It is my opinion that the LTV is not designed to explain spot prices and that most honest purveyors of the LTV admit the STV excels in this regard. The purpose of the LTV is to provide an economic corollary to the cause of human justice. Because it is labor that is the crucial factor in the long term setting of prices – including the extraction of surplus value, i.e. “profit”, we can find a narrative about the struggle for human justice and equality in the “dismal science”.

Quibble or not (and I certainly quibble with LTV-based value judgements), this is eminently quotable. Nice one, Jeremy. I learned something anyway.

Remember my point above: nobody ever said that the LTV determines spot prices. Rather, the theory determines what Carson calls “equilibrium price” over the long run, where spot fluctuations in prices / costs are minimized. How this affects the way people organize economically is really impossible to say with any certainty. I think a mutualist (and any good anarchist) has to be agnostic on the predictive assertion that one form of employment is better than another in a hypothetical free market.

So I don’t dismiss out of hand your assertion that self-employment is incompatible with truly advocating the LTV. But I don’t understand it: whether compensation for labor is paid by an employer as wages or by a customer as the price of the product / service, the market is determining what the worker takes home for his labor over the long run. That mutualists “support” self-employment does not mean “at all costs”. We’re for market-discovered wages, not one particular source of wages or another. Nobody advocates for self-employment per se (except maybe for philosophical or personal reasons – I can certainly see people valuing independence more greatly than others). What I’ve seen from most mutualists is a prediction that self employment would be more prevalent as the privileges that entrench centralization of business are done away with. And as economies become more regional / local, firms shrink in size so that the real difference between working for a firm and for oneself become less noticeable.

But remember: for mutualists who advocate the LTV, the point is letting a genuinely free market find the price for labor – whether it’s productive or that of a coordinating agent. Carson never says self-employment will become universal, just that there is an artificial deficit of it.

As somebody who has been self-employed, let me close by saying it’s not all joy and happiness. :)

Anarcho-mercantilist – I haven’t had time to wade through your comments yet, but they’re always good. I think that, especially for longer comments, you might be well-served by responding with a blog-post of your own. (not to dissuade you from commenting here, of course!)