> I'm not sure what you're suggesting

Really? That it costs labor and resources to make things? Is that really hard to understand?

> if your good cost more in labor and material to produce than anyone is willing to pay for it nobody will buy it.

Thanks for explaining markets again. This is tangential to my point.

> So the market will set prices for labor but not for goods and services? What?

You're getting close. Cost and price are separate entities. Price is "what I think someone should pay" cost is a set of labor and resources it took to make something.

> Are you implying that workers should only be paid as much as they need to fulfill some set of needs and no more?

No? I'm not saying anything about paying people or even the organization of production.

I'm saying that prices are a form of lossy compression. 5 + 7 + 6 + 2 = 20, but given 20, we have no idea that 5, 7, 6, or 2 were part of the equation or that there were four numbers to begin with. If it takes an hour of labor and a kilogram of wood to build something (something that, yes, someone wants because we're not talking about mudpies obviously), the cost to build that thing is an hour of labor and a kilogram of wood, not $20. $20 is arbitrary and effectively useless measurement. The number $20 contains information and you might be able to infer some of the information contained in it, but you can never actually be sure what the information is or the other pieces of information that make it up.

Prices erase information. As a system of measuring cost, they are pathetically limited. Yeah, ok I get it, people exchange things in markets and blah blah, but if a chair has 3kg of wood in it, then we know that it cost at least 3kg of wood (a resource) to produce.

There is nothing subjective about this.

> That it costs labor and resources to make things? Is that really hard to understand?

Yeah, but that's a pretty obvious thing? If that was the entire point then I'm sorry I misunderstood you.

> Prices erase information. As a system of measuring cost, they are pathetically limited

Yes. But I don't see a problem with that (I mean you can still estimate costs and offer a price based on that).

> but if a chair has 3kg of wood in it, then we know that it cost at least 3kg of wood (a resource) to produce

Same applies to labor though. e.g. it took the worker N hours to make it, he used up X amounts of calories to do that, his dormitory bunk costs Y etc. So X+Y+... is the "real" cost. That'd be absurd, the worker can/should charge as much for his work as the market will bare.

> There is nothing subjective about this.

No, the way you put it of course not. So what, though?

> If that was the entire point then I'm sorry I misunderstood you.

That's fine, no problem.

> Yes. But I don't see a problem with that (I mean you can still estimate costs and offer a price based on that).

It's not a problem in a capitalist or even a fully market-based system. My original point is that the information prices obscure might be functionally useful in a non-capitalist system.

> Same applies to labor though. e.g. it took the worker N hours to make it, he used up X amounts of calories to do that, his dormitory bunk costs Y etc.

Yes! There's some amount of cost to derive this information, and there would be thresholds where it just doesn't make sense to collect (or feasible). My point is that we actually do know the costs of various forms of labor and the amount of resources used in things, we just happen to throw them in the trash with each transaction.

> So what, though?

The information we throw out could be useful in scenarios other than "well, that's the price and that's all that matters." One example is the ability to price in known externalities of various resources (or the processes they go through). If you know fossil fuels burned at-scale are "bad" and you know exactly how much fossil fuels it took to build some product, you can immediately tax some externality-cost price amount of the product at point of sale.

In effect, this limits the scope of "economic planning" only to pricing externalities and lets "markets" (not really, because profit is gone, more like "distributed production") self-organize as a solving mechanism for those externality costs.

That's not to say you can't still use planning for bulding a freeway or a bridge or something, but fully planned economies are a beast of their own and I'm not a fan. This is a way of transforming markets into systems that operate within humanity's collective knowledge of the side-effects of production in ways that governments just can't handle.

> My point is that we actually do know the costs of various forms of labor and the amount of resources used in things

Price of the final good (or rather demand for it) can significantly influence the price of labor in certain cases though. There is no fixed "cost of labor" which is somehow directly tied to output produced by those workers.

> Price of the final good (or rather demand for it) can significantly influence the price of labor in certain cases though.

Absolutely, which is why I believe labor markets are a viable solution. Demand signals can propagate backwards and labor organizes accordingly.

> There is no fixed "cost of labor" which is somehow directly tied to output produced by those workers.

I think we're getting wrapped up in future vs past again. For any given product, a certain amount of different types of labor went into producing it. These hours and wages that went into the labor represent objective measures, and are fixed costs because there is no way to undo them.

If you were to make the same product again, the cost could absolutely be different, and you could make an educated prediction on the cost based on past knowledge, but you could not do so with 100% accuracy. I'm not suggesting that costs are predictable, but rather that they are measurable, and our current system doesn't even bother to measure them, it actually just erases the data with each transaction.