Only the appearance of such people ready to buy or to sell can alter prices. Economics analyzes the market process which generates commodity prices, wage rates, and interest rates. At the bottom of many efforts to determine nonmarket prices is the confused and contradictory notion of real costs. If costs were a real thing, i.e., a quantity independent of personal value judgments and objectively discernible and measurable, it would be possible for a disinterested arbiter to determine their height and thus the correct price. There is no need to dwell any longer on the absurdity of this idea.
Costs are a phenomenon of valuation.
The attainment of an excess of the value of the product over the costs, a profit, is the goal of every production effort. Profit is the pay-off of successful action. It cannot be defined without reference to valuation. It is a phenomenon of valuation and has no direct relation to physical and other phenomena of the external world. Economic analysis cannot help reducing all items of cost to value judgments.