and violence.

[JoeAltmaier]

Like every online multiplayer game!

[marknutter]

> If you saw a child about to fall into a well, and nobody else was around, would you help her?

Are you comparing poor adults to children about to fall into a well?