TY Autolykos for exposing the the latest evasion for what it is, hiding behind a language many here do not understand. Turns out that the translation of the first three chapters of the book, to which Mises himself added an English fourth chapter in later years, accurately reflects his ideas.
BTW, in Appendix A of the book, Mises clearly lays out his opinion that value is subjective. So it’s not like subjective theory of value was something he didn’t know about or agree with when he wrote the book. The mystery deepens, hey? How could he let slip such an egregious error, that even a child wouldn’t make?
But of course, the answer lies in context. “Intrinsic” can mean many things, depending on the context. When speaking about “that which is not a subjective appraisal of the worth of an object”, we can fairly employ the phrase intrinsic value, if only to deny it’s existence. When speaking about the value a commodity would have that is distinct from, and prior to, the added value it gets when being used as a money, it is not a distortion of English to call that “intrinsic value” as well, in that context. And though the phrase means two different things in two different places, well that’s life. A basketball player may well say “I dropped my [house] key at the top of the key.”
BTW, the usage is ingrained into the literature by now. In another thread, I quoted prominent Austrians who talk about intrinsic value with no shame.
I searched the forum for “smiling dave intrinsic value” and found this post of yours from about a year ago. Here’s what I think is relevant:
By intrinsic value I mean this: assume the object was declared illegal to be used as payments of any kind. Would people want that object for some other purpose, enough to pay something for it? If no, that is what I mean by not having intrinsic value. Where I live, leaves are piled up in the street, free for anyone to take, but nobody does. Certainly no one will pay for them. So that where I live, leaves have no intrinsic value. Dollar bills, if declared illegal to use as money, would probably be dumped in the streets, too. So they too, have no intrinsic value.
I see what you (and presumably Mises) mean now by “intrinsic value”. You’re not using it to mean “value that inheres in an object”, but rather “value that people impute to an object for non-exchange uses”. Maybe the ambiguity comes from the original German, namely the phrase “an sich”, which is usually translated into English as “in itself”.
So I think I can accept this usage of “intrinsic value”, given the context. My preference would still be for one or more other phrases to be used in its place, but that’s just me.