Isn't that the entire point of the free market? To find the price that incentivizes the necessary level of production of a good/service?

The alternative is a central authority setting prices, which has historically had disastrous results.

Well, in romantic theory, yes. But unfortunately, society doesn't value folks that clean toilets and folks that clean toilets need income to buy food, shelter, and other things. The balance of power seriously works against the person cleaning toilets, and they have no real power over the wages they are paid.

The market forces that determine pay are more competition between folks that hire others to clean toilets. If all of your competitors pay twice as much as you, you might not have quality employees... or any at all, if a job is readily available. If you have a lot of folks desperate for income, you can pay less. If there are few folks that are willing to clean toilets, you probably pay more. You could go without folks to clean toilets, but your average Western accountant probably isn't going to clean the office toilets or breakroom willingly unless it becomes standard for office jobs everywhere. Many places simply cannot leave dirty facilities - and in some jobs, you probably would rather have separate staff cleaning (hospitals, for example).

Luckily, there are a lot of levels between "unregulated, free-market-will-take-care-of-it" and complete control from a central authority. Minimum wages, worker rights, workplace safety, safety nets that ensure less desperate people, and so on.

If the supply of people able and willing to clean toilets is great compared to the demand for toilet cleaning service, the wage for toilet cleaners will be low.

We can redistribute profits from investors to low wage workers like the people who clean toilets, but the consequence of that is lower return on investment, and with it, lower rates of investment/economic-growth.

In the long, policies that lower economic growth rates are very detrimental to all classes of workers. What increases wages for people like toilet cleaners is high levels of production relative to population.

Investment is the mechanism by which we increase production, and profits are how 1. resources are distributed to those who are most effective at growing the economy's level of production 2. people are incentivized to invest to increase production.

There's no escaping economic laws, and no free lunch from policies that redistribute income from high income earners to low income earners.

There are other alternatives. Money isn't only kind of compensation that counts. Once I've covered my expenses - food, housing, transport (that can be public transport if I'm in an area where it's adequate), and medical, I don't care much for extra money. I know this is true, because I have fairly slack hours at the moment and could use my free time to make more money, but I choose not to because I have enough.

Other compensation that I'd accept instead - social status, respect, ability to spend my time in beautiful places and talk to interesting, educated people, opportunities to work in interesting buildings or locations, opportunities to work for organizations that I believe in, ability to have more kids, and live in a community that sees childrearing as a community responsibility. All these things are easier to find if you have money, but they're not exactly things money can buy.

The "necessary" level of production as far as people are able to pay for it. In the iterated free market game power is not equally distributed, which directly affects people's ability to negotiate pay for their work.

Another way is to keep the free market as a price discovery mechanism, but introduce a mechanism that counteracts the tendency to accumulate wealth.

That would mean raising prices, and thus the toilet cleaner him/herself wouldn't be able to buy the things that you want them to reach anyways.

Rather, the toilet cleaner would be able to buy things previously unattainable, and the person who hired the cleaner would have less free cash to spend on other objectives, which would cause a slight drop in the price of those other objectives.

Raising the income of a toilet cleaner doesn't correspond to a general rise in prices. It might mean the development of self-cleaning toilets, which isn't a bad idea.

Legislatively redistributing profits from investors to workers has the predictable long term consequence of reducing the rate of return from investing and with it, the volume of investment and labour productivity growth.

Margins aren't as generous in other fields as in IT.

Yes, and then pay the toilet cleaners even more, raise prices again, and so on. A virtuous upward cycle which would eventually bring their lives more in line with everyone else's.

How did it bring someone's life in line with everyone else when they're still unable to buy the things other people can buy? Do you realise that once the cleaner is more expensive than a Japanese toilet is to maintain, the cleaner will be fired and will have nothing instead?

So the toilet cleaner retrains to become the toilet repair person? What's wrong with that? We all get better toilets out of the deal, too.

The public bathroom still needs cleaning itself, though. Unless you're suggesting that a Japanese toilet is a robot that cleans the whole bathroom? That would be interesting!

> So the toilet cleaner retrains to become the toilet repair person?

I once had a summer job as a manager of this issue - my job was to find a cleaning company and assure quality in one company building (roughly 500 toilets, around 30 cleaners). From my experience, these people were unable to properly do their jobs (not the cleaning part, stuff like opening windows so the toilet doesn't smell like acid and actually dries, not forgetting to clean something...). None of these people would be able to or would want to invest the time to learn to repair the incredibly complex Japanese toilets - they will rather live on welfare. Of course it's anecdotal and I'm sure that a lot of people will do just what you said - most certainly not everyone though, and there won't even be place for everyone, rather like every hundredth at most.

> Unless you're suggesting that a Japanese toilet is a robot that cleans the whole bathroom?

Yes, there are "toilet boxes" that can clean the whole thing including floor, ceiling and walls.

Futile - one repairman needed for every N cleaners. Same with all automation - in fact its the entire point of automation - its cheaper to use machines that require very little human intervention including repair, than humans, to do some job. Until that's true in fact, robots aren't used because they aren't cheaper. In a total cost of ownership sense.