I think that the austrians would respond (and, again, I'm not an orthodox austrian) that value is subjective and, if consumers find that chrome and logos are what make stereos valuable, then that's the way it is. Perhaps the social-marker value when less knowledgable friends visit, or the general aesthetic look of their living room, is what's important to them. After a while, if the consumers really could tell the difference in sufficient numbers to warrant large scale production, superior stereos should win out.

I dislike shoddy stuff generally and how much brand matters (it matters to me, too, why oh why!?) so I don't intrinsically like that argument, but I understand the rational power of it. It implies, in as much as we should be angry with someone, we should be angry at ignorant consumers, rather than evil producers for shoddy stuff. And the stunningly great news is that we can fight that problem by simply blogging about what we are passionate about.

This is one of the great benefits of the internet I did not expect: the spread of knowledge across consumers has dramatically increased the quality of many things. To pick a few examples:

- I can get a cappuccino in Sacramento, CA that would have been available in only a few cities in the world two decades ago.

- There are more beers worth drinking being brewed within 50 miles of my house right now than there were in all of California in the 70's.

- There has been an absolute explosion in high quality, low cost mechanical watches in the last ten years (see stowa, chris ward, and steinhart, to name a few)

EDIT: I pick these examples to show how the internet has improved even old-fashioned, extremely non-digital things through the spread of knowledge.

In any event, I'm drifting dramatically OT...