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by Svip 2556 days ago
But where does the money for whom that is purchasing those things come from? Eventually, all profit can be traced to human labour input.
2 comments

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.

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.