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Re: What is profit? (was: Re: [ox-en] Re: "At Cost")



Paul Cockshott wrote:
Adam Smith showed that all prices can be decomposed into
wages + profit, since costs are either wages, or purchased non-labour
inputs, whose price will in turn ultimately decompose into wages + profits

I understand the claimed reasoning based on work being added at each
link in the chain of production, but the summation of all that work is
certainly not the only cost of production.

What about the real costs that are not wages?

What about pollution?  Isn't that a cost?

What about depletion of finite resources such as petrol, natural gas
or coal?  Isn't the loss of these a cost?

What about the exclusion caused when using finite resources of space,
time, mass and energy?  What I mean here is: Even if a plant is
productive, it must occupy space (land) across time, and it might need
things such as water, sunlight, effort, etc. that will then not be
available for alternate production.

If you are producing widgetX, you cannot simultaneously use the same
space during the same time, nor can you use the exact same drops of
fuel or the exact same inputs.  You can use the same *TYPES* of such
things, but there is rivalry/exclusivity that requires a kind of
scheduling and/or allocation of these resources that should also be
considered a cost.

What about risk?  I wonder if that is a cost.

What about security, storage, wear on machines?  Are these costs?

Sincerely,
Patrick
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