For my Libertarian friends

I'm not. The reason both our countries are in such a bad way in terms of Manufacturing industries is through lack of investment and reinvestment back into the industry. We "make do" with 20 year old equipment and expect to compete in a market-place where the emergent nations are investing heavily in modern equipment and manufacturing techniques. The ethos of grabbing every last drop of profit and hedging it away in some offshore trust fund has left the West impoverished and broken so that all we can do is cry into our beer and bemoan the workforce for pricing themselves out of the market. The people who invest in our manufacturing industries are not risk-takers, they are the most conservative investors you could imagine who expect an unrealist return on their investment in terms of percentage and time - when managers cannot present such an optimistic forecast in their speculative business plans they inevitably fail to get their captial expediture budgets and so the industry slowly chokes. The service industries will go the same way in the very near future because they are not reinvesting into the infrastructure that supports them and if the health-care "industry" suffers the same fate then I'm buying a leech farm .

Epignosis wrote: You said it's enough that everyone earns a living.  What I'm saying is that a job that requires 8-10 years of expensive eduction versus one that requires 1-2 years of training (paid training in some cases)...well, I can't see why those two positions should be paid the same if they are both in demand.