Warren Buffett - Oscar Wilde - Albert Einstein - David Harvey - Karl Marx - Pablo Picasso - Criss Jami – John Webster - Trump: What’s America Worth? TV - Jeff Booth TV -
Price is what you pay. Value is what you get. Warren Buffett
A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan
Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value. Albert Einstein, cited Life magazine 2 May 1955
This is what the bourgeois political economists have done: they have treated value as a fact of nature, not a social construction arising out of a particular mode of production. What Marx is interested in is a revolutionary transformation of society, and that means an overthrow of the capitalist value-form, the construction of an alternative value-structure, an alternative value-system that does not have the specific character of that achieved under capitalism. I cannot overemphasize this point, because the value theory in Marx is frequently interpreted as a universal norm with which we should comply. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard people complain that the problem with Marx is that he believes the only valid notion of value derives from labor inputs. It is not that at all; it is a historical social product. The problem, therefore, for socialist, communist, revolutionary, anarchist or whatever, is to find an alternative value-form that will work in terms of the social reproduction of society in a different image. By introducing the concept of fetishism, Marx shows how the naturalized value of classical political economy dictates a norm; we foreclose on revolutionary possibilities if we blindly follow that norm and replicate commodity fetishism. Our task is to question it. David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital
The circulation of capital realizes value, while living labour creates value. Karl Marx
Every positive value has its price in negative terms ... The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima. Pablo Picasso
Every job from the heart is, ultimately, of equal value. The nurse injects the syringe; the writer slides the pen; the farmer plows the dirt; the comedian draws the laughter. Monetary income is the perfect deceiver of a man's true worth. Criss Jami
Our value never can be truly known,
Till in the Fisher’s basket we be shown. John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
America: the land of dreaming cities and unparalleled natural beauty. When people gaze across the magnificent vistas they experience wonder, beauty and awe. It’s priceless, right? Wrong. Because everything has a price. And I’m going to find out what it is. Trump: What’s America Worth? Trump, Discovery 2017
We have the highest number of millionaires in the world. ibid.
Let’s start with the big one – oil … total value of our oil reserves: $768 billion. ibid.
There’s trillions of dollars waiting to be exploited under your feet … Beside Nevada, there’s gold in Alaska and almost a dozen other states: total value $17 billion … Water: the biggest source of fresh water in the United States is the great lakes … all of our underground natural resources: $2.4 trillion. ibid.
Our homes and cars are stuffed with hidden millions … America owns more cars per capita than any nation on Earth: $1.3 trillion … ibid.
Homes: $16.4 trillion … Homes and Possessions: $21 trillion. ibid.
Food: $3 billion … Cattle $74 billion … Our rural assets $3.5 trillion. ibid.
Roads: $2.8 trillion: total value of what we in America build to just under $31 trillion. ibid.
The most profitable part of the country … human assets … £232 trillion … It’s about what you are … that makes bone marrow worth far more than its weight in gold … $46 million [each] = $14 quadrillion. ibid.
Our military: $1.2 trillion assets. ibid.
We’ve got to subtract our debt … close to $15 trillion. ibid.
If we had to sell America lock, stock and barrel: $280 trillion. ibid.
Transitioning from an inflationary world to a deflationary world – people should be scared. There is going to be disruption and that disruption is coming no matter what. There is nothing fundamental that governments can do to stop the rate of technology progress. Jeff Booth, interview The Keiser Report August 2020, author The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future
You have technology moving at an exponential pace driving prices down, and governments all around the world [are] caught in an inflationary trap that they created themselves out of monetary policy, fighting that force. And I would ask a simple question – isn’t it good when the value of your money goes up, and prices go down? ibid.
The abundance of technology would be broadly distributed. ibid.
It’s not going to go on for ever no matter what … It doesn’t matter until it does. One giant thing they miss that this is they assume a reserve currency goes on for ever, right, and you can just keep printing and people just trust in your currency. ibid.
What if a country, let’s say China, created a currency and decided to keep on printing for ever, and they used the currency and they used it to buy the world? … Would we trust that currency? ibid.
And so you can see from that thought experiment that if you just keep on printing money, people lose faith in your currency, and so you don’t have a reserve currency any more. So there’s a whole bunch of people like I think are like brainwashed in this ‘debt doesn’t matter’, that this can go on for ever. And it’s going to happen gradually … There is nothing that can stop this. We are going to have deflation for sure. Structurally, technology requires it. The path to get to deflation could end up through hyper-inflation first – currency default, debt default – it could happen a whole bunch of different ways but we are going to have deflation anyhow. ibid.
The concentration of wealth because you’re fighting a natural force – Capitalism can’t work, right, so effectively the Government is the market today. Free market principles don’t work any more. ibid.
Deflation we’ve never seen in our lifetimes. What if next year everything around you got cheaper? All it does is increase the value of your savings, and decrease the value of your assets. ibid.
Why do you think the top five technology companies are at historic heights? ibid.
Everybody knows it. ibid.
More band-aids on a systematic, a structural, change that has to take place. And so what they’re really trying to stop is a revolution, right, but they’re making the revolution more likely. ibid.