Yes, I am aware there is a practical element to all of this, what I am talking about here is morality though. However you are correct that one does not always have the opportunity to do something completely moral and must often choose the lesser of two evils.
except that that is
always the way of it. Scarcity, after all, is what
creates an economy. Money doesn't grow on trees, and neither (tragically) does delicious Captain Morgan's Single Barrel Rum. I must instead
trade for these things. But since I chose to purchase this wonderful nectar, I cannot purchase instead a new book, or steak dinner. There is always an opportunity cost, and thus the situation described above is not a "sometimes", but an "always" occurrence. When Wal-Mart figures out how much to pay it's employees, it can hire not 10 but (making up numbers) 100,000 workers at wages you would find "immoral", but only 60,000 at wages you would approve of. That is 40,000 men and women, 40,000 families on the brink. The easy response is always "well, just take it out of profits", but that is cutting off the branch upon which one is sitting. Profits are the reason investment exists; profits are why capital flows to create new businesses, or to expand old ones. In fact, given their lower ability to adjust to sudden economic shock, keeping their business profitable is
most in the interest of its'
least paid (and thus, employable) workers. Insist on cutting into or destroying profit all-together and you have merely assured that Wal-Mart will never be able to hire those 100,000 workers in the first place, and now instead of a possibility of 40K on the streets, we have more than twice that number who will never be hired.
Labor is not different from any other good or service - and it's price will follow the inexorable laws of supply and demand. We can bang our sippy cups and decry it's unjustice, but attempting to create or follow policies that ignore this reality will have the same results as you would see were you to pour maple syrup into your car engine because it
should run on sugar-cane ethanol. The damage you see from the unintended consequences will be greater than the problem you sought to solve.
Things like this is why we should always have social programs, as a form of insurance. Business are good in that they help people have a living, but where businesses fail to provide for their employees, society should step in.
Except that then (as we have seen) we create dependency, and provide financial incentives to engage in self-destructive behavior. That is why I have recently become a fan of the negative income tax to serve the purpose you seek here. You can keep people out of poverty without providing the same destructive incentives.
If an accurate performance model is ever derived, I will be right there with you. I know many teachers, my sunday school class is full of teachers, my wife is a teacher, etc. I understand the pitfalls of their profession and where the models I have seen fall short. I am not willing to assign responsibility of things to people who do not have control of authority to make it happen.
which is why I argue that teachers should not be held responsible for individual, but rather aggregate results off of a baseline. If, year over year, the students at Central High average a performance of advancing .6 of a school year, and in the 5th grade those students who go through Mr Smith's course average .8 for three years running, whereas those students who go through Mr Jones course average .5, then Mr Smith is a better teacher than Mr Jones.
If teachers had a lot more autonomy and could muster up services to put crappy family in check, than performance pay would work. However, until families are fixed, its not a fix that would actually help anything.
Family is the biggest item, I agree - which is why I want to alter our destructive social-services model. But teachers are part of the formula as well, and there is no reason not to optimize that which is both so critical and within our reach.
and that will always be the fight and it is always easier to argue for extending the line Just A Little Bit More in favor of the sympathetic recipient. And government is an atrocious judge of individual circumstance. That's one of the reasons I like the NIT - no "toughness", fight, or discernment required.
