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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Iron Puddler by James J. Davis: The cost of pasturage was a dollar a month for each cow. That was
less than four cents a day for cow feed to produce two gallons of
milk, or about two cents a gallon. The wages of the girls who
milked them and my wages for driving them amounted to three cents
a gallon. In other words, the cost of labor in getting the milk
from the cows more than doubled the cost of the milk. This was my
first lesson in political economy. I learned that labor costs are
the chief item in fixing the price of anything.
The less labor used in producing milk, the cheaper the milk
will be. The reason wages were high in America was because
America was the land of labor-saving machinery. Little labor was
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