A theory of value centred on labour-time is by no means a revolutionary development in the history of economics. In fact, it was the centre-piece of the classical movement, beginning with Smith and Ricardo. Smith saw a commodity's value as the amount of labour that could be foregone in purchasing it, whereas Ricardo (very similar to Chronimism), suggested that something's value was inherent in its embodied labour. The fundamental difference between these classical approaches and the Chronimistic formula is how the remuneration of work is compensated and the implications that evokes in regards to the concept of profit.

The crucial flaw of classical political economy in this case is what Karl Marx called "the objectification of labour." In this system, workers sell their labour-power to the firms offering the highest wages and thus their labour becomes a commodity. Being that said process caused one to become the object of another's will (their employer) rather than the subject of their own, they lost the human quality of shaping the world to their designs. Although Marx saw some moral issues with this, he progressed a more scientific argument as well.

Essentially, the value of any commodity is the labour needed to produce it. If labour itself is a commodity, then its value would be at the level of subsistence or the bare minimum required to reproduce labour. If it takes five hours of labour to feed a person for a day, their wage would then reflect five hours' worth of value. Wages would always naturally gravitate towards subsistence levels as well. Higher wages would cause the masses to increase reproduction, causing wages to lower over time as the working population increased. Lower wages would cause mass starvation and poverty, decreasing birthrates and the total number of the workforce. (Marx argued that the lower classes wouldn't just indiscriminately become more lascivious through the introduction of higher wages, but he never doubted the fundamental principle that wages would generally gravitate towards bare subsistence levels.)

Thus, if it takes five hours of labour to feed a person for a day, their day's work will be paid in five hours' worth of wages. However, a person can work much longer than five hours in a day and create more value than that for which they are being remunerated. This is what leads Marx to create the concept of "surplus value", the disparity between the value paid in wages and the value created through labour. When labour is considered a commodity, one party is going to get more than their fair share, whether it be the capitalist who absorbs this surplus value as profit or the labourer who earns wages greater than necessary to reproduce his labour. Capitalism sees the industrialist as creating the primary conditions for this process to occur, thus their ownership of the means of production causes them to "naturally" earn these profits of surplus value.

Marx believed that profit could only be created through legally exploiting labour in this way. Machines would always cost the amount of labour required to produce them because rational consumers would be willing to bid up the price of machines to where they equalled their added value but never pay more than what the machine could add in value. Thus, as industry slowly mechanized, profits would decline, the business cycle would slowly have profitable companies swallow the more profitable ones until the remaining few became "too big to fail", and their inevitable fall would create some sort of cataclysm with the government either supporting the failing capitalists and sparking class warfare or letting the capitalists be destroyed leading to an unending economic depression. The commoditization of labour-power, then, creates the series of events necessary for the annihilation of even a perfect, laboratory sterilized capitalism, besides which, of course, the real world version is even more fragile.

My solution to this quandary is undoubtedly simple in philosophy if somewhat complicated in application. I take Locke's approach in saying that labour is the inviolable property of a human being and cannot be sold to anyone. Only the products of labour can ever be put on the market, and so the arguments against slavery rapidly become the same against classical political economy. The point of objectification of labour is accepted, but easily refuted. How can a factory worker be considered to own the products of their labour when they do not own the means of production that allowed that product to come into being? One simply has to measure the value added instead of the total value of the product itself, and that argument quickly becomes irrelevant. The worker might not own the product they create, but they do own the value they add to the product, and that is what they sell to the industrialist, not their labour-power.

What about subjectification versus objectification of labour? they retort. If a person works for themselves, their mind is present in all the products of their labour. A bit of the painter is left in every painting after all. But how can this be true of the common labourer? Do we see the assembler's personality in a pocket watch or the autoworker's dreams in a vehicle? Not so evidently, but they are still there. One might follow instructions, but there is no objective difference in the instruction given to the painter by classical education and the manual handed to the autoworker. They both use their creativity in creating the product. One must strive to be more efficient, the other more stylish. They're both capable of inventing and utilizing new techniques. That our factory system is designed to stifle individual thought does not mean it doesn't exist. Such is a problem with society, not with my model. Besides, chronimism naturally encourages greater self-employment and the resulting increase in creativity that necessitates.

Western political economy completely ignored Marx's point, however, and worked on the semantics of refining Ricardo's theory of value so that it could create nearly indefinite profit and circumvent Marx's overly dramatic prophecies. This gave rise to the so-called marginalist revolution and the development of neo-classical economics, with which this chapter is foremost concerned in refuting. Although Keynes in many ways already disproved it in the twentieth century, the economic discipline, with the help of Hayek and Freidman, has been slowly moving back towards the works of these nineteenth century classical apostates at great cost to the our post-modern society.

The marginalist revolution was built on the perceived fallacy of Ricardo's theory of value wherein products are evaluated on their embodied labour. Although it solved Smith's problem of making value dependent on the model of distribution (rent, wages and profits), it created inconsistencies between variable and constant capital. Because dead capital (machinery, land, etc.) was purchased at a fixed price in any given time, it would have to transfer its value to the fixed product at a constant rate. However, being that human labour directly imputed its value into a product, a change in wage would immediately change the value. These subtle differences between value evolutions would cause resources to be inefficiently allocated to the capital intensive projects whose prices were steadier than the human labour markets where prices would tend to fluctuate.

Even without the Chronimistic system, the argument against Ricardian value would be senseless. A good produced by a machine and a good produced by a man are not one in the same. Ricardo lived in a world constantly pushing for standardised, manufactured products, and so he believed the machine to simply be the perfect stand-in for a human labourer. It isn't. 

The mind of the inventor will always be present in the work of the machine. The mind of the labourer will always be present in the work of the hand. That is why we are willing to spend much more money for hand-made products then we are for their manufactured equivalents. The hand-made product is more unique, and that uniqueness is the reason we pay for labour. That is why Chronimistic law requires labour to cost slightly more than automation through the pay-roll tax. It is meant to correct this sentimentality in human nature towards paying for imperfection and drive us further to automation.  Uniqueness is a luxury, certainly, but it is not a requirement for production.

Chronimism's solution to the Ricardian dilemma is obvious: wages do not fluctuate. A person is always paid the equivalent of the value they add to a product or to society, (see chapter one) and that can only change with technological innovation, something that equally affects dead capital. Neoclassical economists had a much more complex approach, obsessed with marginal value.

The marginalist solution was to ignore absolute scales of value and focus on the value added of the last available, or marginal unit. Built from the ideological foundations of Bentham's utilitarianism, individuals would seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain by purchasing scarce commodities. As one accumulated more of a commodity, its marginal utility became lessened. The common example for this is water, wherein a litre consumed in a day can save one's life, two litre's keeps one comfortable and every additional unit afterwards has no value and in fact can be harmful. Thus, the demand curve would be exponentially downward sloping, with people willing to pay less and less as the quantity of goods increased and the marginal utility of each good declined. Rational individuals, it would argued, would only purchase a good when its price equalled or was lower than its marginal utility.

On the other hand, production was seen as a form of disutility being that it is troublesome and undesirable to work or produce. One might work for a minimum number of hours to provide bare subsistence, but every additional hour would provide less reward for more pain as the working day continued to stretch on. Due to this marginally increased disutility, rational individuals would demand higher wages to match this growing discomfort. Thus, higher rates of production (which needed more labour) would necessitate increasingly higher costs. This creates a supply curve exponentially sloping upwards.

Where these two curves meet is where the market price will be set, and that price will reflect the momentary value of that good to producers and consumers. The most troubling assumption in this model is that the value of something overall is entirely determined by the marginal units. The last item produced or consumed determines the true value of everything before it. This is pure, arrogant nineteenth century hogwash. (It's also entirely unnecessary as Piero Sraffa proved Ricardian value correct in 1960.)

The supply curve is the easiest to dissect in this model. Economies of scale make production costs cheaper as quantity increases, for example. The entire industrial revolution was built on that fact. Neo-classicism also suggests that people have a natural inclination towards leisure, that we all see work as a form of pain to be avoided. Unemployment, then, is believed to be the product of laziness, people valuing their pleasure of not working as higher than the current wages. Keynes was the one to disprove this when he made the "radical" suggestion during the Great Depression that the millions of unemployed were so because of macro-economic reasons, not their sudden overvaluation of their worth. The neo-classical solution was to lower wages and move the world towards starvation. The Keynesian model was to raise wages and assist a global recovery.

The demand curve is irrelevant in chronimistic theory and for good reason. The entire, "willingness to pay" phenomenon is simply a clever euphemism for ripping consumers off. Not only can people, through advertisement, be convinced a commodity increases pleasure or decreases pain more dramatically than in reality, eschewing the entire marginal utility curve to where it no longer is downward sloping, but there are a myriad profiteers always on the ready to take advantage of them.

A dying man in the Sahara might be willing to sell himself into slavery for a cup of water, but that doesn't change the underlying production cost of the liquid. A well is a well no matter who uses it. Nor does a sudden fad for sports vehicles in North America change the absolute value added in Europe where they were made. Consumers do not always have all necessary information available to them when they make a purchase either. The price at which they buy might not be the lowest offered, causing an inefficient allocation of resources. The consumer is a bumbling, easily manipulated, perpetually ignorant beast who was born to be leached off of by a variety of equally mindless usurers, and the only way to protect them and our fragile, chronimistic economy is to set prices at their cost of production (see chapter two).

Of course, some might say that chronimism leads back into the same trap that Marx laid out so carefully for capitalism. What about the profits? bemoan the neo-classicals. The system can't survive without profits. Well, on a philosophical level, one must question the efficacy of any economic system based on exploitation whether it be of the worker, as Marx saw it, or of the consumer, as I see it. Having no system is better than one in which anyone is able to consume more than they produce. The unjustifiable inequality such an exercise causes only seeks to instigate chaos and destruction. I have no doubt that the grand inequalities we experience today because of the neo-classical approach will provoke a class conflict more than sufficient to prove me right in this.

On a more scientific note, profit is still possible when workers are paid for the exact value of their labour in wages and consumers purchase goods directly at the cost of production. For a system that glorifies them in its very name, capitalism focuses so indefensibly little on capitalists. They are not the passive actors in this game whose only job is to own the means of production and squeeze profit out of their workers or the unwitting public. Not only is it possible for the capitalist to create surplus value in their own operations, but it is quite common.

Capitalists are able to create profit through consolidation and building economies of scale. They are able to invent new products and means of production. They are able to pool the efforts of their employees into a single coordinated masterpiece that would be meaningless to each individual but makes perfect sense in the aggregate. Assigning profit in this way makes it possible to assure that the industrialist is being paid for the value that they add to the product, not the value they somehow stole from others.

My day is rife with profits of this kind. Technology firms sell entirely on the basis of their founders' ideas, not their ability to manipulate the public or exploit their employees. Although it's rewarding to think that Mark Zuckerberg simply robbed the whole concept of Facebook from others or that Steve Jobs was a brilliant showman and nothing else, both of these men made vast sums of money for the value that they specifically added to their brand. In the case of Zuckerberg, it was his technological prowess. For Jobs, it was his ability to combine the work of others into a perfectly designed whole. As the world continues to move towards a more information based economy, one primarily concerned with the number of ideas instead of the number of workers, this trend can and will only tend to increase.

Profit was never intended to be permanent. The classical economists saw profit awarded to the capitalist for his ownership of factories just like rent was given to the owner of the land. Because profit would only decrease as the world became more mechanized, but rent would increase as humanity struggled to find new lands to cultivate and feed its growing population, inequality was bound to intensify and humanity would be doomed to conflict. Ricardo saw this happening in the far off millennia; Marx predicted it would occur before his own death. Whatever the specifics, the central message remained the same: profit was a temporary phenomenon and could not exist in the long term.

Neo-classicals attempted to end this problem by attaching a commodity's value to the consumer's "willingness to pay", although this ultimately led to more dilemmas than it was hoping to solve. Chronimism makes profit a more permanent aspect of the economy by incorporating it into the value of value. Theoretically, the purpose of chronimism will drive profits to zero in the ever present march towards depopulation, but for any given moment, chronimistic will provide a fair and equal distribution of wage, rent and profit that honours the golden rule of civilization: no one may consume more than they produce.