[crdoconnor]

>Bastani believes you can have profit without human labour input

e.g. by selling mineral rights or valuable beachfront land.

[Svip]

But where does the money for whom that is purchasing those things come from? Eventually, all profit can be traced to human labour input.

[trevyn]

I’ve been enjoying Karl Widerquist’s “Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No”, which notes that access to natural resources is an important input as well. That is, one form of freedom is a freedom to use a proportion of Earth’s natural resources to meet one’s own needs. While many may contract into a system to provide e.g. defense or luxuries, the lack of choice in the “social contract” as regards property rights can nonetheless be interpreted as a regrettable loss of a form of freedom.

In other words, while labor is required to sustain human life, different forms of labor should not be considered fungible — I am happy to labor to directly feed and shelter myself, but may be less accommodating to serving others in exchange for a form of these benefits.

[crdoconnor]

All wealth (and hence profit) is derived either from human labor or nature.

Money is simply a unit of account and convenient medium of exchange. It has no intrinsic use.

[claudiawerner]

Marx begins to deal with this in his theories of rent; a more accurate criticism of Bastiani would be that he believes one can have profit without surplus. It is obvious, and was so when Marx was writing, that not all profit is due to exploitation of labour.