From a facebook post by David Veksler:
There is no such thing as “intrinsic value” in economics. Value exists only in the eyes of the beholder. The concept of “value” is made possible by being valuable to a specific person, for a particular purpose. The only thing in the universe that is intrinsically valuable is human beings.
TLDR: Stop with nonsense like “Bitcoin has no intrinsic value”
My comment (lightly edited here):
The problem is treating “value” as a noun instead of a verb. Nothing “has” “value,” as in some quality or substance, whether “intrinsic” or not (whatever that means). Mises talks about demonstrated preference. Hell, even Ayn Rand said a value is something you act to gain/and keep, so she really meant that you value (verb) something, or show that you value it, by acting to achieve it. Same with MIsesian economic: you demonstrate your preference for some end by acting to achieve it, by using means to achieve it–that is, you demonstrate that you value something by acting. Value is not a noun, it is a verb!
Same with labor by the way, which is why people believe in IP: they think of labor not as an action but as a substance or thing. So they say you “own your labor” or you own things you “mix your labor with”–you own the “fruits of your labor” blah blah blah. This is the mistake Randians make as well as everyone else who believes in IP and all these stupid metaphors like “you own your labor and the fruits of your labor.”
They lose sight of the fact that labor is just an action: it is one of two types of action: all action is either labor, or leisure, just like all (normal) goods are either capital/producer goods, or consumer goods. An action is what you DO with the means at your disposal: your body and other scarce means you have possession of (and possibly ownership of, in society). The action can be either labor (analogous to intermediate means or capital goods which are employed to produce consumption goods) or leisure (analogous to the end of action, or consumption). You don’t own your action or actions, you own (or possess) your body and other scarce mean; the action is what you do with these things. Owning (or controlling/possessing) your body gives you the ability to act (either labor or leisure) but you do not own your “acting”—you do not own your laboring, or your … leisreuring. We must not think of labor (or leisure! or action!) as “things” that we “own.” You cannot own labor! It is an action!
Similarly—ideas cannot be owned, thus IP law is unjust. Ideas are knowledge possessed by actors and it is necessary for successful action, since all action must be guided by knowledge; but the second component of successful action is the availability of (causally efficacious) means of action—these are the subject of property property rights as they are by definition scarce (rivalrous, conflictable), unlike ideas which guide action. 1
All these mistakes are intertwined: labor, value, IP-ideas. This is the result of sloppy and careless thinking, often dishonest and tendentious thinking, careless use of metaphors, John Locke’s own mistake in his homesteading argument of including the unnecessary “you own your labor” step, and so on.
For more on all this see “Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society, Parts IV.C, IV.D, IV.E; also KOL037 | Locke’s Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Political Theory; Locke on IP; Mises, Rothbard, and Rand on Creation, Production, and “Rearranging”; On the Danger of Metaphors in Scientific Discourse, StephanKinsella.com (June 12, 2011); “Objectivist Law Prof Mossoff on Copyright; or, the Misuse of Labor, Value, and Creation Metaphors,” Mises Economics Blog (April 19, 2011); “Hume on Intellectual Property and the Problematic “Labor” Metaphor” (April 9, 2011).
- See also Kinsella’s Sixth Epiphany: Means and Knowledge. [↩]
