Tackling underpaid teachers.

It's widely agreed that teachers in public schools are underpaid. And this is a reasonable view, because the labour market for teachers is an oligopsony -- a market with only a small number of buyers. Markets like that DO underpay their labourers.

Might there be a way to raise public school teachers' pay that is both voluntary and impartial? I think there could be, but I've never seen anyone try the thing that I have in mind.

It would work like this: members of the general public would be invited to subscribe to a Patreon-like contribution system. They could contribute whatever they liked, with the understanding that they'd repeat their contribution every month until they dropped out.

Public school teachers, meanwhile, would be invited to subscribe on the other end -- once they proved that they really were teachers, every month thereafter they'd get one equal share of the proceeds, in the form of cash, to do whatever they wanted with.

The three most interesting things I can say about this system are as follows:

• It seems pretty clearly a Pareto improvement over the status quo, above all if the vetting can be done through a network of volunteers or otherwise voluntarily financed.

• I fear it may prompt NOT a positive reception, but outrage: I expect to hear in response that -- obviously -- raising taxes is better.

But it's not clear to me why this should be so. Yes, taxes send a social signal of a kind, but doesn't this system do exactly the same, above all if it works really well? Wouldn't there be a dollar value of Patreon-for-all-teachers support at which the preference for taxation disappeared? What if every verified teacher was pulling down $10k a month? $20k? $100k? At what point would we declare that the problem had been solved?

• The system I've described is probably illegal. It looks a lot like a tontine insurance system, and tontines have been illegal for many decades.