My point is that all money involves work.
What ever happened to this point:
quote:
But the real "value" of something can only originate in labor,..
My original response stands, from
Message 78:
How are you defining labor?
What about valuable natural resources?
My point about natural resources is that there is a lot of value in having ownership of them that doesn't require any of your labor to acquire (assuming you've already used some of your labor to acquire the money). On top of that, their value can increase in ways that don't originate in labor - like market fluctuations.
Now, turning the value of those natural resources into money is going to require work (that you could do yourself or pay for). But the natural resources have value in and of themselves that doesn't originate in labor. Like, Mother Nature did all the work for us or something.
In
Message 42 you wrote:
Ownership is arbitrary.
and:
In fact, it's society that determines who owns what.
Society has determined that certain individuals own certain things, and that ownership is not arbitrary.
Say a man uses the fruits of his labor to purchase ownership of some property. And then he finds valuable resources on that property.
He risks some more of his money to purchase the labor of his friends to try to work those natural resources into even more value for himself (and his friends) that ends up being in the form of more money.
What's wrong with him paying himself for the risk he took to purchase that labor?
Your previous
Message 40 is:
quote:
NoNukes writes:
On the other hand, the idea that labor creates all value is clearly bogus. Folks who take risks, and who lose money when things do not work out are folks who do contribute to value.
Isn't the money they risk also the fruit of human labor?
Not necessarily, tho generally yes. But, it could be the fruit of their own labor, that they could be risking for a profit.
If they don't take the risk, the laborers don't get the money. And the value sits with Mother Nature. Then everybody doesn't win.
There is value added in taking that risk with your money to gamble on labor by purchasing work to try to increase the value of your property.
You might say that the laborers could just own the land and work directly for the value of the resources. And I'd agree that they could, and wonder why they haven't, and ask you why you think they haven't used their money in the same way to create value without having to just do labor.
If the only way you know how to create value is through labor, then people are going to use thier money to buy your labor to create value for themselves. Otherwise, there's less labor being paid for and less value being created.
So anyways, going back further - you entered a discussion revolving around the Labor Class:
Who produced the value? (of the GDP)
Human Labor.
Spoken like a true member of the proletariat.
...
To which you replied with
Message 40 as quote above. You really look like your arguing for Marxism - and that's fine, I'm just going to argue back. And you haven't really addressed my counterpoint yet.
There's nothing wrong with profiting off of human labor when you're risking your money to end up creating more valuable things. That risk taking is valuable and it deserves reward.
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