I don't think it is a useful tactic to ascribe to others views they did not express and which, in this case, they do not hold. I said nothing about the "labour theory of value," and do not hold it. I DO hold the priority of labour over capital, and I deny the "independent productiveness" of non-human resources. Further, I don't think you made the case. Let's look at two examples you cited, the sun and the phone.
It is quite true that the sun, without any help from me, will produce tomatoes in my garden, and will do so even in the wild. However, it is equally true that these tomatoes have no *economic* value until somebody picks them. Before that, they are not either a consumable or exchangeable value, and hence can play no part in economic theory. Finally, it is strange to hear you count the sun as a "capital" item, since the sun cannot be owned, but is given to all. No one this side of Montgomery Burns has found a way to take possession of the sun and sell off its energy. Hence it is wrong to include it in your list of capital assets. The sun is already equally distributed and shines on the just and the unjust alike. We are speaking of distributing economic assets, assets which can through the presence of unjust systems be poorly distributed.
That leaves the phone. You disparage the effort it takes to dial the phone. Very well, but nevertheless without this effort the phone has no value. Further, even after the minimal effort to dial, you are connected to a vast network which represents countless hours of human labour and ingenuity. And when that labour stops, so does the "productiveness" of the phone network. In no sense is it "independently" productive.
There is no issue about whether capital increases the value of labour, so I am not certain why you choose to belabor that point. The question is whether it does anything independently of human labour, and the answer is clearly NO. Since you base the allocation of benefits on this notion of independent productiveness, your allocation is clearly wrong. And it is this notion, more than any other, which prevents binary economics from being taken seriously by economists.
Note that I am not an opponent of BE. Despite the rantings of Norm Kurland, I am a supporter and I retract nothing that I have ever said in support of it. What I have suggested is that BE be modified in two respects: dropping its insistence on the absolutism of property and dropping the economically unsupportable notion of "independent productiveness." Leaving this baggage behind will not change BE in any significant way, but it will all the binarians to enter into fruitful discussions with economists, and with ordinary businessmen. The decision to buy a lorry will be based not on "independent productiveness", but on marginal utility. Further, that decision also implies a concomitant decision to hire a driver or to drive the thing yourself. There is nothing "independent" in the process.
Finally you dismiss the charge that binarians regard humans as if they were just another kind of machine. Well, I don't know about *all* binarians, but the rhetoric used in your previous post certainly leads to that conclusion. I suspect the problem in not with me, but with the way you choose to express yourself. I can only advise that you read your own writings to insure that others cannot draw this rather obvious conclusion from the way you choose to state things. No businessman ever said, "oh, now I own a fleet of independently productive trucks, soon I will be rich!" No, he says, "I've got all of these trucks, which are a wasting asset, so I had better find some truck-drivers!"
"Independently" productive they ain't.
John C. M�daille
"A dead thing can go with the stream...
but only a living thing can go against it."
-G. K. Chesterton
http://www.medaille.com/distributivism.htm
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