From Philosophical Research
Main entry
- rank good / worker-property (item which is artificially rare yet may be necessary in order to work; MDem 4.3) / treasure (object which has been assigned high value due to gap of labor between most people and it) / collector's item (object which is produced through labor yet treated as if it is somehow a naturally occurring rare item) / cost of living (object which has become expensive but is necessary in order to work or properly reside somewhere) -> I had such a hard time naming rank goods in the earlier versions because nobody tells you about this stuff. my terms and phrasings were all over the place from traditionally Marxist to non-Marxist to the moon. they're still a bit that way but they're getting better
Genesis
- dragon process -> a hypothesized process of how objects gain monetary value. see Q28,88
if you haven't figured it out by now, I want to reverse this thing.
- All wealth comes from labor -> basically all goods which are sold are boxed up through labor. all real estate must be fenced in by some kind of labor. even gold must be mined in order to exist. final drafts of books are created from labor. book customer bases are created through a totally different kind of labor called marketing, which will determine the value of a book series in relation to how many books can be sold and for how much.
labor is not an atomic thing, and has components. the owner of a gold or diamond mine can block off labor to increase the price of something, because effectively more labor stands between the person without the object and the object, and more effort correlates with more price. the more an object is blocked off by a labor wall the more it becomes a rank good, and people push to have it whether they truly want it or not just because it gives them an advantage in getting other things they do want. this does not make value "subjective", because there is still a particular mathematics that governs and limits the rate at which the price of rank goods goes up.
this does not directly imply the statement that labor is "owned" or labor creates the "ownership" of wealth.
- There is a difference between utility goods and rank goods -> food is a utility good. gold is a rank good. university-level texts are often a rank good, but for some reason nobody wants to admit this. university-level texts are incentivized to never increase in supply beyond the very small selection of people who can actually understand them, or else they won't even sell. Liberal-republican economics assumes that ordinary-looking items like books won't transform into rank goods, and that any ordinary-looking item has incentives to be made more common, because this gives a justification for "competition" — the replication of as many bourgeoisie as possible under the rationale that some of them will provide the same product and thus bring the price down. but if you've ever heard the term "rare book" you'd know this isn't true at all. in practice university-level texts are like diamonds. they are very rare things produced with a lot of effort that nobody else has, and because few people can understand them they need some very rich or powerful people to buy them for capitalism to keep functioning normally. one option is for Elsevier to show up and pay money to "publish" academic journals so they will be peer reviewed and basically nobody will get to see them. one option is for a ring of academics who are all very powerful in terms of knowledge and the capacity to structure whole university departments to basically buy each other's books and go on and on about how bright they all are. the former has been standard in science, the latter has become increasingly popular in academic progressive theories. and you know, the funny thing, the terrible thing? rings of academics churning out books at tiny presses and selling them to each other might actually not be such a bad model, and might even be better for science in terms of getting ideas that already exist communicated to people more effectively. it does leave this little fringe of regular less-educated people being able to get the books sometimes if they look hard enough, and get into a field, instead of making the field totally inaccessible to people who haven't already plunged years into a degree. maybe it should be acceptable to go into science and sell a literature review so it can be a citation on Wikipedia and show up in bookstores. most people aren't going to discover new things that are successful, so why not just put all those people to work writing literature reviews and sorting through replication of experiments so experiments will then actually get replicated?
what I would really like is if somebody did a literature review calling out all the Existentialist-Structuralist bullshit, but that's not going to be easy when all you have to prove it wrong is science and they're always going to spring the stupid "science is not for this" trap. which is tent of freedom poles. it's always that they take a bunch of bourgeois freedom poles and stake out a perimeter and put up a tent and they get very upset when everything doesn't operate on tent of freedom poles. even when it inevitably leads to separate parallel tents of freedom poles that want to annihilate them, and will destroy them. tent of freedom poles doesn't do anything to prevent anyone tearing down any of the freedom poles, it just leaves a ton of united people coming to tear down all the freedom poles at once.
- If money is infinite, why do we still have poverty? -> because money isn't infinite. that's my working answer. "wealth" and "money" are not even the same thing; the thing that gold was (wealth) didn't actually stop existing after the gold standard ceased to be practical, it just turned into the thing that money models rather than the thing money is. currency can be infinite but because it's a mathematical model of what happens underneath (the ratcheting and ratcheting up of product models to greater rarities through more and more total labor, enriching business territories while making things harder to get for all but a tiny ring of elite businesses), letting it get de-synced too far off society seems to be a bad idea. it seems historically that printing a lot of money and devaluing a currency breaks the fundamental purpose of money and that's actually why it's so harmful. it's not trivial for Keynes to get all the way to breaking a currency though, you have to really really create a whole lot of money until it stops correlating with anything.
Ideology codes
