Supply and demand creates an illusion of value, not an absolution of it as our teachers and economic leaders have professed for hundreds of years. The true price of something is not what someone is willing to pay for it. For all other economic systems devised by mankind, man's greed has always played a central role. For the capitalists, of course, greed is the fuel through which man chooses to improve himself. For the communists, greed is the great evil that the collective must band together to destroy. My system has no interest in human greed, but in man's nature to improve one's self. Capitalists would argue much the same point, but the valuation of products based on their demand or supply is the one flaw in their reasoning. A person who wishes to improve their standing in a society where the valuation of commodities is based on the efforts of human beings will show their worth through employing vast numbers of people, which gives jobs to the lower classes, or by owning artwork which utilizes the skills of the artisans. In some capitalistic societies, this also stands true; however, the quality of the work they have in their homes is drastically different. A nobleman in our age might choose to hire a tailor to polish his horse's saddles for the hopes of depriving his competitors of the man's employment. Also, an art collector could pay vast sums for works that require little time or imagination to produce, but are wanted for their name or their rarity. The competent bourgeoisie in chronimism will always demonstrate how he can get the best work out of his servants and the greatest amount of time and care spent on his works of art, because production is worth considerably more to his peers and society at large than a bidding war between his partners.

Something does not magically have more corporeal properties because one has it and others do not. That is the simple truth in life that capitalism has always tried to ignore, but ultimately failed. If you and your friends each decide that the one red sports car in town is the correct vehicle for you, the winner of the prized vehicle in our economic system will be the one to outbid his peers. Whereas this can be seen as a great driver of production, it is production without cause. It is utterly senseless to spend more time working to pay for a product as the men on the other side of the line spend producing it. In the end, the consumer in the scenario is left with a product that has a fraction of actual value paired with an enormous dose a delusion. Having a red car while your friends are forced to drive blue does not give you better gas mileage, superior sound systems or a supernatural defence against speeding tickets. It gives you a car with a different coat of paint, one that probably cost the same as the others.

No one wins in a sale of supply and demand. The workers who produced the product are never paid more than their actual value in any capitalist circumstance, and so they receive no benefit. The industrialist makes enormous profit, but profit that was entirely unearned and so ultimately is stolen from the economy, giving him a moral deficit. (In actuality, this system leads to more than a spiritual  loss for the industrialist as the prices of goods are driven up to suit wealthiest clients and eventually the richest people, who are not worth their wealth and cannot produce, can no longer compete economically and are forced to use their affluence to annihilate each other. This is the basis of the scarcity future vision that gave socialism its renaissance in the nineteenth century.) Finally, the consumer wastes his production on an overprized commodity, production that could have been used to benefit both himself and society equally.

The evaluation of commodities based on what you have in comparison to others can only help the incredibly rich, not the vast majority in the lower classes. Simple put, as the population rises, resources become more scarce and the value of goods is driven upwards. However, at the same time, the increase in the population devalues labour because more human beings are available to do work. Thus, the employers can afford to reap higher profits and charge higher prices whilst the workforce slowly starves. This, of course, would be solved if the capitalist system encouraged depopulation, but it does the opposite. The evaluation of goods based on scarcity or abundance alone forces the poor to increase family size so as to gain more labourers to feed itself, whereas it discourages the rich from having children because their care and sustenance has become more expensive. And so, as we see in our post-modern age, wealth in the higher classes concentrates and poverty in the lower classes diffuses.

In a capitalist market with minimal inflation (one that capitalists would consider ideal), new production techniques will drive prices down because it increases the volume of goods on the market. This is how mass production made it possible to put refrigerators, telephones and laptops into every household of the West. Although this can generally benefit the poor in what is called the "trickle-down" effect, it also allows inherited wealth to grow disproportionately in value with the economy (see chapter six). In other words, those endowed with family money do not have to work to replenish it because the money was grown in value instead of depreciating. Although the high inflation periods of the 1930's to 1970's managed to keep this effect to a minimum, new data suggests that the relative economic and demographic stagnation of the West and the projected similar case of the world in the next century will return the world to this regime. Thus, for families in the current system, there are only two probable scenarios. First, technological process plateaus and wealthy individuals outbid the poor in struggling over limited resources, or second, privately funded innovation profits those with capital and makes it easier for those with private fortunes to accumulate greater amounts of wealth faster than their impoverished counterparts. Either of these outcomes puts more money in fewer hands and although this is not always a bad thing, this centralization of wealth will not be based on merit but on nepotism.

The valuation of goods based on the time required to produce them will not only keep prices relatively low indefinitely, but it encourages labourers to become more productive to increase their wealth. If a watch takes on average ten minutes to produce, it will always take ten minutes in this system, because time saved in production is given to the inventor of the production method, not the consumer. Therefore the one who discovers new ways of producing goods or invents new goods to produce is capable of consuming more, not those with inherited wealth. Equally, it achieves this without an incredible amount of inflation as time is ultimately a reality based currency. The price of natural resources will be founded upon how long it takes for each to be discovered and processed. More accurate discovery processes or more efficient refining practices will decrease this time. On the other hand, if a resource becomes more scares than new techniques can balance, it will take longer to find new caches and they will generally be of lesser quality which means that refining must be more rigorous. Thus, the scarce resource escalates in price; however, consumers and economic regulations will demand that it remain at the same price (see chapter seven). This means that in order to continue reaping in the same profits, the industry will be forced to evolve their extraction and/or refining practices or risk competitive elimination.

Notice, although primary industries in my model still follow the Ricardian scarcity principle, the prices are only based on reality, not speculation or market demand, a clear divergence from capitalism. Secondary goods are based first on the time used to unearth and refine the primary ingredients, transportation costs of primary ingredients and then average human labour required to produce the goods. Services are billed per hour and augmented by the training time of the servicemen. As previously stated, professionals earn the coefficient of their time equal to working hours in education period plus working hours in actual recertification period over working hours in average recertification period. This favours professionals with more education or who are able to retain their instruction for longer periods of time. However, for professionals with large average recertification times (ten years or more) it's impossible to know their actual recertification period until those ten or more have been surpassed in which case a great deal of income could have been lost by an above average man or unfairly gained by one below average. Therefore, for the time before the first recertification period, the average is used on both sides of the equation, which should provide more favour to education in calculating professional prices. Non-professional service workers then must be paid using the same method but instead of calculating education, we use training period. Because this is period is shorter, it should mean that the coefficient of labour is closer to one than with professionals, because laymen can more easily take over this job. If a person is particularly ineffectual in their work and requires little training but more recertification than average, it's possible to have a coefficient of less than one because a layman could perform their job better than them, although my system works hard to eliminate such cases in the long run.

So, this explains how goods and services are valued, but the system leaves out a very important dynamic in post-modern market economics. All goods are not simply defined as primary, secondary and service (or tertiary, depending on economics textbook). Many goods go through many different hands before reaching the consumer. The above system would only explain the price of goods if we purchased our gasoline from our local oil refinery, bought our vegetables from our rural neighbours and drove our cars straight out of the factory. Clearly the middle man cannot be simply done away with, especially since in my country and many others at this moment, retail is the largest employer of the populace. However, in a chronimistic society, a person only receives payment for direct labour they put into a product. Therefore a middle man would have a coefficient of one because their job requires no training, recertification or ingenious method. A store manager would be paid the less than his most competent employees per hour, assuming that any of his employees could assume his job. There would be no incentive to open an independent retail outlet which would clearly inconvenience the public. This puts the onus instead on horizontal integration, so that one company controls the good from land to market in order to minimize the costs given to consumers.

It is obvious a new model must be introduced to make certain that middle men do not drive up the prices disproportionately more than transportation and storage costs while goods still are delivered to the consumer. This is impossible in a capitalist society where all capital investment is private and all businesses must make a profit, but is not so in a chronimistic one. As I will expand on later, in a chronimistic society capital is controlled by the civil administration and distributed amongst deserving individuals in low interest loans. There is no private financial sector which eliminates a not insignificant amount of overhead automatically. Equally important is the government's responsibility to regulate prices and set benchmarks for real value, as determined by the time it takes human beings to extract and refine resources, process those resources and put them on the market. Once this benchmark has been determined, an industrialist must never exceed the government controlled price; however, he is more than allowed to lower it in order to eliminate the competition. This forces the entrepreneur to continually invent more efficient ways to process dwindling resources or to choose an industry which does not rely on nonrenewables, both chooses being ideal for the world ecology. Should an industry be unable to adapt to the growing scarcity of its primary resources and make a profit at the benchmark price, it should be deemed undeserving and removed from the economy. Should this industry compromise an essential service, a government cooperative can rebuild the industry publicly at cost, the details of which I will provide in subsequent chapters (namely chapter seven).

So, to conclude, a chronimistic society bases the value of primary goods on the time required to discover and refine natural resources (or to cultivate and harvest agricultural products), the value of secondary goods on the cost of primary ingredients and average man hours to produce said good, and services on hours billed by the servicemen multiplied for the coefficient of that particular worker in his specific workforce.