True Value

"True value" is a pillar of capitalism and that pillar is being eroded by the deluded entitled masses and whacked out government laws, policies, and regulations of today.

What is true value?

That should be self evident. It is what "something" is worth. Something may be anything that is exchanged for money; in the most simple terms something will be a product or service.

What determines the true value of something?

Scarcity and demand.

That is mostly what one needs to know about economics except for the "poison" that government injects into the system. Poison screws everything up. Poison pollutes minds and markets. This poison makes conversations of economics difficult because most people become mired in the poison policies and arguments; those that try to even bring up the concept of true value do it so trying to frame it from the point of view of poison. This is impossible because seeing the big picture is hard from the bottom as opposed to the top; the top is from the pure view, true value, not the bottom view of poison, the branching down of something into what it was not intended to be.

So, what is this poison? Poison is government laws, policies, and regulations. It is forcing features onto a product that the consumer may not necessarily want. This means more work than necessary is put into a product than would otherwise be done. This makes the product more expensive since it takes more to produce it otherwise by default.

All of this should be obvious, but it is not. Poison has infected almost everything and we are blinded of true value. Only black markets come close to true value but the prices are poisoned and altered by legality.

Today we are in a crisis. Both workers and government are intent on skewing the market to what they think is fair.

Today we saw the strike of fast food workers because they want a living wage. Is that the true value of the service they perform? A young adult of fifteen or sixteen can do this job; is this not a common gateway into the workforce? A job that can be done by someone with no experience has very little value.

Regardless of how many adults trying to support a family or workers with a college education trying to repay student loans work these jobs it does not elevate the value of the service. They are replaceable by a young inexperienced individual.

Just for cruel amusement I would like to bring up the point that Henry Ford paid his workers well enough to buy the products they actually made. Fast food workers do make enough to buy the product they make.

I move on to Obamacare; mockingly it is officially named the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Obamacare is not Socialism, Communism, or Capitalism. I do not know what "ism" it is; I don't think there is an "ism" for it. It is a compulsory directive for people to buy something else be fined by the IRS else fail to pay the fine go to jail.

The concept is you buy something you don't need or can even possibly use to fund someone else that needs it. The government is forcing you to pay for a service you don't need.

Now someone gets a service at a lower cost than usual because you helped pay for it. Now they might use it more often. The more it is used, the more scarce the service becomes. Scarcity and demand drives up cost. This service you don't need becomes more expensive and now you need to pay more because it is the law that you buy it.

Can you see the poison now?

Let us backtrack to fast food workers with college degrees. They owe a lot of money because of student loans. Once the government got involved in student loans education became more expensive. That is because government student loans were subsidized by you, just like Obamacare makes people buy services they don't need. You funded student loans. Government loans are guaranteed by your tax dollars.

Once loans for college became more accessible and guaranteed by the government, hence your wages, more people went to college. Society urged the populace to go to college as opposed to trade schools. The social trend became college.

Social secret: trade skills have been socially devalued, but that does not create a scarcity of the need. Pushing people out of trade skills through social pressure increases scarcity of the skill thus increasing its true value through scarcity. Become a tradesman. How often do plumbers go broke?

I do think that this gives the basic illustration of cost and effect of poison on the system. If you disagree, ask a question.