Comment by derektank
10 hours ago
We would all die in a week if we went without water, yet water is cheaper per gallon than gasoline or printer ink or perfume. It’s a question of scarcity and supply curves. Water, even clean water, is not particularly scarce if you leverage industrial systems to purify it. Other products require much more complicated supply chains and are produced at a much smaller scale than water, which makes them more rarer and more expensive.
The skills necessary to develop efficient and effective software are much more scarce than those needed to remove trash, or pick crops, or provide elder care. That’s why the former is paid so much more.
You're explaining how things are but the parent is indicating that's not how things should be.
He's not describing how but why. And at a fundamental level it's something that can't be overcome. If you can only have 10 of one thing, yet can have 5000 of another, and both have even remotely comparable levels of demand/necessity/etc, then the 10 is always going to end up much more valued.
Even take some sort of idealized anarcho-communal society. Imagine two people have a dispute and threaten to leave over it. One's a highly skilled doctor, and the other's a garbage collector. Our equal society's going to suddenly become just as unequal as any other simply because the doctor leaving would have a much greater negative effect than the garbage collector. And that reality would permeate in the day-to-day happenings, creating classes even in an idealized classless society.
A society with no garbage collected will fall apart much more quickly than one without healthcare.