VALUE

     My view.

     The value of your labor to another is the amount of useful energy
the other can get out of your product, not the amount of useful energy
that you put into making your product.
 
     Value = useful energy out, not useful energy in.
 
     The farmer who spends all day long planting stones in his corn
field has done the same amount of labor as the farmer who spends all day
long planting corn seeds that grow and produce a return, but the value
of the first farmer's work is nil.

     Value does not equal labor put in.

     It is true that products which need a lot of labor and useful
energy put into them in order to be made, tend to command a higher price
at the sale, but only because they are in demand in the first place
because of their potential useful energy out, and because they are more
scarce due to the higher demands of manufacture and thus the richer will
out bid the poorer driving the price up.

     If there is no useful energy out, there is no value to the product
no matter how much labor or useful energy went into making it.
 
     Value is determined ONLY by the amount of useful energy people can
get out of a product and by their demand or need for that useful energy.

     If people have no demand or need for the useful energy to be gotten
out of your product, or if there is no useful energy to be gotten out of
your product, people will not value it, unless they value useless energy
or entropy (which is the opposite of useful energy).
 
     Fair exchange is when people trade equal amounts of useful energy
for useful energy.  Sometimes smaller amounts of a scarcer more
necessary form of energy will be considered equal in value to larger
amounts of more abundant less necessary energy.

     If someone is cold during the winter, he may be willing to trade
two gallons of car fuel which he has for 1 gallon of heating fuel which
he doesn't have, even though two gallons of car fuel has twice the
energy content of 1 gallon of heating fuel.

     So equality of value needs to take into consideration both the raw
amount of the energy traded AND its usefullness or immediate need.
 
     'Useful energy' doesn't have to be physical energy, it can be art
and aesthetics too, it can also be free time to play or rest.
Everything that is valued by human beings is useful energy or potential
energy of one form or another.

    Homer