> 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.
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.