The free market pays people what they are worth. Costco has decided intelligent, hard working, disciplined people are worth more money than what a university thinks they are worth teaching English, or whatever
Is the suggestion then that we need fewer teachers in order for the price of teaching labor to rise above costco? or that we need teachers to provide more economic value from their teaching labor? How do we measure economic production from teaching labor?
Why do you think teaching at a university is better than working at Costco? How do you decide the optimal number of university teachers vs. optimal number of Costco employees without the market test?
I don't have any emotional attachment to university teachers anymore than I have emotional attachment to buggy whip makers. Maybe a lot of the knowledge a university education provided can be obtained by moving to a major city and watching various Youtube documentaries for 4 years, augmented with debating people in Hacker News comments.
If your goal in life is to be happy, healthy, and fulfilled in purpose, hasn't universal university education been a recent phenomena, not required to fulfil one's life goals? Perhaps university life and its requisite bureaucracy is an aberration, not a requirement for human flourishing.
The professors I know are experts in their small domain (and most of them are really smart, but this is not my point here). They know all the nitty details, I am always amazed by their wide knowledge in discussions. I think for a society it is easily worth it to pay people to dig so deep into their field of interest and the market is not the right mechanism to enable that.
I also think Youtube is nice to get started, but I found it insufficient for graduate level material.
The free market gathers wealth with a few and then determinate value depending on the state of mind of the few. The whole harebrained idea never worked, resulting in even more harebrained counter movements like socialism preventing value to be how many antigerm washings you performed per day. It's civil unrest or the threat of it, that redistribute wealth and restart societys value circulation.
Yeah and it seems to have that one flaw that ultimately kills it's biggest benefactors at least over generational scales, the money always flows uphill until the end (revolution) unless some countermeasures like progressive taxes, democracy, and social programs are put into place. That's why I respect capitalism as a part of society but not as the sole determiner of someone's status as a human being that should at least have a chance of a decent existence. I would counter that systems like anarchism (they will always be crushed by forces from within or without) and communism fall flat on their face every time except on small scales not bigger than a modern small town or less modern village.
I wonder if you know that there are ideologies like market socialism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism, they too have a market, but they change the relation of ownership of a workplace from some specific owner class to actual workers in the workplace through changing workplaces to worker cooperatives among other postulates.
The market socialist idea is under full attack and in full retreat ever since the thing behind the wall collapsed. It was never more than a temporary pocket of peace, negotiated for by societys that remembered were the journey always ends.
Not surprising given how the political class is connected to the capitalist class, at some points basically interests of the capitalist class determine the value of a labor in the current system. So labor that naively maximizes the corporations profits is more and more the only labor that has better than disgustingly low value in capitalist society. That's the magic of "free market" for you - the game is fundamentally rigged because of structural, systemic reasons.