Then I fail to see what the problem is. Obviously, there is an oversupply of teaching staff, or else wages would be higher since good professors would be a scarce commodity.
That obviously is not the case, thus wages fall. I guess when you have an excess of a generation going to college on false debt, you get an excess of teachers too. I'd imagine of the college going populace instructors make up a significant fraction.
That's because you're thinking like a market rather than a human being.
Regarding markets: they are only the sum of the people that constitute them. Not all reasons or incentives for actions in a market have to be monetary. IOW: if something is of value to people, it will usually be done. If that doesn't happen, usually people say they want something, but do not really care that much.
One is also in Predictably Irrational: in short parents were always late picking up the kids from day care. The day care decided to issue a fine for late parents. The unintended consequences of this were that the parents were way more late on average because they felt they were paying for it. It switched the system from one based on social norms to market norms.
At ball games everyone used to be forced into the same shitty seats. Now the well to do get a pass and have luxury seats with better food and views. Instead of fostering community it further alienates the rich and the poor. This leads to a filter bubble of sorts that prevents both groups from empathizing with each other.
Same with courts and the legal system, fasttrak lanes, free shows put on that have secondary markets.
If you say that basing all interactions around money or segregating people into different groups that get different service can be a bad idea, I agree.
No, they're the sum of the constitutive people, minus all the parts that don't deal with property, trade, contracts, and debt, plus distortions added by institutional arrangements.
If people take their decisions freely, quite often money is not the top priority, but more traditional - and human - values may be.
Then the term "free market" is an oxymoron. By conjuring a market, which deals with money, property, and profit therein, you have already made it unfree.
IRL, there are lots of problems (in general), most of them not from markets, but lots also because people make bad decisions in markets. I think those are communication problems, though - people not agreeing on values. So many people scream "market failure", but nobody ever screams "voter/election failure", when people make bad decisions there that cause problems.
I would say the same damn thing regarding the knee-jerk right-wing proprietarianism, except that rich Bay Area techies have had a tendency towards the less-well-considered forms of "wannabe ubermensch" libertarianism for a long time now.
If you pointed out that leftists cluster on Reddit you <i>wouldn't even be correct</i>, as Reddit was pretty unambiguously rooting for Ron Paul in the past couple of elections.
Reddit always seemed divided to me, lots of leftists and lots of libertarians. Maybe the Paulians were noisier and more visible. HN seems a bit more libertarian to me, maybe because people here have higher incomes.
Please don't. Being harsh is not a good way to argue against blithe nonsense. It's a way to corrode the discourse and ruin the community [1]. If you're patient and reasonable, there's at least a small chance that you'll evoke that quality in others. If you're harsh, the chance of provoking the same and worse is high.
1. That particular comment was actually relatively mild. This is a personal appeal to drop the harsh tone on HN in general.
The market won't work right for teachers because some of them would do it for free if they had some other way to eat. To fix it will take more than administration. It will take leadership.