The Money/Time fallacy

As far as how you express it, your conclusions are a bit off. The method by which you earn money (hourly, salary(taxable or not)) has no bearing on the value traded. Additionally, both time and money are finite, therefore a tradeoff must occur. This is true no matter your ability to work more or you’re a billionaire. In your approach to this idea, you’re assuming some kind of concrete, always balanced, equation. While this is more true(and easier to see as balanced) when opportunity cost is applied in business (outsourced factory can make widget X in bulk cheaper), this is almost always false in life situations like you describe. There are just too many variables. Skill, willingness, enjoyment, or necessity as just a few of the intangibles that factor into the decision.

Free to take time off for travel or family when you want, rather than wait for set vacation days.

And so on. Most people have some things they'd rather be free from, if they had more money.

If you already have total monetary freedom, count yourself lucky.

Let's say I make $100/hr at my job.

My car breaks down, and it's only $80/hr for a mechanic to fix it. Seems smart. Now my deck needs repainting, and it's $30/hr for someone else to paint it. Gardening? $20/hr. Washing machine broken? $50/hr. Daycare? $30/hr. Housecleaning? $30/hr... etc. etc. etc.

Because I'm a Software Engineer, pretty much every service in the entire world costs less per hour than I make, so following the logic, I should be paying someone else to do everything in my life for me. I should get someone to cook for me, drive me to work, and brush my teeth.

All of this assumes I can go to paid work an ever-increasing amount, which is obviously not true. The amount of hours I can work in a week is fixed.

UPDATE: Something else the article doesn't mention is that not only is the actual cash-in-hand dollar amount less due to tax, you should also consider the expenses required to earn that money. Transport, work clothes, work lunch, daycare and even rent/mortgage# must be paid simply to go to work. And those expenses come off after tax dollars. The amount you get in your pocket at the end of it all is a lot, lot less than your hourly rate.

#I say rent/mortgage because if you didn't have to go to work, you could live in a tiny little town somewhere paying a fraction of the rent/mortgage you are now.

But that's not what your article was about! You weren't pushing a rough awareness of opportunity cost, you were saying that it's a "fallacy" because in most cases you can't calculate it down to the penny. See my other comments.

I for example see no learning/entrainment value out of cleaning my apartment

What about the value of a less stratified society? Ever see Metropolis or read Brave New World? Ever live in a country like Brazil or India where the moneyed have servants to do everything from cooking, driving (few in India drive their own car!), and even raising their children? Yes, I want those people to have jobs, but no, I don't want to live in a world like that, or anything like Metropolis. And I don't want to be so elite and spoiled that cleaning my fucking toilet is beneath me.

I make well into 6 figures, though I just quit that job and will likely make much much less to contribute something better to this world than I have been, something better than what pure and cold capitalism has been telling me is valuable.