It's a tough question, but so is: what is just? Like justice value is a possibly unknowable, possibly immeasurable communal platonic. We forged, refined, and sanity check our justice system using a few simple tricks from measurement theory. We ensure that the commonly agreed on axioms are covered (i.e. murder is wrong). We try to reduce several "intuitively agreeable" outcomes into simple rulesets (i.e. possession is 9/10ths of the law). And so on... Yes it's hard and our current system is only an approximation of the communal ideal, but few would want to dismiss law altogether because such measurement systems can do a pretty good job.

Defining value by the workings of the market is simply a circular and technical argument. It's no more useful than defining justice by actual outcomes of court cases. For one thing, markets define value rather simply: a simple majority vote where present and future votes are discounted. It's a pretty good rule with the nice feature that it's distributed requiring no central planning, but it is not magic and does have some less than desirable corner cases such as, say, the state of everyone at the lower end of the bell curve in western countries for the last four or five years.

This is a helpful reply.

> For one thing, markets define value rather simply: a simple majority vote where present and future votes are discounted.

Well it's a bit more fiddly than that. A better analogy is that markets integrate individual tradeoffs. That is, value is constantly established by exchange: I give up 2X for 4Y. I value X at 2Y at the moment.

Economists call this "subjective value". The point being that no objective measure can be thought of which isn't circular or ultimately subjective, relying on some exogenous assignment of value.

If I say 'value' is something like 'hours of labour', then I've just pushed back the definition. Why are labour hours valuable? If it's 'ability to support life', I've merely promoted life-support to a higher value and ignored all other considerations; but are all economic decisions so made with a singular objective? Again I've just made a subjective judgement about what is and isn't valuable.

Neither. Many an economic theory has foundered and sunk on the rock of objective value, no matter how defined.

But somebody may yet prove the economists wrong. So the first step in any discussion of the grandparent post must be to work out what he meant by 'real value'. What is it? How is it recognised? By whom?

let's start with the basics. are they creating real value if they destroy the prosperity of mankind through a complete lack of understanding their own alchemy? probably not.

This still avoids the question. You ask whether they create 'real value' without defining what 'real value' is.

Value is determined by direct gains in production as a result of a fixed set of capital allocated to areas where such production is both heterogeneous and distributed as widely and evenly as the market dictates. Simply, it's a fair price for a fair unit of work.

This is simply the redistribution of tax revenue from the central bank of the US (which is itself privately held by a cabal of banks by way of owning the 12 regional feds forming the FOMC) to the banks themselves.

The question shouldn't be "what's real value", the question is are we okay with concentration of US wealth to a cabal of multinational banks that, in turn, distribute it to wherever they deem money-worthy? Because, increasingly, that hasn't been the US. Why would we be okay with that?

> Value is determined by direct gains in production

Value is determined by value added? How did you measure the difference?

> Simply, it's a fair price for a fair unit of work.

By labour? This just moves the question along to be "why is labour value?"

> The question shouldn't be "what's real value", the question is are we okay with concentration of US wealth to a cabal of multinational banks that, in turn, distribute it to wherever they deem money-worthy?

I raised the question of what value is because of the rhetorical assertion that banks don't create 'real value'. Before you can decide whether to be concerned about 'real value' it helps to establish what it is.

> Because, increasingly, that hasn't been the US. Why would we be okay with that?

I'm Australian and I'm OK with that. Do you suppose that when money is invested overseas it miraculously disappears, never to be seen again?