If you ask pro-capitalist people why a job like, say, sanitation work has such an abysmal wage even though the job is necessary, they’ll tell you that it is an unskilled occupation. We could contest that, but for the sake of argument, let’s concede. By this logic, value is derived from how much labor is required to accomplish something—in this case, the labor of learning the skill in addition to the labor of completing the task at hand. A doctor, then, would earn a much higher wage because of the labor required to obtain the necessary degrees to practice. Okay. But then, if you ask a pro-capitalist people again why the price of a pair of glasses, a mattress, or even a bottle of water is so expensive, despite these things being cheap and easy to make, they’ll tell you that value is not determined by the labor that goes into producing something, but by need and demand. This inconsistency reveals how neoliberal economics functions: the value of something means whatever is most convenient for the ruling class.