How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

by Ben Shapiro

We cannot determine the price of a product by calculating how much labor is “worth”—this gets the process exactly backward. After all, how do we know how much an hour of labor on a widget is worth without knowing what consumers are willing to pay for the widget? If a widget is worth $100 by the labor theory (ten hours of labor worth $10 per hour), but nobody wants to buy it, that worker’s widget is actually worth precisely zero dollars—which means the worker’s labor is worth precisely zero dollars. Consumers determine the value of a product by how much money they are willing to trade for that product. Few consumers—approaching zero—sit and calculate the work that goes into making a product before determining whether to buy it. Furthermore, if indeed profit-driven capitalists were greedily exploiting labor, in the true sense of exploitation, we would never see wages rise—and yet we do. If profit-driven capitalists were capable of maintaining endless profit margins by squeezing profit from labor alone, products would not become more inexpensive and better quality—and yet they do. So, what do these capitalist “exploiters” actually do? They take all the risk. They invest their own capital; they hire the laborers; they pay for the production and the marketing; they bear the brunt if the widgets never sell; they buy the raw materials and invest in the machinery and staff the HR department necessary to sell the widget. Often, they invent the widget itself.