You don’t pay someone for the job they did; you aren’t paying someone because they did something toilsome. Rather you pay for the job you don’t have to do.

The former justifies all manner of economically backwards, window-breaking make-work schemes; the latter represents the exchange of value for value, of productivity for productivity.

What you are willing to pay is determined your disutility of labor.

A cost is what you give up in order to obtain something else.

A price is the cost of something that you didn’t produce.

All costs are opportunity costs.

That is all.