I cant remember exactly but I think it was Veblen who gave Marx props for coming up with a rhetoric that was extremely correct if you assume the underlying philosophy and almost impossible to refute otherwise
Of course Veblen then goes on to mock it with his Leisure Theory of Value
Labor vs Leisure theory of value, pretty sure Veblen nailed it
labor theory of value is utterly retarded and directly appeals to egotistical sense of being downtrodden, commonly referred to by new age literature as "the wound of the ego"
it's a free pass to econometrics and centralised determination of prices that doesn't work because the reality is created by the interaction of billions of people's preference scales, which aren't even necessarily linear because in many cases two options are equal and a coinflip is required when either can be satisfied by one option, on the same level of the scale
what's interesting about the name Veblen used is that Mises Action Axiom more or less points out that the prime motivator of human action is the relief of discomfort (aka pain, in extremis)
leisure = relieving tension
'labor theory' = accumulating tension
marx' rhetoric is literally the opposite of the way that nerves work, appealing to neuropathology of some kind (ie psychopathy)
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Never heard of Veblen. Found Marx pretty lame after Mises.
My new pedagogical framework: Nifty, et aliae, post something I have no clue about, feed that shit to Chat GPT and ask for a summary, learn new interesting shit about Labor and Leisure types, but more importantly, dude's first name was Thorstein: nickname had to be THOR right? So Thor Hammers Marx! And yes, I should be doing the PlebLab backend course right now and I'm being lazy.....
