Comment by sbt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sbt | Hacker News Reader

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> Welcome to the free market

While I consider myself a proponent of the free market, I think my work as a programmer blinds me to how much rent seeking underlies other high earning professions in the US. Doctors, lawyers, financiers, accountants don't really operate in a free market, rather they work in a system that is better understood as defined by laws. The reason all these fields (with exceptions for parts of medicine) are so lucrative, is because they have thrived in a system mandated or failing to be regulated by law. It is naive to think that said groups do not wish to sustain and propagate that privilege. Market adaption is an important force, but one that for all practical purposes exists within a framework society has created. I am expecting Americans to slowly get to terms with this reality as the economy recovers after long period of credit expansion and it dawns on more people that it has always mostly been a zero sum game.

EDIT: grammar

right, and the decades of classroom time they put in, and the complexity of their field has NOTHING to do with how much they get paid. There will be some bad actors in any group, but to paint both groups with such a broad brush is doing a disservice to the ones that engage in those professions because they have a passion for the law or want to heal people.

Do I really need a person who went to school for "decades" to swab my kid's tongue to see if she has strep? Do I even need a person with "decades" of education to then write out a prescription based on the lab results (that I could probably read myself with 5 minutes of reading online)?

I doubt anyone would seriously say that a heart surgeon doesn't deserve big bucks for performing heart surgery. But most highly-paid people in the medical profession aren't doing heart surgery. For the most part, they're getting paid by hiding behind regulations that say they can't be replaced by people with less education who would work for less.

Same goes for the legal profession, to some extent. The fact that you can't represent clients in court without passing the bar is both a consumer protection (we don't want scam artists bilking clients) AND a subsidy to the legal profession. It may be a subsidy we are "OK" with, but don't deny that it is a subsidy.

Well, "nothing" is a strong word, but I know people who put in decades of classroom time in the (actually quite complex) field of philosophy, and they don't earn shit.

I agree on not painting broad brushstrokes. But there are some discernable patterns.

It certainly has something to do with it, but if we didn't artificially restrict the number of slots at medical school and let anybody who was willing to put in the classroom time then that would make a big difference.

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