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Have to agree with this. Marx's central argument is that focusing on pure production is confusing use-value for monetary value. Capitalist focus on production above all else results in commodity fetishism and the misallocation of labor and resources to goods that don't provide much use value to members of society.
The inability to provide a metric for use value makes this moralism, not an economic theory.
You can make similarly sentimental arguments that some things are worth economic inefficiency, hell you can make convincing ones, but that has essentially no predictive power.
The question then is why should one listen to Marxist moralism instead of Christian moralism, even in these specific matters?
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One can argue 'monetary value is not use-value'. Sure. But name a better predictor.
In practice, prices are literally--like quite literally and exclusively--the result of billions of people voting with their dollars, based on how much utility they believe item x has. What could be a better predictor average of use-value than every persons' opinions on use-value, averaged out?
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