Supply and demand sets athletes’ pay

The Daily Herald printed a letter from Tulsi Patel on April 27 protesting the large salaries paid to professional athletes for plying their trade. Patel’s letter implies that our president’s salary of $400,000 to run our country (in Mr. Obama’s tenure we might justifiably change run to ruin, but I digress) should be higher than an athlete’s because being president is more important than an athlete providing amusement to fans. Patel states that an athlete making $13.5 million for a single year is just overpriced when there are doctors who save lives every day and do not make anything close to that amount.

The writer doesn’t seem to understand that, in a democracy, salaries are determined not by the importance of the work being done but by supply and demand. If a doctor could get people to pay good money to watch him cure people, he would make as much as an athlete. Get people to pay to watch teachers teach, and teachers would be wealthy. Get it?

Gene Maril

Arlington Heights