Reply #8: In part yes in part no [View All]

[notesdev]

Statement: the value of an object is related to the labor needed to make it.

It can be. Or it might not be. What I value may be different than what you value.

For example, I have cats; you may have dogs. Cat food isn't very valuable to you, and dog food isn't too valuable to me. But making one is about as labor-intensive as making the other.

Value is ultimately subjective. Perception and circumstances play a huge role. You may jump out of your shoes to get the latest iPad, but the exact same device has zero value to someone with no skill with technology nor desire to learn or use it. A piece of fruit may be a snack to you, but it may be literally priceless to a man on the edge of starvation.

This is ultimately why top-down technocratic economy management can't work - because the proper calculation of value is subjective, and there's no way even a computer program, let alone another flawed and limited human being, is going to accurately make those judgments in real time for millions of human beings, no matter how well such a program would be designed.

Marxism is a dead end, economically, for the same reason all centralized command systems are ultimately incompatible with humanity. The underlying reality is that human activity is organic, not mechanical, and as a result it is far more fluid and dynamic than any static mechanism can account.