All I have to say to you putty is that you're welcome anyday to come and see just how little work I do. If you think school is easy you're welcome to go try. If you'd like to sacrifice 12 years of your life, after high school, to become a doctor go for it. Your comment about having to be borne into a middle class family is a joke. I went to school with kids who came from nothing. There are loans, grants, etc. Anyone in this country that wants to get an education there is the money or the loans to do it so dont' even try and use that as a copout. As far as not working in school, hardly. I busted my tail and worked all through school. In the summers I worked 12-16 hour days at home on the ranch to help pay my grandparents back for the money they were giving me for school. The time I wasn't working I was studying for boards or preparing for the next year. And breaks at school. Those just let you get caught up on everything else or fly somewhere to take a review for boards.
In undergrad I had a football scholarship. I paid my own way there. Anyone that thinks college athletes don't work for what they get better think again. I never had any free time in school. In undergrad any free minute I had was studying or training. You don't get into grad. school unless you are near a 4.0. Then there were the wonderful MCAT's. Take two months or more of your life and basically study 20 hours a day seven days a week. Then you actually get to school. Well good luck if there's very many days that you do sleep even four hours a day. Let's see then you have your USMLE boards to pass. Figure on studying for those for six months at a time and don't plan on sleeping or having any kind of a life. Basically take everything you've learned out of some 200 or better textbooks and probably a 100,000 or more pages of information and you dang well better know any part of it verbatim. You don't pass them you don't go on. You take a couple of those type of exams. You don't get passing grades in school you're done. If you don't think school is real work you are sadly mistaken. I'd take those 16 hour days on the ranch anyday compared to studying 16 hours.
Then let's say you actually get past that. Well I won't even go into the residency process. I put my whole life on hold for 12 years. There wasn't time for a relationship. There wasn't time to go fishing with my buddies or anything else. There wasn't time for a family or anything that you enjoyed those years. Basically you take those years of your life and school is it. There is no time for anything else. Then you get done and you are on average $150,000 in the hole from school, testing, etc. Then work another four - six years to start making a good income.
As far as amazing how little professionals work you have no clue. Most of the patients that I treat have numerous sick days every year, two - four weeks of vacation. They work an eight hour day and they are done. There's nothing to take home. There are no middle of the night calls. There are no weekend calls, etc. How would you like to sit down with your family for dinner or a game with your kids and get a call you ahve to leave. Do this 3-10 times a week on average and see how tired you get of it. You get a retirement from your company, you get half your social security paid, etc. etc. On your own as a professional you have none of that. You don't have sick days, you don't have vacation days. You take a day off you don't get paid. You pay 40-60% right off the top for expenses. Then when you do get paid you pay about 50% or more of every dollar to taxes. Do you have any idea the amount of paperwork alone that you have to do? No I didn't think so. A professional may only work eight hours as far as office hours go seeing patients and clients but you have no idea the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes. And all of this so that the avg. physician makes a little over a hundred grand a year. Then you tell me that a janitor deserves the same amount of pay? If that's your value system then what the heck incentive would anyone have to go through the absolute living heck to become a professional. Not even to mention the stress.
Would I do it again. Not on your life. What you have to give up, the amount of time that it takes, and then when you do make it you have people like yourself and others who say you don't deserve what you have and you don't work hard. Then you have the ins. companies which I won't even bother with here either. Then go to work everyday and know that if you even make one little mistake all that you've worked for could be gone. You get no mistakes in this business. Don't get me wrong I like being a doctor but the baggage that goes with it and the process to become one is not worth it for sure.
Now you ask about an educated person. An educated person is someone that one way or another has gone through an educational process. For some this can be an apprenticeship, for others this can be hands on training and working up the corporate ladder, for others it's a formal education. One of my good friends is a CEO for HON. They are a big company that deals in office furniture and such. He started out on the assembly line and has worked his way up the ladder. He only has a high school education. An incredibly smart man and invaluable to his company. He makes about ten times as much money as I do. I begrudge no man to rise up and succeed in this country. But when you give people jobs, raises, etc. that they don't deserve I have a real problem with that. Regardless of what you want to percieve and believe there has to be some sort of a hierarchy in society. I'm not saying that any person as a person is more important to society than any other person. What I am saying is that this country works and you have people willing to go through what it takes to become a professional or rise up a corporate ladder. They do this because there is incentive to do so. Most people do what they do because they want to be successful and they want to enjoy better things in life. There is nothing wrong with that. But when you start collapsing that system that rewards people based on their merits and what they do in work, school, etc. this whole system will collapse.
That is exactly what the govt. trys to do now. We push more and more to become a socialist society. People like yourself that don't value a person because they did go through what they did and think a janitor deserves the same pay as a doctor, lawyer, or any other profession where you had to work hard. I'm not saying that a professional is any better than any other person. But for you to say that professionals don't work hard is just absurd.
Lastly you say you are a deeply religious man. Well you're just like every other deeply religious man that I know that has to profess it, pretty hypocritical.