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Neither Andrew Oswald's "market-led salaries" ("Pay the going rate", THES, May 7) nor his special-interest critics' alternatives ("Readers' reactions", THES, May 14) are any substitute for real market salaries.

Virtually all UKacademics are tax parasites who are more or less pursuing their own hobbies within a coercively imposed state-monopoly system.

They are thereby antisocially displacing genuinely efficient and voluntarily funded services where academics would be paid whatever they and their customers agreed to be mutually beneficial.

J. C. Lester

Centre for Practical Philosophy

Middlesex University