“If this man were a capitalist on the other hand, and tried to survive without working, he would be dead in a matter of days. Because capital alone is not enough to create wealth, you can see that labor alone IS enough to create wealth.”
Hmm? This is all relative to the situation. Surely a person who is providing legitimate tokens of wealth in an economy (that normally they have accrued thanks to contributing to society in other forms) is providing a service (by taking a risk and putting people in places to profit themselves). Sure a person in the wilderness would benefit from labor, but that is, again, relative to the situation. It’s like saying finding water at an oasis in the middle of the desert should therefore mean we price water the same as a television set because of its relative importance in an extreme situation. This is an absolutely nugatory argument.
I dont think he realizes but, in between all the nonsense, he does admit the market works. Competition and consumer demand makes the companies lower their prices and their profits to near the labor cost. Then, why oppose the market?
That was hilarious. I guess the same people who wrote that must be baffled by the existence of showers since “clearly” rainfall produces a demand for umbrellas…
What’s more they don’t even understand statistical mechanics… Thermodynamics only allows you to make a limited set of conclusions concerning aggregate relationships, but does not allow one to represent their causes for which knowledge of what is inside the “black box”(e.g. the molecular structure and possible chemical reactions) is necessary to make reliable inferences.
The application of Physics & statistics explaining complex phenomena is wrong because it assumes away possible complex relations between variables. If the physisists had the same results as Marx it is only because they made the same mistakes.
Blasphemy! God worked his rear off for six days before he rested. Marxsists today are able to calculate the value of all the land in the universe based on God’s hourly wage, though there are fierce debates about the latter due to the difficulty of calculating his sustenance wage. His food, shelter, and commuting costs are practically non-existent so some argue that his wages should be low enough (close to $0!?) to reflect that.
<<< Rob do you have a serious critique of Subjective Theory, and marginal value theory? I’ve not had one person explain LTV to me that didn’t sound like a joke.
No one can explain to me why it takes 8-16 hours for me to produce a foot of poo in my toilet, yet it’s worth essentially nothing. Sorry for the vulgarity but it’s a hilarious point to make. According to your LTV there should be some objective value assigned to my poo. >>>
I’m sure you never have read anything about the LTV, as otherwise you would have know that a pre-condition for anything to have value is that is has so-called ‘use-value’. If I work no matter how long on something that has no appliance, the value of my work equals zero, because there is no use-value.
And another remark: poop still has some value as it can be used for producing bio-gas.
But, your remark in total is something non-sensical, cause the producing of ‘poop’ is just the outcome of your bodily functions (like sweetings, blood pressure, respiration), so you would not call that labor. Labor is always a dedicated task, not just the effect of your bodily functions. Labor is a conscious task.
<<< Land does not require labor for its production. Doesn’t the LTV imply that land should have zero value?>>>
Blasphemy! God worked his rear off for six days before he rested. Marxsists today are able to calculate the value of all the land in the universe based on God’s hourly wage, though there are fierce debates about the latter due to the difficulty of calculating his sustenance wage. His food, shelter, and commuting costs are practically non-existent so some argue that his wages should be low enough (close to $0!?) to reflect that. >>>
Yeah, but unlike man, God did not have anyone to exchange the product of his labour with. Or did he? Maybe he sold us to the devil for profit!
<<< What about things with value that don’t require any labor? Land (natural resources in their natural state) is valued differently by different people. Land does not require labor for its production. Doesn’t the LTV imply that land should have zero value? >>>
If you look this up, you will find that Marx did discuss this issue of natural given commities, like land. Although land itself, at first, doesn’t require labor (but in many cases this is not true, because mane parts of land have been cultivated throughout history, take for example Netherlands, most part of this land would have been sea if we did not convert it to land) there is still a price attached to it due to the fact that also land itself produces value, because you can grow crops on them.
<<< All you have to do to disprove any objective theory of value is find two people that disagree on the value of objective theory of value. You just found that. >>>
You have not understood one bit of what the article tries to explain, because we are not considering individual cases,. but the aggregate.
Like the temperature of a gas tells something about the average veocity of molecules, this does not imply we instantly know the velocity of an indiviual molecule.
<<< Right so then if labor != price, what is it? Well its labor. Its this metaphysical thing floating around attached to the good. Some marxists on the wiki article think that somethings labor content is a sort of magnent around which prices gravitate. I don’t think they have any reason to believe this… nothing could falsify such a vague claim anyway. >>>
That’s the whole point what the article is about, that it can be falsified at the basis of statistical economic analysis.
<<< 3. Of course, the assumption that the economic universe is like the atomic universe is a big mistake, as pointed out very often on this site. As an example: If we assume people in cars drive by the laws of statistical mechanics, then they will wind up evenly [or at least randomly] distributed along the face of the globe. And yet, on a day when there is a football game, there seems to be a big clustering of cars near the stadium. And on days when the stadium is closed, the cluster of cars disappears. Why is that? >>>
So, you assume because the physics laws of thermodynamics require that the molecules of a gas get evenly distributed, right?
Then explain to me, why does the wind blow if that were the case?
So, the fact that the wind blows means that thermodynamic behaviour of gas in the atmosphere is not even correct?
<<< I doubt they think about it this way but, if I understand the LTV’ers correctly, prices of goods should always be just slightly higher than the cost of employing someone to make it. Therefore prices cannot fall unless wages fall as well. Easily falsifiable and is dead wrong. >>>
For sure it can happen that prices fall below the actual cost of producing them, and as a matter of fact, Marx explains just why that happens.
The only rule is however that on average prices can not be lower then the costs of producing them!
Again, you are using a false dichotomy, because the whole intent of the article was to explain something about aggregates, not abiut individual cases.
In a capitalist society, a produced/capitalist can not continously produce below the cost price. Sometimes they do, intentionally, for outcompeting the competition, and sometimes the are forced to do it because of overproduction in that market segment.
But as we know from the markets assuming perfect market conditions, if prices are significantly higher then cost price, the production will go up and more competition will come in while demand would sink, causing the prices to lower, and could cause prices to even fall below cost price, in which case some produces will get broke, production will decrease, while demand is growining, causing prices to go up again. So quite understandable, prices will be driven towards the equilibirum point of the cost price.
The primary argument of LVM and other Austrian economists is that it is grave methodological error for economists to try to use the methods of the physical sciences for any economic analysis. In short, the laws of physics and physical sciences are simply not appropriate, nor applicable, for analyzing human actions- useless, in fact.
The best book on this, [to my mind] is LVM’s “The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science”. It’s fairly easy to understand[ much more so than “Human Action” for example] - why not give it a shot?
And I could say the same thing about you, since you seem to think the exploitation theory is entirely founded apon LTV. The Exploitation theory however was demolished outside of any criticism of LTV.
Or simply because consumers didn’t want the good, causing a surplus.
Somewhat true. Prices always are aiming at an equilibrium but will never arrive there. They may bounce up and down around it, but will never arrive at an equilibrium. The concept of an equilibrium is purely conceptual, it’s not something that can be argued as objectively observeable.