I feel that the clue is really in the name, wealth is stored “value”, and value is well, a “value judgement”.
If you have to strip away all uncertainty from the universe to support your position and further posit hard materialism and then qualify with “in practice it’s not discoverable but philosophically it’s there” then I feel we are squarely in angels dancing on pinheads territory.
Physics itself does not need such violent axioms to get useful results! I think you would be hard pressed to find a physicist who would claim a plausible conservation law for “subjective beauty” (another kind of value), yet this is also a consequence of your premises.
You’ve explained that you are a materialist but not really anything useful about economics as practised by humans. Who are, perforce, rather limited.
You could equally well say “there is a ‘true’ value for every thing, but only god knows it”. That statement would be exactly as useful and (as an aside) just as unprovable a belief.
If we are in dancing angels territory it is because you insist that counting angels on pinheads is exactly how you value cheeseburgers. Meanwhile, I will stick to the notion that the value of a cheeseburger is tied to how hungry I am and if I've got other stuff to do.
If you have to strip away all uncertainty from the universe to support your position and further posit hard materialism and then qualify with “in practice it’s not discoverable but philosophically it’s there” then I feel we are squarely in angels dancing on pinheads territory.
Physics itself does not need such violent axioms to get useful results! I think you would be hard pressed to find a physicist who would claim a plausible conservation law for “subjective beauty” (another kind of value), yet this is also a consequence of your premises.
You’ve explained that you are a materialist but not really anything useful about economics as practised by humans. Who are, perforce, rather limited.
You could equally well say “there is a ‘true’ value for every thing, but only god knows it”. That statement would be exactly as useful and (as an aside) just as unprovable a belief.