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Comment by smhost | Hacker News Reader

> ignores the value of capital and organisation

it doesn't. that capital was built by labor.

And indeed those workers who get paid, can save and invest that money to enhance the productivity of other workers and get a return. Generally the higher risk of losing the money, the more return you can potentially get. Some of those workers will hit the jackpot and get a great return.

Is it morally wrong?

the labor theory of value isn't a theory of morality. if you don't believe that exploitation is wrong, then you're free to use the LTV to maximize exploitation, which is what many ex-communists have done to great success in places like south korea, vietnam, and china.

LTV drawn to its logical conclusion leads to exploitation of every worker almost by definition. It is the core of the market economics = exploitation argument.

Profit is simply value extracted from workers.

As opposed to the arbitrage of the subjective preferences of multiple actors. The modern interpretation of how value can just appear.

Those workers who got a return on capital delayed consumption now, for more consumption later. That's a preference. I don't think that's a bad thing. But you can see how over a long time it can generate massive inequality.

But I don't think the fundamental mechanisms of how this occured is particularly exploitive.

Where as LTV pretty much just says it your just stealing value.

yes, one might make a moral judgement that exploitation is a tendency of capitalism, if one believes that people who control more capital have structural power over those who control less or no capital, thus narrowing the viable subjective preferences in a way that is "bad".

but ltv on its own provides no such judgement, it simply describes the material relationship.

LTV on its own shows very little predictive value in the real world. Which is why it isn't used.

Marginal economics explains and models a lot things we see in reality.

I'm much more likely to believe a model that has predictive ability.

Leaning on the predictive power of "the dismal science" isn't a strong base to argue from.

I agree with that predictive ability is important but I have seen no evidence that marginal economics has predictive ability. You yourself even say it "explains and models" which is not the same as predicts.

> And indeed those workers who get paid, can save and invest that money to enhance the productivity of other workers and get a return. Generally the higher risk of losing the money, the more return you can potentially get. Some of those workers will hit the jackpot and get a great return.

> Is it morally wrong?

Not per-se, but as the denominations grow, society is structured to privatize most of the upside of that risk, while socializing the downside, but at the lower end of the scale the reverse takes hold.

In other words, even aside from the way the ratio between CEO and average employee pay has ballooned over the past fifty years, upper management gets bonuses when the company does well, labor gets downsized when the company does poorly.

Another way this plays out is that if you owe the bank a few hundred thousand dollars and the company you work for goes out of business, you have a problem. If you owe the bank a few hundred million dollars and the company you work for goes out of business, the bank has a problem.

That is, if you assume the labor theory of value is true, then UK-Al05's criticism is wrong, so the labor theory of value remains unrefuted. That's... not a very convincing argument.

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