What makes you think that the Kochs have “a bizarre anti-Ludwig von Mises bias.” They’ve funded Misesian economic research (especially at GMU) for decades. It’s certainly true that they have a very bitter conflict with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. But not because of some mysterious beef they have with Ludwig von Mises (who was by then several years dead).

Rather, what happened is that, the year before the VMI was founded, the Kochs and Ed Crane had an extremely bitter conflict with Rothbard, who until then had been a founding member of the Cato Institute, and the main person writing their position papers. Rothbard was fired from Cato in 1981. Rothbard certainly did not “leave” Cato in order to “stick with Lew”; he was thrown out of Cato against his will (he maintained illegally — he had “shares” in Cato that the Kochs simply confiscated — but decided not to fight it in court), and Lew set up the VMI in 1982, after Rothbard was gone from Cato, largely in order to provide a new harbor for Murray and his ideas. The Kochs got pissed off about it because they were pissed off at Rothbard, and because the Institute was founded as a direct challenge to Cato’s approach to libertarian advocacy. Not, particularly, because the Institute was named after Ludwig von Mises.

You can read all about the whole sorry story in Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism (Chapter 7-8), or (for Rothbard’s side of the story specifically), in Rothbard’s “It Usually Ends With Ed Crane.”

Cal: The attempt does not, at all, in any way, presuppose anything about the fundamental nature of the formation of value.

I didn’t say that your attempted distinction presupposed something about “the fundamental nature of the formation of value.” I certainly realize that Mises didn’t say anything in the passage I quoted about value-formation, but then, neither have I. What I said was about Mises’s view on what it means to say that Jones economically values X. Not his view on how Jones forms that value for X.

Cal: Mises is not saying value is comparative, he is saying that it is revealed comparatively (ordinally) and subjectively.

You’re asserting this, but where’s your argument? I gave you specific passages of text in which Mises straightforwardly says that for the purposes of economics value does not exist independently of the revealing of comparative preferences in action. Not that it isn’t known by third parties; that it has no independent existence. For Mises, there just is nothing for economics to talk about separate from actual or hypothetical revealed values. (Which, necessarily, express a consistent ordinal ranking. Among other things.) Of course, you can agree or disagree with Mises’s views about the conceptual analysis of value — it certainly sounds like you are more interested in the sort of psychologistic perspective that Mises rejected — but then you should perhaps speak only for yourself, and not for “all modern economics,” or for all proponents of the subjective theory of value.

As for explaining marginalism 101 to me, you can save yourself the effort. I already understand how that works. My comments here have nothing to do with rejecting marginal utility theory.

Cal: No, Marja, labor-entailment does not necessarily affect subjective valuation.

1. She didn’t say it “necessarily affects subjective valuation.” She said it does affect it. Note the difference in modality. One can correctly assert that a general tendency obtains without claiming that it is a necessary or conceptual truth.

2. However, I will also note that, given the meaning of the term “cost,” basic requirements of rationality do require that costs have a certain bearing on value-ordering. (For something to count as a cost is for it to lower a state of affairs in an actor’s preference order, ceteris paribus. If it did not, then it must not really be a cost for that economic subject.) Hence there are at least some factors that necessarily affect subjective valuations — among them costs — because they are themselves already part of subjective valuations, and valuations, to count as valuations, must be part of a consistent ordering.

Marja: The first meaning [of ” to value”] being to admire, or to appreciate [sans the price-finding meaning of appreciate!]… The second meaning being to compare one good to another.

Kyle Bennett: Marja, values are not ordinal (nor are they cardinal), they are non-numerically defined. As Cal said, they are ranked ordinally only when comparisons become necessary. How one does that is purely subjective and not subject to external analysis…. There’s only one meaning relevant to subjective value economics. …. Your second meaning is not in any way, shape, or form part of valuation under the STV.

Kyle,

Could you tell me what version of subjective value theory you are reading that tells you that the concept of “value” in marginalist economics is not comparative? Looking briefly at a couple of sources, I find that Ludwig von Mises tells us (in Human Action I.IV.2 that “one must not forget that the scale of values or wants manifests itself only in the reality of action. These scales have no independent existence apart from the actual behavior of individuals. The only source from which our knowledge concerning these scales is derived is the observation of a man’s [sic] actions. Every action is always in perfect agreement with the scale of values or wants because these scales are nothing but an instrument for the interpretation of a man’s [sic] acting.” Earlier, we are told (in I.I, “Acting Man” [sic] that action is always an expression of preferences (hence necessarily comparative) — that “Acting man [sic] is eager to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory. His mind imagines conditions which suit him better, and his action aims at bringing about this desired state. The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness ” Von Mises argues that only this sort of comparative valuing (as opposed to other things which you might call “valuing,” such as idle wishes or moral doctrines) is relevant to economics, since economics is the science of human action.

Similarly, at the beginning of “Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics,” Rothbard tells us that “Individual valuation is the keystone of economic theory. For, fundamentally, economics does not deal with things or material objects. Economics analyzes the logical attributes and consequences of the existence of individual valuations. … But the essence and the driving force of human action, and therefore of the human market economy, are the valuations of individuals. Action is the result of choice among alternatives, and choice reflects values, that is, individual preferences among these alternatives.” [emphasis mine]

Whatever valuation in Marja’s first sense may be, it is not the sort of value that prominent subjectivists have thought to be relevant to economics. They have, as far as I can tell, generally or exclusively argued that Marja’s second meaning of “to value,” not the first, is what’s relevant to the economic study of human action.

Kevin Carson:

Similarly, the labor theory of value is based, not on an inductive generalization from the observed movement of prices, but on an a priori assumption about why price approximates cost, except to the extent to which some natural or artificial scarcity causes deviations from this relationship. (Kevin Carson, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, pp. 70-73)

J. Neil:

Translation: Kevin Carson has some blue-sky theory out of his ass — without looking at what happens in the real world

Now we have J. Neil Schulman, who claims to be an admirer of Ludwig von Mises, objecting to the use of aprioristic economic theory as “blue sky-theory out of his ass without looking at what happens in the real world.” Awesome.

Ludwig von Mises:

Consequently, a proposition of an aprioristic theory can never be refuted by experience. Human action always confronts experience as a complex phenomenon that first must be analyzed and interpreted by a theory before it can even be set in the context of an hypothesis that could be proved or disproved; hence the vexatious impasse created when supporters of conflicting doctrines point to the same historical data as evidence of their correctness. … Disagreements concerning the probative power of concrete historical experience can be resolved only by reverting to the doctrines of the universally valid theory, which are independent of all experience. Every theoretical argument that is supposedly drawn from history necessarily becomes a logical argument about pure theory apart from all history.

(Ludwig von Mises, “Epistemologial Problems of Economics”, Ch. 1, s. II.2)

J. Neil:

If Kevin’s theory could accurately describe price fluctuations in a free market, Kevin wouldn’t be making his living emptying bedpans for a living. He’d be a filthy rich Wall-Street broker.

1. Again. We don’t live in a free market.

2. And, now we have J. Neil Schulman, who claims to be an admirer of Ludwig von Mises, apparently objecting not only to the use of aprioristic theory in economics, but also believing that an accurate economic theory ought to produce quantitative predictions. Really, dude?

Do you know anything in particular about Ludwig von Mises’s economics? You just angrily dismissed to two of the three central ideas that von Mises is known for. (At least you didn’t bring up Kevin’s work on calculation problems in big corporations, which would have given you an opportunity to angrily dismiss the third.) All of which indicates to me that you are either ranting in utter ignorance, or else you just don’t give much of a damn about what’s true and what’s false, as long as you get to slam Kevin Carson in the process.

In either case, you ought to be embarrassed.