> There are no jobs in my area that pay 80% of my current rate for the same task done 4 days a week.

You can totally get this kind of flexibility as a self-employed contractor. The fact that you aren't just as easily allowed it as an employee is ultimately due to excess red tape in the paid-employment sector, nothing else. Every bit of red tape in the employment arrangement is an extra fixed cost that has to be paid-for somehow, meaning that the employee has to work that much more just to break even.

> If a job was truly an even exchange of value between employer and employee, I would expect to see some people working 7 days a week and making 40% more than me, and some people working 3 day weeks and making 40% less.

Why? There are plenty of concentration effects that go against this; e.g. it's better for everyone to work the same hours for communication reasons.

>I am overwhelmingly more productive and valuable now as a specialized, highly educated, experienced engineer than I would have been as a subsistence farmer.

I've got some news for you, many manual labor jobs aren't just picking up a shovel and digging a hole or picking up a box and setting it back down.

Your first sentence, to me, reads "I'm more valuable than you because I know thing, so I want more resources for less effort".

That is a perfectly reasonable sentiment. It is the essence of a specialization economy. Skills that bring more value to the market can take away more resources from it. From each according to ability; to each according to the best deal they could negotiate in exchange for their abilities.

One can state a fact without making it into a brag. Saying, "I get paid more than you" is not the same as saying, "I am a better person than you", despite the culture that the rich prefer to cultivate that equates the two. A person that gets paid $15/hour is the same amount of person as someone paid $100k/year. The latter is "more valuable" only in the economic, marketplace sense, and gets roughly 3x the resources for the same amount of labor, which likely does not involve work that requires separating ass from chair.

If you don't pay people more to acquire the difficult skills, they won't bother, except in rare cases.

Sorry, I didn't mean at all to suggest that I am a better person or have greater intrinsic value as a sentient being. My economic output is entirely decoupled from those moral or ethical concepts.

I was only saying the engineer version of myself adds greater resources to an economy than a hypothetical hunter-gatherer version of myself - who, being myself, obviously has equal moral worth.

>"I'm more valuable than you because I know thing, so I want more resources for less effort"

Congratulations you just described capitalism.

That's not even true - it's "I'm more valuable than you because I have more resources". That's literally it - sometimes it matches up with knowledge, but many times it doesn't.

Then go dig holes and make less money and he can continue on with his life. No one said an engineer was worth more than a ditch digger, just that an engineer is going to be economically better off. I'm an engineer who dug ditches in his youth but also took the time to go to school and put off having a family until it became economically viable to have one. Communism doesn't work it, it kills passion and leads to authoritarianism. Capitalism isn't going anywhere.