I think we are at the point where the following SMBC presents a fine view of the world.
Anyone have a take on my meteorite example from post 60?
How is 100% of its value derived from labor?
I think that illustrates the principle that limited, one-off absurd examples are not part of an overall system or statement. If you take the economic value of selling meteorites which have landed in your lap, and compare it to an economy, it would be such an overwhelmingly trivial amount as to be meaningless and can thus be discarded from any serious analysis.
Besides which, the owner of the meteorite would be the owner of the land, who presumably gained ownership of the land directly or indirectly through labor.
The fact that it is a contrived example is irrelevant for two reasons:
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What’s happened with all the examples in this thread is that you and others have tried to squint really hard and find the labor in any given transaction, and claim that’s the root of all its value, even if in my opinion, it’s only one piece.
I necessarily had to think of an extreme example to eliminate any possibility of such squinting. -
My only concern is with the absolute statement that labor is the root of all value.
If you’re now conceding it only usually is most of the value, something nuanced like that, we’re good.
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That would obviously depend on what the law is in that location. For the purpose of defining something general like value you can’t just assume one set of laws.
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Sorry for the multi post but I should also add that the idea that land derives its value from labor because labor was involved in gaining rights to the land self evidently nonsense.
If i have a vial of vaccine for covid, and I give it to a friend because he smiled at me, is the value of the vaccine derived from the labor and skill to produce the vaccine or the smile?
It’s obviously the former, but then applying that to land is problematic for your position since there may have been no labor to produce the land, or the labor is not the main source of value (a brownfield site full of crap that needs to be demolished could still be worth millions in a premium location).
I am also baffled by the Neo-Marxism — or whatever it is — in this thread.
A pretty girl sells her photograph for $5000. How do you split the labor value between photographer and model? What if it’s a selfie — $5000 is the value of her clicking the camera button? Or some of the value goes to Mom who labored (pun) to produce the pretty girl?
William the Bastard became very rich 1066-1070. Was that due to the sword-wielding labor of William and his companions? I showed in a recent thread that some very wealthy Britons living today have inherited wealth that can be traced all the way back to the Conquest 950 years ago. Are those billions of wealth today to be attributed to William’s and his warriors’ skillful, if deadly, labor? Or does this avant-garde-Marxist view of capitalism have some allowance for capital?
I disagree, because, as we have already determined, gold has no intrinsic value, so the amount of labour put into mining/panning/tripping over it has no relevance.
If the man who “*goes out panning for gold and at the end of a 10-hour day has enough grains of gold to make an ounce”
- is an employee, he will get paid whatever ten hours is worth for his level of skill in his economy.
Imagine that you crash-landed on a planet and need some repairs that you can’t do yourself. The locals are not unfriendly but not charitably inclined either and there is nothing on your ship that they want and you have no skills they don’t have in abundance. The only way you can acquire enough of the local currency to buy what you need is to hire yourself out as a manual labourer.
I think what we seeing here is that you have a definition of “economic value” which may not be shared by everyone. To me, and I suspect many, many others, economic value is, to quote Wikipedia, investopedia and many others: “Economic value can be described as a measure of the benefit from a good or service to an economic agent. ”.
If I like the view enough to be willing to pay for it, clearly it has a benefit. To me, the agent. Presto: economic value. If you want to exclude this and certain other examples from “economic” value, and you exclude enough of them for whatever reasons you come up with, then sure, in your world there is no dispute that in the end labor is the source of all value. I can make a world like that, where the source of all value is the strength of the bond between Carbon and Oxygen atoms.
In our shared reality, even your example of your kid’s smile at Disney should give you pause. Let’s say that smile was captured during a ride, and at the end of the ride A photograph of it is offered to you for a buck. You agree to buy it. Unfortunately, the picture falls into a completely unnecessary paper shredder before the transaction can be completed. But no worries! There’s another picture, exact same size, material etc as the first, exact same labor went into it, it just happens to be of some other kid, whose family doesn’t approve of smiling pictures and didn’t want it. Disney will just give you that one. If at that moment you are not willing to take it, the notion that labor alone is the root of all value falls apart.
What makes that paper worth a Buck? To you, it’s the happy pic of your kid, to the photographer it’s the ten cents he gets as commission, to the owners of his equipment it’s some tiny amount because it’s spread over many thousands of pics. Disney gets the rest.
To you, the pic of another kid has no value, but it cost the same to produce. To a South Sea Islander, your gold bar has no value because he has no use for it except maybe to weight his fishing net, but stones are free and plentiful. He doesn’t want your ‘bucks’ either, but he will happily feed you for a couple of hours of your labour.
The diamonds-water paradox shows that all value is subjective and there is no intrinsic value.
That isn’t part of the scenario, and you can’t honestly change the scenario from one which discredits your idea to one which you think supports it.
OK… and? How is this an argument for or against anything whatsoever?
Well, since “property is theft” :rolleyes:, by claiming it as your own and forcing anyone who wishes to possess or use it to pay you, you’ve become a “parasite” i.e. a rent collector.
I concede that Hellstal is right. Labor is a necessary but not sufficient condition of economic value. I do not subscribe to Marx’s Labor Theory of Value. All I was saying is that labor goes into everything. Of course you could say that oxygen goes into everything, but nobody disputes that, however you are are saying that you can sell sunsets and the like which no labor went into.
I am suggesting that you do not sell sunsets, you sell the ability to view the sunset through the use of land, among other things.
Your picture example doesn’t really prove anything except the unremarkable proposition that people place different value on items than others. Hand me a plate of the best octopus ever made. I will push it away. Hand it to someone else and it is the best meal they ever had and would pay $60 for the dish. That’s like a Disney picture of someone else’s kid, or even your beach house. Maybe I hate sand and beach life. I wouldn’t go there if it was free. I like to go to art galleries, or strip clubs, or Bernie Sanders rallies.
Does that mean that beach houses around the country plummet in value because Ultravires doesn’t like them? Of course not. The value is in the product across society and (to the OP) the concept of money infinitely helps facilitate those transactions.
But without labor; if everyone sit on their couches all day, there would be no Disney pics, beach houses, art galleries, strip clubs, octopuses, cooked food, or Bernie Sanders rallies.
Money is the symbolic representation of work. Your work has value, but trading the results of your work to get the things that you need such as food is cumbersome. By agreeing that money has value, we make trade easier. What backs up our currency is the infrastructure that our work has created. Take away all the roads and our currency would decrease in value, even though we still had cars, because we would not be able to use our cars very well. What is disturbing to me is that money is being created without work. Any process that creates money without work devalues the stock of money. Conversely, money is destroyed when mismanagement and greed destroy an enterprise. The people who had invested in the utility stocks of the company that became Enron saw their money disappear when the company went under.
Under U.S. accounting rules, money owed to you makes you worth more, even though not all the money owed to you will be paid back. An entity which is owed millions can use those Accounts Receivable as collateral on a loan, even though that money does not exist yet. A collection agency can buy a debt for pennies on the dollar, add a ‘fee’ worth several times the amount of the debt, and then insist that you owe the new total. But if they can’t collect, they will sell the debt for a portion of the original amount. What happened to the money represented by the ‘fee’? The collection agency used that money to pay their payroll, even though it never existed. Did the money paid out to employees suddenly disappear? What happens when bad debt is written off? Does that money vanish?
The only thing backing up our currency is our collective agreement that the currency has value. When the rest of the world decides that the U.S. is not as valuable as the debt that we have incurred, our currency will lose most of its worth.
Again, an absolute statement.
What about examples like my meteorites, where I asked specifically for anyone to point out how labor was adding value, and instead all you could say was that it was an edge case?
And now you’re just matter of factly again saying labor is a necessary condition? What happened?
I can’t see any useful connection between labour and value. The earth is full of valuable things, sometimes they take labour to extract, sometimes they don’t, like stumbling across a gold nugget. What gives money value? Trust, as said upthread. Governments with fiat currency had to earn that trust by policing its creation and use, making it difficult to forge (the history of milled coin production is fascinating), having it universally accepted, and having it fuel a strong economy. Give me a Somali shilling and I will try to exchange it for another currency as soon as possible.
it would fucking hurt.
Just to stir the pot.
What is a kidney worth?
Clearly it is worth more to some than others, and condition matters. But you only get two.
Blood? You can donate regularly. Value depends upon your health and your blood group.
gold is very rare; man-made chemical reactions involving mercury to separate the rock from hold makes it pretty