Why shouldn’t the price of goods be the cost of producing them?
It's like asking "why shouldn't workers work for subsistence income instead of asking for more money?": the obvious answer is "because the only reason they would consider doing so when they don't have a choice"
Being a shareholder requires capital, which the vast majority of people don't have.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted though.
But that tendency comes with a lot of asterisks.
Arguments against will be that value "is" what people are willing to pay for them, which is some combination of supply and demand, but I find this just too simple. Technically it's true that the "value" of something is the price someone last paid for it, but then we get situations where we say a Bitcoin is worth 40k usd or whatever tf the price is right now. And then suddenly its value is 20k, and if you ask why you'll get thirty answers, all wrong. Maybe the price was 40k to someone and 20k to someone else, but the value? Nah. And the price alone tells us basically nothing.
The interesting thing for me is the third person. Me, in this case, to whom Bitcoin is worth 0, or less than 0 because I would consider it a labor cost to own a Bitcoin (figuring out a wallet or whatever). How does someone to whom a Bitcoin is worth 40k then then around and say "Bitcoin is worth 40k" to someone like me?
To capitalists trying to nod their heads and say ah the price is high, supply must be down or demand must be up, I say, good luck predicting human behavior, that usually goes great.
For me though I agree with you, the value of goods is some combination of their production costs, in any meaning of the word "value" that matters.
"But what if someone spends an entire lifetime of labor producing a single widget nobody wants? Clearly demand plays a part in value!" I don't know, go away. Why would that happen? Sure, ok, also include in value calculus that hopefully people only make things that people actually want. (the capitalist argument here is, the profit is to be found in the margin between cost to create and the price set by desirability - to which I say exactly, profit should be eliminated)
Edit: someone else had a comment they deleted talking about how profit is necessary so as to have surplus to save in case of equipment failure, I'll paste my response here cause my thumbs put in the labor so by golly I'll get the Payout
Traditionally, are profits sequestered to be used as savings like that? In my experience the equipment breaks and both companies go bankrupt because the executives in the c corp spent the profit on themselves already and are happy to just go find a new investment.
Actually in my experience the other company, the co-op, doesn't go bankrupt, because the workers are smart enough to safeguard their well being with rainy day funds. This might be one of the reasons coops are repeatedly shown to be far more resilient than traditional companies.
There is bid price, ask price, and last sale price.
Do they indicate "value" to the specific people making those transactions, bids and asks? Sure. Does it have to be the same for everybody? No, and that's why trade happens.
While I am not an expert, I remember reading about it on "The Classical School: The Turbulent Birth of Economics in Twenty Extraordinary Lives", by Callum Williams. It made sense to me.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/49374783
While linking to the sources is useful, I would appreciate any argument correcting the above since, as I said, I am not an expert and it makes perfect sense to me.
This is not true; Marx's model of exploitation (known to modern economists as the Profit-Exploitation Correspondence Model (PECP)) does not concern itself with what demand and offer agree on within a labor negotiation. Marx says that workers do not sell their labor, they sell their labor-time (e.g. X units of time/goods) during which they exercise their labor-power. The discrepancy between the value of the time and the value produced during that time is where this 'exploitation' comes in.
The idea that exploitation is a matter of opinion or agreement adds a moral or justicial spin to what Marx considered to be a fact of the capitalist economy. Whether the people involved are happy with the situation or agree to it does not change this discrepancy of value or its representation in money.
> The discrepancy between the value of the time and the value produced
I am thinking how can one value this time. If it is valued by the market (how much someone is willing to pay for it) we would end up with the same problem, no?
It must be intrinsically valued, I am assuming.
What is the "value"? Well, the prices cannot be explained only in terms of offer and demand (a society with an offer of 100 pens and demand for 100 pens and offer of 100 planes and demand for 100 planes still would not sell pens and planes for the same price) nor entirely because of the price of raw materials (because this only postpones the explanation: from where came the price of the raw materials?). It also cannot be explained only based on subjectivity, because there exists a number, which is a very objective measure, representing the price if you balance offer, demand, assume competition and discard several perturbations. The "value" tries to explain this basis value that later will became the price and show objectively and numerically how the wealth is produced and distributed.
This "value" is measured by Marx as the quantity of labor socially necessary to produce the product. Given a car, the value represented by a car can be measured by the mean time necessary for the workers to produce that car in the industry plus the value transferred by the machines and tools used by those workers (whose value came from the workers that produced these machines and tools). Both manual and intellectual work need to be taken into account and you can also assume that some complex tasks or more intense work can produce more value than simple tasks in the same time.
Given this, you can compare the value produced by a worker with the value of the things that the worker can buy with its salary. This is how Marx measures these things and shows the exploitation in the society.
The capitalist wants to pay as little as possible per hour, but will on average long term not be able to pay less than the cost of living. Capitalists pay just enough so that workers as a class reproduce themselves (so there are more workers), but less than the value the workers produce.
Marxism is explicitly amoral, it does not concern itself with that is morally right. It is a social science that analyses the contradictions within the material world and their consequences.