So much labor history has been forgotten. Here's the founding document of the International Labor Organization.[1] This was, when it was founded, on a par with the World Trade Organization. The ILO position, mainstream at the time, was that wages are an output, not an input. The purpose of economic activity is to maximize worker wages. Not return on capital.
That few people today even know this was once mainstream is the result of a very effective lobbying campaign started in the early 1970s. Milton Friedman provided the theory, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce providing the money. There was a master plan for this, the Lewis Powell Memorandum.[2] This is where the organized conservative movement came from, from think tanks to talk shows.
e.g. Wages can be both inputs and outputs. Because there’s no ultimate judge deciding how these things should be considered.
Millions of writers can write billions of words about it one way or the other, but at the end of the day they don’t count for anything, when compared to 8 billion lives worth of daily decisions.
That few people today even know this was once mainstream is the result of a very effective lobbying campaign started in the early 1970s. Milton Friedman provided the theory, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce providing the money. There was a master plan for this, the Lewis Powell Memorandum.[2] This is where the organized conservative movement came from, from think tanks to talk shows.
[1] https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:62:0::NO:62:P62_...
[2] https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/