The employer does not pay a skilled worker more do to the cost of production, but due to personal intrest
As to the employer who pays an professional worker twenty times more than a simple worker, it is simply due to personal interest; if the engineer can economize 800. And if the employer has a foreman who saves 80 or 40 when they expect to gain $400 by it; and this is the essence of the capitalist system.
Let the collectivists, therefore, not talk to us of ‘the cost of production’ which raises the cost of skilled labour, and tell us that someone who went to university has a right to a wage ten times greater than an entry level worker. The professional worker simply benefits by the advantages their industry reaps in international trade, from countries that have as yet no industries, and in consequence of the privileges accorded by all states to industries in preference to the other trades.
Nobody has ever calculated the cost of production of a producer; and if a noble loafer costs far more to society than a worker, it remains to be seen whether a robust day-labourer does not cost more to society than a skilled worker. We know full well that people work for less, but we also know that they do so exclusively because, thanks to our wonderful economic organization, they would die of hunger did they not accept these mediocre wages. For us the scale of remuneration is a complex result of taxes, of governmental tutelage, and of capitalist monopoly. In a word, of state and capital. Therefore, I say that all wage theories have been invented after the event to justify injustices existing at present, and that we shouldn’t take them into consideration.
References
- Kroptokin, Peter. (1892). The Conquest of Bread Chapter 13. The Collectivist Wages System (p. 224).