I've been doing odesk/elance gigs for a few years, and though I can find work at $25/hour, the competition is stiff, it's a pain trying to get paid for all hours billed, and the clients aren't those you can easily list on a resume (good portion of the jobs are well-paid corporate sysadmins/programmers outsourcing their jobs, or shady fly-by-night spammer/advertiser types). All meaning, if companies really think $75/hour is normal in some areas, but more established programmers are unwilling to do fixed-price contract, then those contracts are low hanging fruit for the likes of me.