That’s the paradox of productivity. You create a machine to make bread and all that happens is that bread gets cheaper in time terms once you strip away the money abstraction.

You can see this by comparing production relative to something that can’t be automated away but is still valued over time - like a violin player.

The machine forces people in the same business down to your level, but people in a less automated arena go up in value relative to your bread.

you're presuming the value and price are static in that example.

once the capital investment has been made, the price of the bread will go down because less labor will be used to make it, as the marginal cost of the bread goes down. the labor in the capital investment will be amortized over time in the price. the capital investment itself should only capture the riskiness portion of the project, not the majority of the resultant productivity gains.

and in many cases, people do pay more for a product made using more labor--i pay more for my manually-roasted beans than i would for mass-roasted ones. the higher price reflects the added labor in the value chain.

that's what i mean by the labor theory of value being more prominent, not to the exclusion of other theories of value.

Imagine that a craftsman value of his manufacture is the time and the necessary skill applied.