Well, if we're ranting, I might as well add my gripes:
One of the things people need to realize is that in order to earn $80.000 a year, you have to create say $130.000 for the company to break even on you. It isn't easy to create this kind of value every year. If you're in the producing layer of a company (software engineer / graphic designer) you have to create enough value to also pay for all the salaries of your managers, testers, secretaries and all other non-producing employees.
People focus way too much on what their want to earn, not on how to create value. The reasoning often goes like this "I have to do X, which is much harder than Y, and people who do Y earn $Y, so I should earn more than that!". Almost everybody has this weird concept of a "fair" salary, that has no bearing on reality.
This is a very idealistic approach. There are industries which have not produced a dime of revenue for many years and keep existing and employing a lot of people for political reasons.
Even in sectors actually governed by the free market, what you say only has to be true on average. As a software engineer I know I have worked at places that produced no value whatsoever to anyone. Once I wrote a Perl script that immediately saved the guy I worked for something in the neighborhood of my monthly salary per day. That was the only time in my life that I could actually say that I understood how my work translated to money. Usually you just write code which is a small part of someone's great plan which in a few years time may go somewhere or not depending on things that are outside of your control.
Except... if X is much harder than Y, and people who do Y earn $Y dollars, but people who do X will earn less than Y dollars, who in their right mind is going to go and do X?
If the effort/reward/value equation doesn't balance, the role will go unfilled until it does.
But that's the way it's supposed to work. If nobody is willing to pay more than $Y for X that is harder than Y, then you shouldn't go into it. That's not a bug, it's a feature.
You're looking at an instantaneous snapshot of a dynamic system. If it's a problem that nobody will do X, then people will pay more for it once the feedback propagates through. If it never does, then it wasn't worth it and you shouldn't specialize in it.
jerf, you aren't looking at it from two perspectives. Both employers and employees have options. If an employee could do teaching or job x, and teaching pays $30k and job x pays $60k, which should the employee take? If teachers earned more, then the pool of talent gets larger.
You say, If it's a problem that nobody will do X, when really the issue is, "Nobody will do X for $X, but lots will do X for $Y."
In something as complex as a society, society has to make investments it its future. In our society, we have become so short focused on quarterly reports, that we have forgotten the value of education. The payoff of education to a society takes years, decades, generations... this is beyond simple supply/demand microeconomics.
You've attached extra semantics to X and Y that were not in the original post. I do not apologize for failing to guess what you would read those variables as.
I acknowledge the value of government in tweaking the market values of some things; I'm only a little-l libertarian. However, as an engineer, I observe that in order to do that successfully, you have to start with a correct understanding of how the market works, dynamically, not just statically. Getting emotional about valuations the market gives is not a good start.
It is not beyond supply/demand. If I can see the value of education for my lifetime of earnings is greater than what it will cost me I will do it. If it's not or I can't tell, I will not. Crying about the short sightedness of others on this dimension or many others is nothing new.
One of the things people need to realize is that in order to earn $80.000 a year, you have to create say $130.000 for the company to break even on you. It isn't easy to create this kind of value every year. If you're in the producing layer of a company (software engineer / graphic designer) you have to create enough value to also pay for all the salaries of your managers, testers, secretaries and all other non-producing employees.
People focus way too much on what their want to earn, not on how to create value. The reasoning often goes like this "I have to do X, which is much harder than Y, and people who do Y earn $Y, so I should earn more than that!". Almost everybody has this weird concept of a "fair" salary, that has no bearing on reality.