Decline And Fall Of The American Empire

What if the cashier can't come to an agreement with Safeway? Economies worked long before there were standard units of exchange. If the farmer needs capital - e.g. seed - to get started, he gets it from another farmer. What he uses to pay for it isn't particularly relevant.

How do we obtain those natural resources? Do they just leap out of the ground into the capitalist's pocket?

It would be hard to work out a scale of "should" that had any meaning. "Should" the guy who risks his life down in the mine get more or less than the guy who pushes the buttons that print the cheques? Realistically, much of the cost to the end-user goes to parasites who are not essential to the process. For a start, everybody "should" be paid a living wage. But according to the capitalists, paying a living wage to a waitress or a fruit picker would ruin the economy. Somehow, we mange to survive paying a Safeway cashier twice as much as a 7-Eleven cashier but they still claim that a higher minimum wage would kill jobs.The sad part is that too many 7-Eleven cashiers and Safeway cahiers believe them.

Do you understand that digging resources out of the ground requires labour?

And yet your examples involve "very little labour", not no labour.

Show me a capitalist who says he doesn't "work hard' for his money.

In my experience, the ones who gripe the loudest aren't working while they're doing it.

Really? Rebuilding somebody's home is a bad thing? Paying somebody to work is a bad thing? Really? Your own social security is more important? Really?(And your contempt for "mass labor" is showing through again.) If your own future is so bloody important, you should be trying to untie it. You're confusing your metaphors. The rising tide argument doesn't demolish anything. It allows the poorest members of society to have decent housing.

Where does the 100 bucks you gained come from? At some point, doesn't somebody work for it, even if you don't? Say I walk into a bank with a gun and walk out with 100 bucks. I just gained 100 bucks with no labour.But didn't somebody work for that 100 bucks? And not all water is wet, I suppose. If you define it like that, you can come up with any conclusion you want.

The "value" is what the buyer is willing to pay - and his ability to pay is based on labour.

Value is measured in bucks. If bucks come from labour then value comes from labour. You haven't established that natural resources have any "value' beyond what can be added by labor. In Message 84 you said, "...you could define labor so broadly as to be like "human activity" or something...." and in Message 91 you said, "...not all hard work is labor...."I lean more toward the first one. Maybe you can give some examples of human activity that can't be called labour.I'd also be interested in your idea of the difference between work and labour. I might go so far as to say that even easy work is labour.

Then give some examples. When is something worth more than what the buyer is willing or able to pay?

Those trees didn't magically increase in value when you bought the land. You just underpaid for them. I don't know what you mean by "the labour class". I'm just talking about labour. Indeed. It's a bullshit classification - you can include or exclude at your convenience. YES! It's ambiguous. And yet you guys call it nonsense.All I've done is ask for examples that don't involve labour.

What something is "worth" depends entirely on what somebody is willing and able to pay. You can claim that your painting is worth millions but if nobody agrees, it isn't. You haven't shown where the added "value" comes from. Is it magic? Again, the wine only increases in value if somebody is willing and able to pay more. Where does he get the money that he is willing and able to spend?You can't have an infinite regression of everybody getting their money for nothing.

Then for God's sake, come up with an example that makes sense. Where does value magically come from in your world? I am neither making a point nor taking a position. I'm trying to make sense of yours. So far, there doesn't seem to be any.