Comments on Allin Cottrell's LTV Defense

[FAC_BROSSER@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

     Let me begin by congratulating Allin on the most
articulate and well-reasoned defense of the labor theory of
value that I have seen.  I note that at its core are three
arguments:  a) labor is the most "socially important" factor
of production (I agree), b) empirically LTV works not too
badly (maybe, I don't know, but it seems to be fuzzy, i.e.,
a 97% or maybe 93% theory of value/price, I'll stay away from
the Marx vs. Sraffa issue), c) labor is the crucially scarce
basic input to production.  I shall focus my remarks on this
last point from three different but distantly related perspectives,
keeping in mind that asserting the existence of another "crucially
scarce input" does not therefore justify "owners" of such inputs
receiving rents or other returns from that input.

1)  neoclassical GE.  It is mere assertion that labor is the
immediately limiting input to production.  This is at least partly a
matter of time scale.  Agricultural land is clearly also limiting
and is, as previously noted, more fundamental than labor in the sense
that labor does not produce land, but land is necessary for the
sustained reproduction of labor, even if labor reproduced itself by its
well-known and delightfully capricious method.  Granted that in a
short-run planning period oil will not be all used up and is therefore
not "scarce," one is allocating some flow of it.  But it is limited
over time and the criterion of "sustained development for future
generations" criterion brings in having to think about that ultimate
scarcity.  In the longer time horizon, humans ARE reproducible and hence
not as scarce as oil, that "production is for people, not for oil" being
irrelevant to this point.

2)  deep ecology.  Forget oil and nonrenewable scarce resources and
play Marx/Sraffa reproducible systems games.  Preserving other species
may be more than a "moral imperative," it may be necessary for our own
long-run survival.  Species reproduce and generate "surplus" which we
can and do "exploit."  Excessive exploitation can drive them to
extinction.  We have done exactly that in numerous cases, especially
in fisheries.

3)  Austrian time.  No, Neri Salvadori (PS, why were you not at the
Easterns this year? was hoping to talk to you), I am not going to
declare that capital is the "average period of production."  But
Bohm-Bawerk's critique of Marx is one that must be dealt with.  Time
is lurking in all of the above.  It is fine to say "oil is not scarce
for this planning period," or more generally that labor today is all
that matters because its reproduction is capricious.  But if indeed we
are concerned with allowing sustained development for future generations,
then time must be accounted for somehow, on its own.  How does labor
today relate to labor tomorrow, not to mention the future existence of
species or the time path of the extraction and use of oil?

     I do not have a definite answer to these questions/problems.  I
simply note that they remain unanswered by this laudable and impressive
effort.
Barkley Rosser
James Madison Universityu