>>403188> What is a dollar worth on its own?< A way of paying taxes and avoiding prison.> Is the world built with thin air, or is the world built with labor?< What about someone stuck on a deserted island? Where does the value of their shelter, food etc. come from? No labour went into the coconut trees on the island, but the coconuts have value.On your first reply there's implicit a whole society with division of labour (taxes) that creates surplus product (prison). In such a society money does much more than paying taxes and avoiding prison: money is reified power, it allows you to command the production and distribution of any and all commodities, assuming you have enough of it.
On your second reply you turn around and describe a non-economy of a single person consuming non-commodities. An actual economic argument would have hundreds of people in the island, and in that case the coconut on the tree is of no use to them. Coconuts on the table on the other hand
are valuable, and a person who spends the whole day climbing the trees to bring enough coconuts for everyone else will feel cheated if they don't get a day's worth of effort from the rest of the lazy tribe. If there were no coconut trees then acquiring food would require more effort, and the economic output from person doing that task would be relatively more valuable.
< That doesn't determine the value of commodities. Let's say the socially necessary labour time for a surgical mask is one minute. In January 2020, the value of the mask might have been one minute of labour. What about in April when there was a shortage of masks? Did the mask not increase in value, but the socially necessary labour time stay the same?The mask increased in
price, as firms were able to extract super-profits from the economic imbalance. The seek for super-profits is essential for the revolutionary character of capitalism, but the same technical advancements that result from the seek of superprofits end up decreasing, not increasing, the value of each commodity in the medium term: today the price of an N95 mask in my local pharmacy is half a dollar, while before the pandemic they costed five to ten times as much. The imbalance is over and the new equilibrium price plummeted.
>LTV manages to get its units to cancel out mathematically.<Only at the aggregate level, not for individual commodities, unless you want to introduce concepts that you can't measure.Of course it's in the aggregate: the LTV is a macro theory. Temperature is not an unphysical concept just because you can't measure the entropy of individual particles in a gas.
>Love to hear where the circular argument is.<Labour determines value, value determines prices, but prices account for value and value accounts for labour.Under the LTV value and average labour time are synonyms, that is, you can measure value by summing up person-hours across the whole supply chain. Which is extremely difficult to do in the face of globalisation. Prices generally tend to values so you can use prices as a proxy, but there are other stochastic and fixed factors such as taxes, subsidies and generally the allocation of surplus product, demand, ground rent, unequal exchange, and so on. However as pic related shows these factors average out once the data is aggregated enough.