This debate wasn’t just about labor. It was about value — what it is, where it comes from, and what kind of system honors it. My opponent tried to sell you a ghost: a metaphysical "value" created by labor, existing independently of anyone wanting the result. But value doesn’t exist in objects. It exists in choice — in the minds of individuals acting to sustain their lives.
My opponent has spent this entire debate smuggling in the very subjectivism he claims to oppose. He appeals to “socially necessary labor time” — but how is that determined? By the market. By prices. By what people value. His entire theory is a parasite on mine.
Even worse, every attempt to define or measure this “labor value” devolves into arbitrary guesswork or circular logic. How do you compare a surgeon’s work to a software engineer’s? How do you value art, software, or a 200-year-old bottle of whiskey? The labor theory of value cannot answer — unless it turns to subjective judgment.
The Subjective Theory of Value explains everything the labor theory can’t:
Why prices fluctuate even when labor doesn't.
Why clearance sales exist.
Why a Picasso is worth millions and a copy isn't.
Why a t-shirt with a logo costs 100x more than the same shirt without.
People don’t pay for labor — they pay for results. You don’t buy a sandwich because someone spent 45 minutes making it. You buy it because you're hungry, you think it will satisfy that hunger, and you like how it tastes.
And this isn’t just theoretical. The labor theory of value, when implemented, destroys prosperity. It punishes innovation by erasing rewards for increased efficiency. It disincentivizes risk-taking, entrepreneurship, and creativity. It hands moral credit to those who exert effort regardless of outcome — and condemns those who succeed in producing actual value.
Worse, it justifies coercion. If labor is the source of all value, then anyone who profits without labor must be a thief. That is how LTV leads — inexorably — to confiscation, redistribution, and tyranny.
But theft doesn’t become just by calling it “redistribution,” and slavery doesn’t become freedom by calling it “economic democracy.”
The moral root of this error is altruism — the idea that the individual's life and mind must be sacrificed to “society.” But a man’s life is not a means to another’s ends. You are not a beast of burden for the collective. And value — real, economic value — comes from your judgment, your work, and your choice to trade.
That’s the trader principle. That’s capitalism. And that’s the only system consistent with reason, with liberty, and with human flourishing.
The labor theory of value is not just false. It is a mystic relic of a pre-scientific age — a theory that tries to replace thought with toil, innovation with stagnation, and individual choice with collective decree.
The truth is simple: value is created by minds, not muscles. The man who invents a cure for cancer creates more value in a thought than a ditch-digger does in a lifetime. And no economic theory that denies that can survive contact with reality.