kcurie:

Migeru has produced some interesting diaries about how you could establish a real relation between thermodynamics in the metaphoric sense of "state variables" and "non-state variables". I would urge you to read them.

Summing up.. purely monetary arguments are completely wrong in general, they do not reflect the present economy and the variables are not even properly defined.

Agreed, except that I think inherently "closed" "definitions" and dialectics have been the problem, and do not help in finding solutions.

That's why I felt I had to get to the Metaphysics and the assumptions underpinning Economics - because conventional Economics seemed to bear no relation to the Reality I experience.

My contention is that "Value" - whatever it is - lies, like Beauty, in the eye of the Beholder and is definable only in relative terms...

I like E C Riegel's definition of Value as the "Relativity of Desire".

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson