Supporting Artists

*Applauds*

Well said, and it needs to be said.

And also heard and listened to, which are harder.

Capitalism distorts the value of things. In Ancient Egypt, they had the right idea about art: it was one of the most valuable things in their world, sacred even. (There wasn't much creativity, but oh well.) But capitalism puts most people in survival mode, which distorts the value of things. Let's look at the things that are underpaid and under-appreciated in our society:
* Teachers
* Artists (there are exceptions, but on the whole, it's true)
* People who work with the developmentally disabled

These, and possibly others, should be of the HIGHEST value, and should be getting paid the MOST to do their jobs, especially teachers. But no, corporate America wants people smart enough to run the machines but too dumb to question authority, and well-funded schools tend to produce kids that are too smart for our plutocrats to abide.

And then, too, some groups find ways to inflate the value of their work to absurd heights. A good example of this is the medical profession: important, yes, but the price of everything in the medical profession is so absurdly overpriced that doctors make money hand over fist. (If you don't think medical prices are absurdly overpriced, my roommate once got charged $300 just for a single ride in an ambulance. That's at least 1000% higher than it ought to be, and I only wish that were an exaggeration. An ambulance ride should be $30; 1000% of 30 is 300. And then you get professions like chiropractors, which back in the 90's were charging $30 for 10 minutes of pushing on your back. And therapists, charging as much as $100 an hour for you to vent your feelings at them. WTF??? Prices like that, they almost need a space between the e and the r.)

Another good example of a group artificially inflating their worth is colleges. College tuition is absurdly high, and literally the only reason for it is greed; the people running the colleges keep raising the tuition to see how many gullible people they can get to pay those ridiculous prices, putting themselves into lifelong debt they cannot legally claim bankruptcy on. Add to it the absurdly high cost for books, the fact that used books are not allowed in most colleges, and the fact that going to college is a gamble anyway, and it's a Ponzii scheme to make Enron look like chump change.

I would count sports figures in that group, too, but honestly *their* value is being inflated by the people making money selling tickets to the games, the owners of the teams. But the basic value distortion is the same: here we have a group of people who shouldn't even be able to make a career out of tossing a ball around, or at the very least should be making just enough at it to get by, but instead they're making millions of dollars every year. Honestly, the salaries for sports figures and teachers should be switched around. But capitalism encourages people to care about nothing but greed. It is an inherently evil economic system but the evil just keeps perpetuating itself because greed is a powerful motivator, and money is power.

Many doctors are not raking in the money. My stepson is a doctor, and while he's making decent money, he worries mightily about how to pay off the loans he had to take out to get the training; fortunately, his wife is well-off.

It's the institutions- insurance companies, big pharm, instrument makers, hospitals, etc.- that are raking in the big bucks. Something single-payer would put a lid on...

I wrote a whole series of articles - the most recent this past summer - called Music in the Post-Scarcity Environment. It's a bit more on the mechanics around all of this, but there are a few essays right up front on how we got here, which is to say, commentary on devaluing the entire concept of owning (copies of) music.

Agreed (with the linked post). Plussed. "And value each other's hard work, because somebody has to," as well...except that I need the money I finally accumulated and cashed out from Paypal to pay an annual bill. Sigh.

It is interesting that while money was introduced as an improvement over barter, now barter has become an improvement over money, at least some of the time.