Also worth keeping in mind - there's a big difference in "market rate" between "well-treated doctor in a well-functioning health system" and "relentlessly over-worked doctor in a wretchedly crumbling health system". And even if paid well above "market rate", the latter position will attract far fewer applicants who really care about patient welfare and outcomes. And suffer considerably higher turn-over.
I do see your point, but the fall of the Weimar Republic isn’t a great comparison.
Ultimately, it still boils down to “I think you should be limited to making X for doing job Y, because I don’t believe it should be worth as much as job Z, which is clearly prestigious enough to be worth 2X.”
Market forces are a surprisingly efficient means of separating perceived and actual value for pretty much anything, even with some fairly sizeable warts.
Yes and no. A nation like the UK can afford to pay any one doctor millions of pounds. But that solution scales poorly to a national level. And worse if you try to scale it to all the other sorts of essential workers. And when an extremely large, complex system is wretchedly mismanaged - paying the guys in the trenches 10X does not fix that. For example, many of the UK's public buildings were built with "RAAC", and are at risk of collapse: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/sep/04/raac-crisis-...
Meanwhile - a rather large number of HNer's seem to disagree with you about the virtues of those "efficient market forces" when it comes to health care. Perhaps discuss it with them here? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37398504
Also worth keeping in mind - there's a big difference in "market rate" between "well-treated doctor in a well-functioning health system" and "relentlessly over-worked doctor in a wretchedly crumbling health system". And even if paid well above "market rate", the latter position will attract far fewer applicants who really care about patient welfare and outcomes. And suffer considerably higher turn-over.