Crabbe, I tried to think of a way to explain it so you'd get it.
You are looking at it back to front, thinking in terms of how much money people have, which doesn't say in the slightest what they are worth to other people. What that does say is what they were worth to other people in the past [if the money was voluntarily given to them].
People do have value and you seem to agree with that. Nihilistic ideologues [who don't believe their own cant] would say that nothing matters, nothing has value and we are all doomed anyway and it's all pointless. But you aren't saying that. So, you agree that people do have value.
Now, how could that possibly be measured? You think we should use adjectives or something. But think of physical weights and measures.
We know that some things are long and some short. We could simply say, "It's a really, really, long way to Mars". But that wouldn't really tell us how much fuel to take for the journey.
We could say "We'll need lots of fuel" and therefore "A really big fuel tank", but that wouldn't really be a good description for the purposes of achieving the goal of actually getting there.
People invented more precise measures, called metres, kilograms, lumens, rads, watts, joules and seconds to measure various things.
Now, how to value people?
We could say, "You are really great and worth heaps". But that wouldn't really define where they sit on the scale of values. Would you use a measure of "MT"s [Mother Theresas]? That's one way of doing it. Another is to use ounces of gold and that's what Aztecs and some atavistic types still advocate. Or, one could use an auction system of a fiat currency which is kept in limited supply. That's the normal method used these days.
A person needn't have any money at all to have value. And might not require monetary payment or any payment. They might do things for fun or curiosity. But that's begging the question because nearly all humans are not so well-off that they can goof off for long [when they have no money] without doing something useful for other people in exchange for money. If you play with words, you could find people who do things in exchange for cobs of corn, or bowls of rice, but in that case, a cob of corn is money and so is a bowl of rice.
Because most people think in terms of having money as defining value, they forget that the value is produced by the person who doesn't have the money but does something for other people to get it.
It's simply false, or silly, to say that human value isn't defined by money. That's exactly what money is. When you say money is a medium of exchange, what is exchanged is human value.
Maybe you are thinking in stone age terms of hunter gatherer found wealth. But even then, there was human ingenuity and effort in finding and gathering the wealth. When one person swapped a bison for a patch of corn, they were still defining each others value, not the value of the corn or bison. Bison was money. Corn was money. Each valued the other person.
Whether people admit it or not, they value other people in money terms. Usually, they value them at very low rates. People make the silly assertion, "You can't put a value on human life". Then proceed to put a very low value on it.
For example if you suggest to somebody that they could save somebody else's life by giving them all their money, they will suddenly find that the person to be saved isn't actually worth quite that much. If you deny that, please send me all your money and I will give it to the young woman in NZ who can't afford the breast cancer drugs [apparently about NZ$100,000 per year] which would probably keep her alive. You don't think she is worth that much do you? So you DO put a value on human life, and it's not very much. In fact, it's the same value as other people put on human life and it's something like $15 an hour on average [give or take a bit].
Or maybe you get a quote for some goods and services then double the payment requested. I bet you the $100,000 that you don't do that. You don't because you value people at the going rate, which is measured in dollars rather than kilograms, length, watts, ASTM colour, etc.
If you don't see the light now, I give up.
Mqurice |
