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Originally Posted by Alan
I respect your objections, because this is precisely the reason I made this thread. I'm trying to see whether I'm wrong and why. However I don't think what you're saying actually proves me wrong.
You couldn't buy a million pigs in 1400's because there was no pig farming at such a massive scale. You certainly wouldn't be able to buy a million pigs today if there were only let's say 4 million pigs in the world.
Equally if in the 1400s pigs were abundant enough, it would be very easy for a king or even a lord to have a million pigs.
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There are way more than 4 million pigs today and there weren't then. So ifs are besides the point.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan
What you say about an ipod being more valuable than the sum of its parts is just another way of talking about marginal utility. It doesn't create emergent value, it just plays with demand. If the demand was merely for the functionality of an Ipod-like device, seeing how mp3 technology is abundant and ignoring copyright law, such a music player would really gravitate its price to its cost of material, labor, and distribution. I say 'gravitate' because as I have explained, price is set by marginal utility, not labor itself.
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Sure. By the way have you heard about the conditions in the factories where apple gets its parts from? Suicide nets.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan
And that brings me to my final point. The idea that there's no fixed quantity of labor, thus labor CAN be created. And you're right, and this is precisely why Adam Smith and David Ricardo and Karl Marx initially believed that only labor can create value.
But again, market value and exchange value are separate. Labor is indeed emergent, and as such it creates new things, things which didn't exist before, but this is immanent value. When these things enter the market they must be relativized by the market, and thus their price is fixed in relation to everything else in the market. The total value of the market does not change with the introduction of new objects, it just gets shifted.
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Simply reaffirming that market value is constant, not justifying it.
[quote=Alan;690164]You yourself said this is a tautology. Not quite, but it does seem to be axiomatic and that's what I'm trying to prove. If you say this is tautological then you're not really arguing new value can be created, the opposite of what you were saying at first.[/quite]
No, pay attention.
If you add together everyones share in the market you arrive at the totality of the market. Commodity prices and personal net worths are all relative to one another within this system, but it's not a closed system. The total utility of all property can increase or decrease over time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan
Of course it has to be tautological, or as I'd rather say, axiomatic. If it were otherwise, there would not be a law of supply and demand.
New value, we have seen, cannot be created. The existence of more money is nothing but inflation. The expansion of the markets is not a growth of the market but a diversification of it.
It is precisely because new value can't be created that capitalism can be a regulatory force on production and a rationalizing force on economics.
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We haven't seen anything, you've just asserted it.
Let's talk about value. Does an artist create value? Is the best determinant of it the value of his labour?