Value: It’s subjective!*

If I were to try to sell you a cup of water in a restaurant in America, you’d look at me like I was crazy as you asked your waiter for a free one.

If I were to try to sell you the same cup of water in a desert you had been stuck in for days, you’d probably be willing to give me substantially more than nothing.

Value is subjective. There is no property that sets an inherent price point for any good or service. Instead, the marginal utility of a good in achieving the end that an acting human wishes to accomplish determines value at a given time and place.

And only at a given time and place. Past value is a historic event, not a rule for the value of something in the future. A 2001 Jeep Cherokee cost $36,807, inflation adjusted. A 2017 Jeep Cherokee costs $27,656. Obviously, you’d be hard pressed to find somebody willing to pay nine grand more for a 16 year old Cherokee, even in mint condition.

Finally, examine this: if I were to attempt to sell you a bottle of compressed oxygen for breathing, you would wonder when I stopped taking my meds. Oxygen, though, has massive utility to every single one of us. Without a bountiful and easily accessible supply, you would be dead in minutes.

This compressed oxygen, however, could be readily sold to, say a blacksmith who needs a fire to achieve maximum temperature to work with certain kinds of metal.

Only marginal utility based on subjective perception of value explains these paradoxes. Attempting to deduce the true value of something by establishing qualities that inherently exist inside of the object in question and independent of perception and circumstance will have to include extensive lists of exceptions and paradoxes.

*Disclaimer: This is not a treatise. Nor is this, but it’s a great summary. This is the treatise that started it all (sort of), however, and it’s FREE!