How is that any different than some technocrat in a social country whose job it is to decide how much and when fossil fuels are used? The job’s essentially the same, it’s just been privatized in capitalism.

The difference is what the goal is and what the incentives are. A technocrat in a socialist country doesn’t personally benefit from deciding how much and when fossil fuels are used. A corporate lobbyist does. This is the problem I identify in the original comment.

The goal of a business is to create profit for the owners, everything else is secondary to that. The goal of a socialist economy is to produce useful things for the general public. There’s another big difference where producing things is seen as a cost because it takes resources from the country to do so. Meanwhile, under capitalism production for the sake of production is common because the goal is to sell as much stuff as possible. This is how we end up with stuff like planned obsolescence and new goods being destroyed to keep up market prices.

This argument of mine is weaker (for when the lobbyist is arguing for truly absurd things), and sometimes stronger (when we’re talking about lobbying for things less controversial than the fossil fuel industry). But in general, it works rather well.

Lobbying is just legalized bribery. Large corporations bride officials to pass laws that help the corporations at the direct expense of the public. It certainly works well for the 1% of the population who own everything.

That’s because there is no “use value”. Value changes from moment to moment, even for the same good and the same person who would demand it. It’s not just an abstract number, it’s illusory.

You don’t understand the definition of use value.

Trade value comes closet to determining how real people in the real world value some good or service. And not only does it come closest, it can update those numbers quite rapidly if the demand changes.

You need to learn the terms you’re discussing. Use value and trade value have specific meanings. Use value is something that is produced for direct use, while trade value is something that’s produced for the purpose being held as an asset or traded.

Use value refers to things that people need and use directly. A socialist economy is geared towards production to meet the direct needs of the people as opposed to wealth accumulation which is what a capitalist economy is geared towards.

Anything else is some poor deluded fool’s attempt to dictate how reality should work.

That is an incredibly ignorant statement.

mean, goddamn. If you’d said that capitalism leaves many in poverty, or treats those people harshly and unfairly. That it was reactionary instead of proactive. I could come up with a dozen stinging criticisms for capitalism, but you’re attacking the one single thing that it’s actually good at.

You’re right capitalism is fantastic at creating poverty. In fact, capitalism inherently requires poverty to function. Thanks to the wonder of capitalism roughly 3.5 million people die from lack of clean water, 1.5 million people die from vaccinable diseases, and 9 million people die from hunger each and every year. That’s over a 140 million deaths every decade.

Meanwhile, the only major country where poverty reduction has been happening consistently is China that has a communist party in charge:

If we take just one country, China, out of the global poverty equation, then even under the $1.90 poverty standard we find that the extreme poverty headcount is the exact same as it was in 1981.

The $1.90/day (2011 PPP) line is not an adequate or in any way satisfactory level of consumption; it is explicitly an extreme measure. Some analysts suggest that around $7.40/day is the minimum necessary to achieve good nutrition and normal life expectancy, while others propose we use the US poverty line, which is $15.