Why do people in poor countries have 10 kids?

Because they know that their country is so shit 9 of them will die in infancy, and maybe the tenth survives adulthood

Libya had the highest standard of living in Africa. Gaddafi was socialsit.

PugSlugger, look up paul cockshott. Labor theory of value is the best explanation of prices.

Tell me, Pug, what is value?

I doubt you even know what the "value" in labor theory of value means.

What is value?

What do you mean by "value" when you say that the amount of labor does not determine value?

Who is this someone?

wrong

That's not what value is

value in the Labor theory of value means the AVERAGE exchange rate of a product

false

individuals are weird and idiosyncratic

This is not semantics

The individual is not the same as the whole

The labor theory of value doesn't care about the individual

it's about the aggregate, large scale phenomena

Define value

You need a market exchange in order for things to be exchanged

Labor theory of value assumes supply and demand

you've so far said nothing that Marx did not EXPLICITLY say in Chapter 1 Section 1 of Das Kapital

I'm not sure what you think you are debunking

Marx also assumed supply and demand

You use supply and demand as if it somehow debunks LTV. It doesn't.

Why is there no way to determine supply and demand? They track pretty constantly, around some central point.

Explain why prices tend to be constant around certain point. THere may be fluctuations, but these prices aren't random

So your theory is that you have no theory.

No, it doesn't.

Where did you get it from?

"LTV does not deny the role of supply and demand influencing price, since the price of a commodity is something other than its value. In Value, Price and Profit (1865), Karl Marx quotes Adam Smith and sums up:

It suffices to say that if supply and demand equilibrate each other, the market prices of commodities will correspond with their natural prices, that is to say, with their values as determined by the respective quantities of labor required for their production.[7]"

Read

This is from the wiki page you presumably got your first quote from

Also read

"Modern economics tends to deny the need for a LTV, concentrating instead on a theory of price determined by supply and demand. "

Now first thing, asshole, is that price is not the same as value.

Supply and demand determines prices, but not values.

Value explains what price supply and demand equilibrate around.

Unlike your idiotic explanation which amounts to "too dumb, thus impossible to determine value, can only observe"

Quite unscientific. It's no different that theists whipping out "God did it" whenever there's a strange phenomena to be explained.

Get this, @PugSlugger, modern economists don't even DARE touch the question of what explains prices, instead, they prefer to ignore the whole question entirely.

Labor is the only thing that explains prices. Empirical studies have proven this. Prices track labor time.

Adam Smith, David Ricardo, whose the modern economists all can't stop sucking, both had labor theories of value.

In fact, every economist before Marx had one.

And these economists are the poster boys of capitalism, so they can hardly accused of socialist bias.

The term value is not nebulous at all

Try to strawman some more though

things exchange at certain rates for other things

Really?

Labor time tracks with prices

more so than any other measure

be it energy, steel, oil

labor correlates the best with prices

such as?

So you're saying that there's a commodity which has very high price but low labor value?

Social sciences run off of correlations much weaker than that between labor times and prices.

The correlation between labor and price is very strong.

easy

the amount of labor necessary to reduce the ability of the worker to work

the means of subsistence, basically

food, water, shelter

if you pay your worker so little that he get weaker day by day till he starves away, you won't have a working class to exploit anymore

no shit man. This is leftypol

as for low labor industries with high prices, like robotics, remember that machines are also made by labor. The labor used in machines also counts towards the labor in the final product sold

as well as the labor used in intermediate commodities that are then assembled by the machines

How is this any different than just saying price?

You are equivocating price and value

when is there ever no labor?

Even the air your breathing right now takes a little bit of labor

Contradiciton

how can price be the form of value but value not mean anything?

sure

Do you ever need to repair or replace the machines?

so let's Steelman this experiment, and make you God. You can manifest anything you wish, break the laws of conservation of energy, etc.

And let's give this ability to everyone

And then ask, what is the price of some random thing on the market

why?

define capital?

And if everyone did that?

Where would you get the people to employ?

if everyone became some small shop owner.

what do you think would happen to your labor pool

Young people make up how much of the population

Besides the issue of money, running a business ain't hard

I've worked in stores where the owner is literally in Venezuela and has not even set foot in the country since the store opened a year ago

The owner doesn't "run" anything. He just looks at his profitability.

Have you ever run a store before?

Providing the service is simple. Making a profit is another matter

Ever worked before?

been employed?

Ever met the owner?

Not the manager, the owner.

Know anyone that has?

Not your internship

Your other job

what sort of business.

That would be what it is like if everyone were a business owner. They'd have to work themselves.

Rothschilds. Morgans. Rockefellers

They don't work a day in their lives to generate their income.

Their income comes from the mere fact of them owning property