Yes, but that drives me crazy! With the internet you aren't held down by your local economic wage and yet there are people like this guy who works like a dog and undercuts everyone with crazy cheap prices which brings down the global value of developers on sites like odesk. While I am sure he is a great developer, my point was that he could have worked less, raised his prices, gained better clients, and overall built a better business model.

I'm not sure the economics of the situation are obvious as that.

If he raises prices: is he actually going to get "better" clients? He'll have to compete with other high end'ers. What if there competition is too fierce at that price point? What if his skill/quality doesn't match up to that price point?

It's not worth getting worked up over. If you sell your services for $x there is always somebody willing to sell for $x - 1.

Or organise an international union of programmers...

Wouldn't that involve getting every programmer in the world to actually agree on something? Good luck with that!