Comments Elsewhere

Cal: I’m a degreed economist. I speak as a member of the economic profession.

Congratulations, kid, but speaking as a member of the profession is not the same thing as speaking for it. In this case you are clearly advocating a view of value which is distinct from that of praxeological theories such as Mises’s and Rothbard’s. (Mises would argue that predecessors like Menger also, at least implicitly, advocated a praxeological view of value at odds with the view that you are advancing; whether that interpretive claim is right or not, the point is that at least some of the folks you claim to be speaking for here do not actually accept the way you are trying to formulate things.)

Cal: All significant, modern economic schools (as in post-Keynes) are conceptually founded on marginalism

That’s fascinating. But since I just told you that my purpose here has nothing to do with arguing against marginalism (or, for that matter, against subjective theories of value), why are you telling me this?

Cal: When Mises is talking about “value for the purposes of economics,” he is not talking about value qua value – he is talking about the revelation of value.

Again, Cal, Mises does not accept the legitimacy of the distinction that you are trying to make between “value qua value” and “the revelation of value.” This is a distinction that you would like to make; it is not a distinction that Mises accepts. (In fact, it is part and parcel of Mises’s conception of praxeology that he rejects it.) You may think that there is some secret meaning behind the phrase “have no independent existence” which allows you to attribute to Mises a view on which value actually can be characterized as existing independently of comparison amongst an ordinally ranked system of alternatives, but I don’t know why you expect anyone to take such a claim seriously.

Cal: the point of revelation vs. more fundamental thing is made

That may be your point. It’s not Von Mises’s. Again, he makes it quite clear in the opening conceptual analysis of action and of value that he rejects the notion of a “more fundamental thing” to value than value-as-revealed-preference. Perhaps you think that this point needs to be made because you have confused an account of value-formation with a conceptual analysis of value per se — that is, committed a rather crude genetic fallacy — and supposed that, since Von Mises isn’t addressing value-formation in his remarks, he must be addressing something “less fundamental” when he discusses revealed value. But if so, you’ve simply missed the import of his argument on a very fundamental point.

Cal: There is a difference between claiming that labor-entailment may tend to affect subjective valuation (still an essentially nonsensical claim) and stating that it does, unqualified. Check basic logic on modality here.

Well, no. You might want to consider the form of statement that Thompson (2008) calls an “Aristotelian categorical” — for example, “Cats have four legs” or “The human female gives birth to live young” — as well as other common related usages, such as “Eating cheese makes me feel sick” or “Cats like me.” If you ever spend much time on the logic of modal terms, you may come to see that there are actually lots of things asserted in a categorical mode which state a real relationship but do not actually involve either a claim of necessity, or a claim of actual universality.

Cal: Also, stating that “costs” in the broad sense of the word affect subjective valuation is meaningless. Cost, disutility, is also subjective.

I’m aware that cost is subjective. You might have gleaned the fact that I’m aware of it from the fact that I said as much in the note you’re supposedly replying to. Before you begin your next lecture, you might want to take the time to read what people are telling you.

The reason I brought it up is because you made a statement which was oversimplified to the point of being extremely misleading (“Nothing does necessarily affect subjective valuation. It is 100% subjective”). Either this claim means (1) that nothing necessarily affects the subjective valuation of a single marginal good, considered in isolation from other concurrent valuations — in which case the claim is flatly false, since economic rationality requires that concurrent valuations (including the valuation of costs) form a consistent preference-ordering; or else (2) that nothing other than other subjective valuations affects the system of subjective valuations as a whole — in which case the claim is vacuously true (because any mental state which necessarily affects the system of subjective valuations becomes counted as part of that system, just by that very fact), but non-responsive, since it doesn’t actually do anything to refute or even to complicate Marja’s point about costs.