Transkribering
Is it fair that relative prices of goods in a free market determine how our lives are organized?
[Speaker 1]
I'm not really that interested in property except insofar as it affects the kind of work that people have to do. I'm interested in the labour that people have to carry out and therefore how we live our lives. And only in that sense does Andrew's stuff about individual property have any meaning for me, because that's the precondition for it. One of the things that Peer said that was interesting was he was talking about different people producing different things and that being what allows society as a whole to become richer because the baker has a hammer which he exchanges with the builder who has flour.
The problem is that In a society based upon individual exchange, it is the quantities and the proportions in which the flower exchanges with the hammer that determines how our labor time is distributed and how our lives consequently are organized. What do you think of that as a problem that needs to be overcome? Because I think that's inbuilt into the way that capitalism functions as a society.
[Speaker 2]
I don't think the quantities of the goods that are exchanged actually decide the prices of them, but how they contribute to satisfying people's wants and needs. So what you're talking about is the supply side, but there's also a demand side. If you have both, you get the price. So I don't think you can say that if there's a lot of flour and there's just one hammer, then the hammer is better. worth a lot.
It depends on what you can do with the hammer and how people value what you do with the hammer as well as the flour. And between those two, you get prices and you can sort of compare them. But it's not only supply side, no.