Re: RE: Re: Re: the labor theory of value

[Brad DeLong]

>Brad, read the first two pages of Ricardo's _Principles_. A major 
>mistake of the
>economics profession was in developing the theory of value for 
>commodities that
>derive their value from scarcity, in other words, for exceptional 
>cases, instead
>of focusing on the general case, *reproducible commodities*, that do 
>not derive
>their exchange value from scarcity.

If a reproducible commodity ain't scarce, it has no value. We can 
make oxygen out of water and electricity, but no one would say that 
the cost of air is determined by its cost of reproduction...

Brad DeLong