It's not so much a "bargain" as it is how we discover which jobs are useful. Capitalism is very efficient at exposing useless labor, and this is a good thing. Having a bunch of humans laboring at jobs no one needs or wants is wasteful.
The ideas of “efficiency” as they are used in economic theory are very narrow, and reflect a technical understanding of a vastly over simplified model of reality. Such models do provide insight into real life, but they are analytical tools, nothing more.
Economics, as field of study, has a big problem with the concept of “value.” The price of things tends to stand in for the value of things, as it is easily measured.
You don’t have to look hard to see the absurdity of taking this compromise too far. Look at military spending. Since dollars are spent buying a weapon, and workers get paid, profits are made, the “value” of the sale gets added into GDP. Then we take that missile, and blow it up. If we kill our enemies, then maybe one could say we got our money’s worth. If we kill only innocents, then I see it as more of an “anti-value.” What if it just blows up in the desert, and makes a multi-million dollar hole in the sand? Sort of a modern, high tech version of paying one group of workers to dig holes, and another to fill them in, is it not?
How would you suggest choosing who gets to do the "make work" versus who must toil away at the necessary? How would you suggest compensating those whose work is more vanity than value if no one pays them for their output?
This was done in the Great Depression, to try and keep the economy going.
There are ways to create work that is valuable, but the market value is below what anyone can afford to live on. So the government could subsidize salaries, in addition to hiring people.
Getting back to my comment about military spending: I see it as a destructive waste. How does that get decided? It’s decided by people operating in a complex political-financial-industrial-military complex.
If we, as a society, can decide to waste lives and wealth on idiotic military action, we can decide to spend wealth on helping our own citizens.
That’s all government spending.
That doesn't mean we always like those outcomes, hence the need for regulations, social safety net, etc.
Overall, it's a pretty shitty system, since it means that some people are always losing, but it also seems to be the best we've got.
_Emphasis mine_.
Is it a system or emergent behavior? I'd argue that these are mutually exclusive and that capitalism falls squarely in the latter category. It is the result of individuals being free to exchange whatever they find valuable.
No its really not a lot of work out there adds limited value to anyone's life.
Further the measure of the worth of the labor is determined by how much resources the decision making party controls.
Something which flatters a rich person and ads negligable value is worth more than something that keeps 3 poor people alive.