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"In a free market, prices are determined by what buyers want" - sure for products but it is not entirely true when it comes to compensation. If janitors, in some united way, stopped cleaning our bathrooms for minimum wage then we would pay more. I'd say their service is "worth" more then we compensate them for, we are just collectively taking advantage of their position in life.

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If janitors charged much more than the reasonable market value for their services we'd invest more in self-cleaning technology and tools so those few janitors that remained employed were less necessary and were really effective such that they could do more work per unit time. We'd also probably just adapt to a lower level of cleanliness. Or clean the bathrooms ourselves as needed or as an extra add-on task to some more valuable job.

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