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The requirement that an object have utility is a necessary component of the labor theory of value, if it is to avoid certain objections. Suppose a person works on something absolutely useless that no one wants. For example, he spends his hours efficiently making a big knot; no one else can do it more quickly. Will this object be that many hours valuable? A theory should not have this consequence. Marx avoids it as follows: “Nothing can have value without being an object of utility. If a thing is useless so is the labor contained in it; the labor does not count as labor, and therefore creates no value.” Isn’t this an ad hoc restriction? Given the rest of the theory, why does it apply? Why doesn’t all efficiently done labor create value? If one has to bring in the fact that it’s of use to people and actually wanted (suppose it were of use, but no one wanted it), then perhaps by looking only at wants, which have to be brought in anyway, one can get a complete theory of value.

Even with the ad hoc constraint that the object must be of some use, there remain problems. For, suppose someone works for 563 hours on something of some very slight utility. This satisfies the necessary condition for value that the object have some utility. Is its value now determined by the amount of labor, yielding the consequence that it is incredibly valuable? No. “For the labor spent on them (commodities) counts effectively only insofar as it is spent in a form that is useful to others.” Marx goes on to say: “Whether that labor is useful for others, and its product consequently capable of satisfying the wants of others, can be proved only by the act of exchange.” If we interpret Marx as saying, not that utility is a necessary condition and that (once satisfied) the amount of labor determines value, but rather that the degree of utility will determine how much (useful) labor has been expended on the object, then we have a theory very different from a labor theory of value.

We can approach this issue from another direction. Suppose that useful things are produced as efficiently as they can be, but that too many of them are produced to sell at a certain price. The price that clears the market is lower than the apparent labor values of the objects; a greater number of efficient hours went into producing them than people are willing to pay for (at a certain price per hour). Does this show that the number of average hours devoted to making an object of significant utility doesn’t determine its value? Marx’s reply is that if there is such overproduction so that the market doesn’t clear at a particular price, then the labor was inefficiently used (less of the thing should have been made), even thought the labor itself wasn’t inefficient. Hence not all of those labor hours constituted socially necessary labor time. The object does not have a value less than the socially necessary number of labor hours expended upon it, for there were fewer socially necessary labor hours expended upon it than meet the eye.

“Suppose that every piece of linen in the market contains no more labor-time than is socially necessary. In spite of this, all the pieces taken as a whole may have had superfluous labor time spent upon them. If the market cannot stomach the whole quantity at the normal price of 2 shillings a yard, this proves that too great a portion of the total labor of the community has been expended in the form of weaving. The effect is the same as if each weaver had expended more labor-time upon his particular product than is socially necessary. (Marx, Capital, p. 120)

Thus Marx holds that this labor isn’t all socially necessary. What is socially necessary, and how much of it is, will be determined by what happens on the market! There is no longer any labor theory of value; the central notion of socially necessary labor time is itself defined in terms of the processes and exchange ratios of a competitive market!

– Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Why does NYT‘s Thomas Friedman keep calling Iraq a car? Can you really drive without a steering wheel? Has Hertz or Avis ever gotten back a spotless rental? These and other questions answered by Matt Taibbi, who concludes:

There is only one reason why muddle-headed idiots like Thomas Friedman can exist as prominent spokespersons in the United States. It’s because muddle-headed policies require muddle-headed people to champion them.

To say I am not optimistic about the future of Central Asia is an understatement of oceanic proportions. The entire region is unstable, with ethnic disputes and conflicts over borders, water, oil, and pipelines disrupting every political discussion. It is debatable whether these countries are in fact countries. Turkemenistan, for example, was shoved together by Stalin out of a vast stretch of desert, incorporating five nomadic tribes. There is no logic at all to Kazakhstan. And Uzbekistan as an identifiable country does not exist. Ethnic and tribal distinctions will drive the region’s politics for the foreseeable future. Their current “leaders” are opportunists who seized the moment as communism fell but who have little support. Groups in all the Stans will start to agitate to establish their independence, just as happened in Eastern Europe with the former Yugoslavia and has been occurring regularly over the years in Africa.

The Soviet Union has already broken into fifteen states. People speak eighteen different languages in the five Central Asian republics. There are more than a hundred linguistic, ethnic, religious, and national groups in the region, none of which joined the Soviet Union willingly. …

Sooner or later, all these “countries” will be bankrupt. The currencies of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are declining in value rapidly, and both economies are moribund. … Big trouble is in the offing: violent strikes, assassination attempts, bombs exploding, and the eventual outbreak of more than one civil war.

What does this mean for the United States? Very little, probably, for these people will be paying little attention to us and blowing one another up for a very long time to come. Their nuclear weapons have, in large part, been stripped and cannibalized. Those weapons that are intact have not been maintained. Unless U.S. politicians, in their mindless posturing, make the mistake of replaying the “Great Game” all over again, and dragging us into this mess, as their European counterparts did in the nineteenth century, we in the United States should be largely unaffected. Or so it seemed a few years ago. Now the United States, rattling sabers over Iraq, has established bases in Central Asia, making additional enemies in the region. It constantly grieves me to see our politicians dragging us into terrible situations about which no one has done the homework, in places where no one understands the situation on the ground.

– Jim Rogers, Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip

Move over, Ben Shapiro, here come the kids of Mt. Lake, MN, to explain how the Big Guy (God, not Ashcroft) was gonna take our freedom away if we didn’t invade Iraq. As K-Lo noted over at the Corner, these kids think about war’s big picture. Gosh, if war gave us the Panama canal and made the English language what it is today, just think of all the cool new stuff we’ll have by the time the Bush administration is over!

Wow, I really have to congratulate The American Spectator for its amazing overhaul. What with the non-stop Jed Babbin, it really looks like … well, National Review. Here, Mark Goldblatt does his best Rich Lowry impersonation:

What if there were a moment at which the American public became so appalled by the casualties and costs of the Iraqi occupation that President Bush felt compelled to bring the hammer down … a moment when C-Span was filled with hard-right demonstrators demanding that Bush subdue the terrorists by any means necessary, a moment when a revered Republican senator quoted Pulp Fiction director Quentin Tarantino, urging the president “to get medieval on their asses,” a moment when conservative pundits clamored for Bush to, say, level Tikrit to pacify Fallujah, or level them both to pacify Baghdad?

Certainly, the prospect of such a reverse-tipping point would create a new dynamic in the War on Terror. The terrorist cannot operate without a sympathetic local population to supply provisions, stash weapons and keep secrets — which is why he depends on the restraint of his enemy in the first place. But if his enemy is determined to come after him with disproportionate violence, regardless of the collateral damage, then those who aid and abet the terrorist will soon turn against him out of self-preservation.

Sam’s post on Turkmenistan made me think of this amusing article from the New York Times Magazine earlier this year. As Sam mentioned, we send this guy–who renamed the days of the week and months of the year after himself and his relatives– millions for democracy and the war on terror. I can already hear Christopher Hitchens and the liberventionists squawking about the need to topple Saparmurad Niyazov, though phonetic difficulties may at least keep Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity out of the debate.