[bobwaycott]

> Ultimately the value of a person's labor depends on scarcity, just as the trade value of things or experiences do, and we've seen how lack of scarcity makes trade value crash.

Apologies for being pedantic, but you're confusing cost--i.e., market price--with value. These are two different things that are not dependent entirely upon scarcity (I assume you mean supply/demand balances of both commodities and labor itself) alone. There are many factors beyond scarcity that are inputs to determining the value of a commodity (including the commodity of labor) to both society and economy, which may or may not be included in determining the cost of said commodity--and the calculations of both are not guaranteed to be equal.

From almost any perspective--economic, historical, philosophical, psychological, etc.--the cost and value of an item are rarely equal. This is especially critical in analyzing and theorizing on trade relations, as the value of a commodity to one agent is often an independent determining factor in calculating the cost of that commodity by another agent.

[randallsquared]

Scarcity creates a lower bound to cost. If the lower bound for every good and service drops such that no human can afford to live between material cost and the finished cost, then humans will be out of work except for charity. There might well be boutique human-crafted items, but counting on that for the survival of 7-15 billion humans seems premature. :)

[bobwaycott]

This may well be true, but this is still only a matter of cost, not value. Again, I apologize for being pedantic on the matter, but my point was that the value of a commodity, including labor, is a very different thing from the cost of that commodity.