>>So, in general, for this to be effected, it is actually not in a
>>competitive environment. To have "high value added" you have to have
>>either and effective or legal monopoly on one or more of the
>>components or processes.
>
>Yes. Although, in practice, legal monopolies are usually less
>important than the "effective" monopolies that are inherent in
>figuring out how to undertake high-tech production before everybody
>else does. In other words, it doesn't directly correspond to the
>common-sense concept of an "unfair monopoly." Also, it's usually not
>a literal monopoly - there is usually more than one competitor in
>the business, just not enough to generate perfect competition.
Look, it helps to control the supply of any particular kind of labour, but not sufficient by itself. What you seem to be overlooking is that most "high value added labour" is just that. It is labour that has high value added to it in terms of experience, training, etc.
It costs time to add these skills, labour-time. It requires an entire social infrastructure to create the conditions in which people can gain these skills. Which is extremely costly.
So the productive labour time of highly skilled and specialised workers is more costly to reproduce than the productive labour time of an unskilled labourer.
High value is added. It isn't just some artificial concoction of convention. The skilled surgeon needs 20 years of education before they can even begin to learn the trade. Then most skilled workers have to keep on learning throughout their working life, to keep up with developments. And it isn't just the labour-time of the skilled worker him or herself that is concentrated into a relatively small amount of productive (in terms of actually doing the job) labour time. There's an entire army of people required to train the skilled workers, teachers, trainers, peers. Then those trainers have to be trained and all of them have to be supported while they are doing so.
And it requires a huge investment in social infrastructure before anyone can even start out on the long road to acquiring specialised skills.
Now its arguable that skilled workers often exploit their position to extract a better return on their labour than is socially-necessary. Particularly through professional cartels, inflated certification barriers and artificially restricting entry to training. But there's a limit to how effective this can be.
The basic thing to remember is that "high value added" labour is labour that has high value added. It is socially-necessary for it to cost more, because it costs more to produce.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas