Re: More Peoples Weekly World commentary
Daniel C. Burton (dburton@ocf.berkeley.edu)
30 Nov 1997 23:03:11 GMT
It looks like there are still a few communist hold-outs left from the
Sixties towing the same tired old line. It is really no intellectual
challenge to spot the holes in arguments like these.
It all boils down to the Labor Theory of Value, which is that the value of
objects is determined, objectively, by the amount of work that goes into
producing them. However, it is easy to show this is not the case. For
example, in the hands of a great Chef, a bunch of ingredients can become a
souffle whose value far exceeds that of the ingredients. In the hands of
someone who doesn't know what they're doing, the same amount of work can
easily ruin the souffle and actually create something inedible and of less
value than the original ingredients.
They would have us believe that value is something constant from person to
person and circumstance to circumstance, but this could only be true if
usefulness to humans played no part whatsoever. Supposedly, a medicine
that cures a deadly illness should be of the same value to someone with
that illness and someone without it, but its easy to see that the person
with the illness will probably value the medicine more than the person
without it. Similarly, the medicine is worth a lot to a society where
everyone's sick, and worth nothing to a society where the disease has been
completely eradicated.
This theory of value only holds true if you assume that human happiness is
of no importance, an assuption most of us would not want to make.
I find particularly amusing the part that says when someone sells
something for $3 that they bought for $2, there's no profit. That's the
definition of profit -- taking in more than your costs!