That is what I have been saying. However I am struggling to express the complexities of this as clearly as I would like. Let me put it another way, when the surgeon performs an hour of surgery, we must recognise the many hours of training work that has prepared the surgeon to be able to do so. Those hours of labour, both by the surgeon and those others workers give the surgeon's labour extra value, precisely because the labour of the teachers who teach, the students who learn and before any of that the family and society that rear the future surgeon through childhood, are worth as much as the labour of the trained surgeon.
So it is not that the surgeon's time is intrinsically worth more, it is that the surgeon's hour is the ultimate expression of many other hours of labour.
> That's the only sane basis for an economic-social system. Everything else devolves into self-justification contests, is a waste of time, and reinforces the worst aspects of being a verbal and calculating being.
Sure. But it is important to understand why an hour of surgery performed by a surgeon is more valuable than an hour of unskilled work. Because there are many more hours of labour that must go into preparing the surgeon to do actual surgery.
>An hour of my life is worth an hour of yours, and we support whoever for whatever reason can't work. If you keep it simple, it may even be doable.
The principles must be simple, but in practice understanding things get more complicated. Unfortunately for me and my limited ability to explain what I am thinking.
But if society has to invest 400 man-hours rearing, socialising and training me to do a task, for every hour I can actually spend doing a task, then the value of the labour on the task must be equivalent to 401 unrefined man-hours.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas