(bolding added) Isn’t this statement merely a tautology? Marx is arguing that not counting for things that are not valued by their labor input, and keeping every other variable the same, all products are valued by labor input.
In those cases where it does, in fact, increase its (not it’s) value, then the labor actually did contribute value. It sometimes does work that way. A finished product is worth more than the raw materials, and labor is part of why. Information (knowledge and skill) are also part of the increase. Marketing too: if I can persuade people that my product is “fashionable,” it can increase in value. (But that, too, is labor and information.)
The labor theory isn’t “wrong,” just complicated.
But being valued and having Marxian value aren’t the same, right? Marx is after the way capital works, and his first major point has to do with capital’s chief function as far as 1850s economics is concerned: the production of commodities, defined as above. Capital does not produce sunlight, or water, or meadows, or art: it produces commodities with use value and exchange value, and it does so by employing wage labor (both managers and laborers, of course), buying rsw materials and using machines. And he wonders what are irreducible component to this commodity production is. Now, just because capitalist commodity production requires wage labor does not make it tautological that it is labor-Hellestal says it’s not, for example. Marx says it is, because it is the only thing that, at the very bottom, MUST be there in order for anything to be produced. It’s the wrong analogy, but if you like: to make the first tool, nothing but some Homo Erectus’s half-hour of work was required, and with millions of stones around, whatever extra value was now in that flint was solely due to his labor. Again, the analogy is faulty, but it may serve for explicatory purposes.
Does that make it any clearer? I will say that you might call it a logically well founded axiom, rather than a fact, that labor is the source of all value. I would not do so here because everybody else appears to think their favorite axioms are facts of life…
Obviously he was! Goes without saying! Jolly good show! I stand corrected. As does Marx, the silly bugger, with his decades of study of the subject and carefully laid out argument.
Okay, roll with it–why? What’s your reasoning? Lay it out. It should be obvious, no? I mean, you’re right, and it’s exactly what Marx is saying, too, that not all work done is value-producing labor. But lay out your reason for why value IS (not just “can be said to be”, or “if so argued to be, helps us understand the motivations and behaviors of actors in the economy better than the alternatives”, but LITERALLY IS). Why IS it that? Shouldn’t be too hard, if it’s so obvious?
At the risk of repeating myself: I have no quibble with the possibility that to say “value should be seen to be what actors in a competitive market place arrive at in the process of exchaning goods” allows us to see processes at work in the economy that are otherwise obscured. And yet, *that does not **make *value that thing. Can you show that value MUST BE and IS only that thing? I doubt it. Marx’s labor theory of value allows us to see OTHER things, things that (to me and many others) are more important than the sterile act of saying things like: “Hey, that iron you bought for $3? It’s value is $3.” Because THAT’s tautology. If a thing’s value is always its price, I’m not sure why we need two terms.
Then what is the other meaning of value? If willing sellers are offering bushels of tomatoes for sale and willing buyers are paying $10, they I would believe that they value of a bushel of tomatoes, at least in that market, is $10. What other method would you use to value the tomatoes?
Of course if there is a tomato blight, the value goes up. If a new technology comes along that allows tomatoes to be produced in greater quantities, the value goes down. If the moods and fads of the food consuming public change and decide that turnips are a delicacy and that tomatoes are out of style, then the value of tomatoes are less, no matter the labor required. And I would certainly agree (without this change in moods) that if it requires 10 times the normal amount of labor to produce tomatoes, then the value goes up as well.
I just don’t understand why Marx believed that labor itself is the key. It is only key if you eliminate every other factor involved.
The value of the labor isn’t intrinsic to the good or the service being sold. The value of labor is realized when wages or some form of barter are paid or exchanged for that labor.
Labor being the source of all value can be an axiom but evidence and reason would suggest that other axioms as the basis to create hypotheses to test would result in the former being dismissed as less likely.
No a pound of iron’s value is exactly one pound of iron. Everything else must be determined empirically by engaging in trade. What is the value of a pound of iron in terms of grams of gold, bushels of apples, man hours of a particular individual’s labor, yen, wompom, beaver furs, copper wire? The answer is those are variable values and trade must occur to determine that value.
Likewise none of the above have an intrinsic currency value. Aside from the currency itself. But even currency values fluctuate relative to each other at a given point of time and relative to itself over time.
Let’s say I have wood. I paid $1000 for the wood. I apply labor to the wood and make something. Let’s say I make an ugly ass chair that I have to sell for $100. Was my labor worth intrinsically -$900? No. If I paid someone to make that chair was his labor worth intrinsically -$900? No. It was worth, assuming free trade, what I paid for it. That labor could very well have been worth $30/hr if that’s what I had to bid to acquire it.
5 years later if a hipster following a trend wants to pay me $2000 for an ugly ass chair does that change the value of the labor? No. The only thing that changed was demand and supply. The action of humanity is not necessary to create relative value. All that is necessary is the process of trade.
Anyways the burden of proof of a concept so obvious is not on me. The burden is on you. What is the intrinsic value of labor of a person that puts a pickle on a bun?
The fact that you can bid for such labor which is basically a commodity in a sort of free market should give a clue. Venezuela’s meltdown due to a command economy ought to be another.
This not about what I value something as, but about where the value comes from. Does it inhere in the tomato? Is it solely the consequence of a negotiation between me and you about the price of your tomatos? Or is it because the tomato would not be here unless you had paid your workers to tend to it, and therefore their labor is the irreducible component of its production? Its a crucial misunderstanding to assume that what you value something as is the same as its value for Marx.
Yes, yes, and no, Marx would say. The first two impact socially necessary labor time, the third doesn’t. But if there is no market for tomatos, if you persist in making tomatoes beyond what can be exchanged, you will have failed to produce commodities, and you will not obtain enough exchange value in return to keep your laborers alive. You cannot of course expend labor on just anythibg and expect to have created value–try tying two sticks together and selling that. But whatever value remains in the few tomatoes you are still selling is there because people labored at producing those commodity-tomatoes.
Yeah, but that’s the point. Labor is the irreducible factor in capitalist production and, perhaps, all human economic activity, says Marx. Nothing is produced without human labor being involved at some point. The thing that adds value to a stick that you sell in the marketplace as a spear is not its stickiness or the money somebody gave you to eat while you are making it or the sun you sat in, but your labor. That’s where value comes from. Says Marx. Because, again, precisely because its the only thing left standing that is irreducibly necessary (and, and here these primitivist analogies do a disservice, it is available for purchase in modern industrial societies–this is after all a theory of capitalism, not of all economies!).
No, and I don’t think anybody said that. Not Marx, for sure: value is a function of exchange. But when that value is realized in exchanged, its source is labor.
Well, no. Reason suggests no such thing, at least not to me, or the many people who have given much more thought to this than you and I and still think it’s a useful axiom. Reason suggests it to those poeple who have given much more thought to this than you and I can and concluded it’s not a useful axiom. One of us feels like this is something to insist on absolutes over, why ever…
Yeah, so? I don’t think anybody was saying that labor came with a stamp that set “insert five hours of work here for $10 dollars value”. Marx wouldn’t particularly disagree here. He would just say the fact that all of these things even have equitable values to exchange them on is a function of their being embodied labor.
Currency fluctuation rates are not a concern for the labor theory of value…why would they? “Currency value” has, in a way, but its more complicated; Marx, at the point Hellestal is at in this threat, is just treating money as a medium of exchange. And, of course, he’s right to do so: because whatever the value of the dollar is, if the commodities it trades are of equal value, then their dollar value will be equal.
Yeah, well, see my prescient note about the cutting up of the Monet. If YOU make a chair, that’s hardly of any concern to Marx: you’re not paying yourself a wage, after all, and, as I have repeatedly repeated, labor has no intrinsic worth (or rather, things you do to wood in your spare time are not intrinsically labor). And yes, if you had bid $30 dollars an hour for the labor, then the value of that labor would have been that (approximately; again, it’s complicated; but the point here is the value of the labor need not fully go into the chair, though all value in the chair will be there because of labor); but if your chair sells for $100 dollars and takes four hours to make out of $1000 dollars of wood, you have to sell it for less than its value, not to mention your expenses, and you’re a) a shitty capitalist and b) soon bankrupt. If the socially necessary labor time for crappy chairs is four hours, then its value is $120 dollars. Nothing prevents you from selling it for less or giving it away, though (nothing prevents you from selling it for MORE either, necessarily, if you can find a chump).
But this is why I tried to clarify all my simple examples with a disclaimer: simple examples are easy to follow, and Marx’s theory is not, because, as Trinopus rightly says, it just is not simple. As I offered in the past, if you are genuinely willing to understand, rather dismiss, we can walk through this (though I’m not rich on time), but I believe you are NOT willing to be open minded about this. Am I right? It’d be okay with me, I’d just like to hear an honest “No, nothing you can say will ever convince me that I am wrong here.”
Yeah, that’s what I would call a tautology: the chair is worth more because people will pay more for it, and if they will pay less, it’s worth less. If it floats your boat, fair enough. I’ve got a load of nice expensive tulips for you.
A): saying “obviously” often doesn’t make things obvious. B): if you still think “putting a pickle on a bun” is a meaningful example of what Marx means by labor, this is rather pointless, right? I might as well talk to that pickle, or the bun.
Why? How? What’s your reasoning here?
So just because Marx engaged in ridiculous circular reasoning and people parroted it doesn’t mean it’s any more factual than religious mythology. Regardless of the number of people thinking about it or for how long. Labor has no intrinsic value in any unit other than what the labor actually is. Every other unit be it a potato, a dollar, a ton of iron, an hour of my labor, an hour of your labor, etc must be established and is only accurate at that time and place via trade.
The fact that Marx is talking about labor as if it’s homogeneous, or even more damning only accounting for labor that is arbitrarily socially useful is enough to be inherently contradictory that the framework of his argument ought to be considered so shaken that no useful conclusion can be constructed. Do you not see the inherent contradiction by defining that labor is only providing value if the labor is socially useful? Well, how is that determined? By trade. Hmm.
My dear Octopus, I’m not going to blame you for not understanding Marx’s complicated idea. I do blame you for inventing wholesale things nobody ever said. Socially useful? Nobody ever said that. It’s not in Marx. It’s not in this thread. It doesn’t make sense (cigarettes are a commodity, but are they socially useful?). Nor is labor in Marx homogenous (though its average, by definition, is); nor is he saying that labor has intrinsic value; nor is he saying that its (monetary equivalent) value is established in anything but exchange. He even calls it exchange value, man (or woman)! I keep saying this. Your objections aren’t objections; and your dismissals of intelligent men and women as parrots of circular reasoning is just boorishly offensive.
Listen, I offered, in good faith, as I have countless times before, to walk you through the argument, if you have specific questions. But you’re evidently not interested in the argument–that’s fine. But why don’t you do those of us who are interested in the argument and willing to debate it with an open mind to objections the courtesy of sparing us your blanket, and sadly ignorant, dismissals of something I doubt you have fully read, and know you haven’t fully understood? We’ll see if Hellestal comes back to this, and if he’s going to be more willing to pay attention to what Marx is actually saying than you are; but you and I are, once more, through debating this, unless you come to this with at least a modicum of intellectual courtesy.
I have rarely seen a more patronizing tone, and undeservedly patronizing, than the above comment by Enterprise.
I’m sorry, then. Why is it undeserved, though?
He may be questioning your statements - even aggressively so - but his questions are neither stupid nor irrelevant. In fact, they go straight to the heart of Marxist theory, and even jump ahead to cut off forks that Marxists, if not Marx himself, created to deal with the inherent contradictions. I don’t see that octopus is in any way arguing in bad faith, nor is he making stuff up. He is, if anything, bringing far more precision than Marx ever put in.
That said, you’re under no obligation to argue with him, or me, or anyone else.
Heya, thread’s been bumped.
…reading…
Hmmmm. I still think my OP is okay. A few problems, but I stand by the basic approach. Looking back on it, I’d say the biggest issue is that it doesn’t place the ideas in a broader historical context. It would’ve been easier to feel out the contours and edges of the Labor Theory of Value if people had a broader notion of where these ideas came from, and where they went afterward.
But that would’ve made it even longer. It would be hard to do much better at the current length.
Apparently there is a bit of new criticism, too.
I stand accused of misusing the term “relative prices”. Here is the complaint against me:
Now here is what I actually wrote:
Emphasis added.
Right. Okay Enterprise. Already off to a bad start.
The purpose of the OP was most explicitly NOT to walk through Marx using his own terminology. I said as much. The ideas will be the same no matter what language we use, and it’s the ideas that matter. I can explain them in English. Ich kann auf Deutsch erklären. 日本語で説明できる。We can use 19th century descriptions or 21st century descriptions, and those descriptions will naturally be different, but the ideas will be the same.
The same ideas can be explained in more than one way. Marx’s notion of exchange-value is what I defined in the OP as relative prices. I didn’t make up this term. It’s part of the standard terminology. Relative prices, as defined in a bog-standard way, mean the same thing as exchange-value as used by Marx. Here is how Marx describes exchange value:
Can you see how this would be identical to a sensible definition of relative price?
Absolute prices are money prices – a gallon of milk costs 4 bucks. Relative prices are Marx’s exchange-value: a gallon of milks costs two loaves of bread, or four candy bars, or one twenty-five-thousandth of a Ferrari etc. I want to point out, again, that I was upfront about what I was doing. It’s right there at the beginning. My purpose was not to conform to the official King Engels Translation of the prophet’s text. I’m not trying to earn a red star badge at the next meeting of the Marxistisch-Leninistische Partei Deutschlands.
Yet this is the absurd standard to which you hold everything I wrote. Here are some other egregious examples.
This time the magic word is “commodities”.
I used the word “goods”. In the original German version – which frankly, I very much doubt you have read – the word is actually Waren. Exchange-value is Tauschwert. Use-value is Gebrauchswert. In general usage, there is no one “correct” translation for these words. “Goods” is of course one acceptable translation for the German word Waren. Though my choice is apparently not the translation favored by certain Marxist-leaning readers, I don’t at this moment give a used fig about that.
I stand by my choices. I have more than sufficient background to trust my own judgment on this matter, and my choice was suited to the particular purposes of this thread. This paragraph in particular is very important:
This is yet another paragraph whose importance you seemed to miss entirely.
I clarified the kinds of “goods” that were under discussion within a Labor Theory of Value. It’s right there. You just ignored it. When I’m talking about an “economy”, I am of course making the same restriction to the economy of goods (Waren) produced in the same described manner. This, again, should have been obvious.
I heed this distinction for the entire rest of the discussion on the LTV. I’m not talking about goods in general, and I say as much. I specify what this meant for Ricardo first, because Ricardo was the first person to try to focus specifically on goods created in this particular context. Marx was working in that same tradition. His own restriction is almost identical. Every time I’m talking about goods in this context, I am of course referring to Waren as Marx envisioned them.
As far as I can perceive, your entire post is like that. Empty terminological complaints from top to bottom with literally no exception that I can see.
It was at around that point I was also accused of not having read the book or something. “I’m not sure you’ve more than glanced at this text”. So here is something else I wrote in this very thread:
This isn’t actually from the OP – I used “goods” and “produced goods” and “these goods” etc. in the OP to specify what I was talking about – but that clarification was nevertheless written two months ago. It should obvious to all that I am not making some sort of post hoc justification of myself today. I wrote those words months ago. I’m aware of the distinctions, and I brought up Ricardo specifically in order to emphasize it.
And all of that is right there in the thread. It’s right there. I know the OP is super long. I know the rest of the thread is long, too. I realize that. But nevertheless, if you want to debate the ideas in the OP, you must actually read it more carefully.
You don’t get to skip past the paragraphs where everything is actually defined.
But yes, they are. That’s the point. The objections he has outlined have been met over and over…at least he might say where he finds the reply to the objections insufficient, no? They are based on misunderstandings on what’s in Marx’s text, and whether they are willful or not, they could be dealt with if he kept an open mind. And yes, he IS making stuff up. It’s right there–the is nothing about the socially useful in Marx or in this thread. How is that not making things up? And no, he is not more precise…I’m baffled how you would even be able to say such a thing? I’m not even quite sure what it means…
As simple as can be put a service or a thing only has the intrinsic value of what it actually is. If you want to use units to express it’s intrinsic value it can only accurately be expressed in terms of its own unit. Even in a class of goods no two apples have the exact same intrinsic value.
When trying to determine the intrinsic value of something in terms of some other good or service the answer is that it cannot be done. There is no such answer. Until we have perfectly lossless matter to energy to matter replicators. Now why is this? Because preferences, needs, wants, desires are unique to each individual and unique to a particular individual at a particular point of time.
The most accurate theories of economics realize that pricing which I am defining as w amount of x for y amount of z is not intrinsic nor is it objective.
Trying to disentangle labor from the all of the components of an economy and treat it separate from every other component is not an economic issue. It’s a political concern.
Answer me this though, use this so called Labor Theory of Value and calculate me the price of something in terms of dollars.
Well, my bad, possibly; I’m still not quite sure I agree, but I’d have to go through the text again and let you know the specific objections, for which I have no time right now, so my apologies for this. I think one point I might raise here is the objection that (if you go on in the section you quoted a bit later) there seems to be no distinction in Marx between relative price and absolute price: gold, which becomes what Marx calls the “universal equivalent form by social custom”, becomes the money-price through coinage (Penguin ed, 163). But of course, for Marx, gold is first a commodity–that is, it’s also embodied labor.
Well, I agree theoretically, but disagree in practice, that you’ve managed to do this. I believe you are confusing the issue when you don’t deal with Marx’s terms, and I disagree that your ideas and his ideas are the same. But, as always, YMMV.
If your preferred explication actually represented the sense of what Marx is doing, I wouldn’t give a fig either. And my complaint was not about whether you use good for Ware or commodity, but the point that the word good need not transport what the word commodity entails for Marx. This was my point; I don’t think your “good” actually corresponds to what a commodity is for Marx. You may be using the word analogously, but then it appears you’re not clear on how the concept works.
Oh, and as for that other matter, I read Kapital first in German, with what it being the native language and all, and then in English, which is a hassle, because I have to look up all the special words for discussions in English…
Yeah, I really wish people would stop lobbing the word “obvious” around so much. It clearly wasn’t; in fact, I’d say the way you were talking about this in your examples, was, simply, wrong. Your mileage obviously varies, so here I’m sitting again asking the question I asked before: can you see a basis on which we can rationally debate this? I mean, if I say “this is what he means”, and you say “no, THIS is what he means, and that shows he’s a moron”, we’re not getting anywhere, are we? You clearly win by popular acclaim, anyway!
Okay, but my post most affirmatively was not that. So what can I do to make you see that it was not terminological quibbles, but genuine complaints about factual misrepresentations? I mean, I even asked you a couple of questions that are, as always, in perfectly good faith. And I explicitly told you why I think your final example before the “I’m not making this up.” line is wrong.
Hm, not really, but my apologies for missing this in the thread. This predilection not to read carefully is obviously something we share, eh?
So, my major issue with your OP is that I don’t see it as a good-faith attempt to come to terms with the LTV on whatever merits it has, but a hatchet job that I think is a little bit beneath you. You have my apologies, if you’ll have them, for the accusatory bit in my last few paragraphs. I said before that I’m willing to debate, and you’ve kindly taken up the explicatory role that I had said I’d be willing to take; but there needs to be some kind of common ground for this. I’m not a trained economist, just a well-read Marxist who feels like he can say something useful about an unfairly derided conception of value. I’ll do what I can to make this discussion worth your while, if you think anything useful can come of it…
Oh, and hey, can we skip the nonsense about “King Engels translation of the prophet’s text” and agree that reasonable people may reasonably think there are reasonable arguments even in Karl Marx? This isn’t my religion, just the ideology of my preference, and I’m aware of its gaps and problems.
I am sincerely trying to follow this but failing. 
Labor has no intrinsic value and my own labor doesn’t count. However if I hire someone at $30/hr to make a chair, then the chair is valued at $120.
However, since as you mentioned, I put $1000 worth of wood into the chair and will go bankrupt and not make any more cheap chairs, doesn’t that then turn the labor into “non socially necessary” labor, making the labor instantly worthless?
Again, it seems like something a professorial candidate would write. Why could my “Natural Theory of Value” not be equally as good and state that all things are reduced to the value of raw materials? You can have labor, capital, and entrepreneurship but nothing without raw materials. So I expound upon this for pages and when you point out that dog shit is a raw material just like gold, I could scoff and say that I am only talking about “socially desirable raw materials” which include gold, food, coffee beans, and when something doesn’t fit my theory, I hand waive it as not being “socially desirable”?
Marx isn’t the only one to criticize. Smith’s two beavers to one deer analogy is equally flawed. What is the societal need for deer and beaver? I can think of many uses for deer, but with beaver only pelts come to mind unless you are starving to death and would eat a beaver (Yeah, yuck it up folks. )
Many things could flow from this. It may be that no commercial beaver hunting is done, or that specialization occurs and someone develops a way to farm beavers for commercial use, or a new fashion trend arises that makes every rich man in the society wants a nice beaver. (Yes, I’m really not doing this on purpose )
But nothing, nothing at all suggests that solely because it takes twice as long to kill a beaver than it does a deer that any price/value any measure that means anything should mean a beaver is worth twice as much as a deer.
No, you have not met any of his objections. I would say you have done nothing except to obfuscate the issue and claim that nobody understands what Marx really meant except you.
No. If anyone here is misunderstand Marx’s work, it is you. It is not remotely difficult to understand, even in translations. It’s still quite wrong regardless.
You are demonstrably wrong. Marx very clearly did use such a term in describing the “socially necessary abstract labor-time”.
It may not have been crystal clear. So: you hire somebody at $30/h to make a chair. You’ve exchanged, in other words, $30 dollars of your money for one hour’s worth of labor-power on your worker’s side. These $30 dollars are gone, however, already exchanged, and all you have is labor power now. That labor power goes into a chair, and you go to try and sell it, but its exchange value has yet to be determined on the market. Now, if everybody else is capable of making chairs in two hours, while you’re stuck having yours made in four, then the “socially necessary labor time” that is embodied in a chair is just that. No matter your paid $120 dollars for it, its value is only $60 [well, technically, it’s the average of everybody elses’s two hours and your four, and those who’s value is actually $60 exactly realize an extra profit from selling them].
But note: “In the first stage of his analysis, Marx assumed that all exemplars of a given sort of product were produced in equal, normal, average conditions. The individual labor expended on every exemplar quantitatively coincides with the socially-necessary labor, and the individual value with the social or market value. Here the difference between individual labor and socially-necessary labor, between individual value and social (market) value, is not yet taken into account. Thus Marx speaks simply of “value,” and not of “market value,” in these passages (market value is not mentioned in the first volume of Capital).”
I’m not sure how to answer, because I’m not sure I follow the reasoning, sorry. This happens all the time, doesn’t it–somebody is behind the curve with their product and needs to make it cheaper to compete, so either they buy machines, or fire workers and make the others work longer hours at lower pay, or some other thing that achieves that. In the meantime, you will hopefully have capital somewhere to allow you to bridge the gap; if not, they fail. That’s capitalism.
I think the confusion may lie in the “socially necessary”–it’s not “socially necessary labor”, it’s “socially necessary labor time.” If you mean by “worthless” that it will not be able to realize a profit for you, the capitalist, yes, perhaps; if you mean, “it has no value,” no–after all, you exchanged value (money) for it; if you mean, “it makes no value in the chair,” yes, it does–just not enough, in the market place, to allow you to realize a profit.
It’s a common, but still fallacious counterargument. You’ll have to explain the bit about “socially desirable”, which I’m not quite getting. And then, maybe it helps to think about it like this: what do you conceive of when you say “raw material”? Iron ore, say? Iron ore in a mine, one presumes–and a mine, not to put too fine a point on it, requires labor to be. If not iron ore in a mine, then maybe the wood in a forest? But that wood is equally available to everybody–it has use value, but no exchange value before it is worked on. This is why labor is the irreducible element of value: because nothing gets exchanged without it becomes the object of labor, whereas labor ITSELF is always a tradeable commodity (I can go to you and say, I’ll chuck down that tree for you, and it requires no previous expenditure of labor power for me to do so). Make any sense? Perhaps its easier to put it like this: if you pay me to get the ore I dig up out of a pit, you pay me not because of the raw material (which, one pit over, you might dig yourself), but because I have labored to get it. [And again, this is an imperfect analogy for Marx’s purposes, because he’s dealing with larger social and economic structures than simple one-to-one deals.]
Marx isn’t the only one to criticize. Smith’s two beavers to one deer analogy is equally flawed. What is the societal need for deer and beaver? I can think of many uses for deer, but with beaver only pelts come to mind unless you are starving to death and would eat a beaver (Yeah, yuck it up folks. )
Many things could flow from this. It may be that no commercial beaver hunting is done, or that specialization occurs and someone develops a way to farm beavers for commercial use, or a new fashion trend arises that makes every rich man in the society wants a nice beaver. (Yes, I’m really not doing this on purpose )
But nothing, nothing at all suggests that solely because it takes twice as long to kill a beaver than it does a deer that any price/value any measure that means anything should mean a beaver is worth twice as much as a deer.
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