>>508084597>Carl Menger wasn't jewish, retard. Marx was though.I actually don't have a specific problem with Menger's marginalist interpretation, and tend to agree that the idea that a good's utility has some inherent fixed "quantity of labor" embedded in it is not particularly helpful.
The important thing to recognize is that, even when we are discussing subjective valuation of goods and services, what we are actually measuring is labor. Labor is not an abstract quantity that can be crystallized in the form of a good, and while there may have been some economists of the day who believed that, certainly Marx did not (which is what leads to the entire Das Mudpie argument). The point is that, when you exchange one thing for another, what you are actually doing is creating a valuation of the (subjective, and personal) EFFORT required to replace the first thing with the EFFORT required to obtain the second thing some other way.
If I pay $9 for a hamburger, I am weighing the amount of effort it would require me to replace that $9 against the amount of effort it would require me to make the hamburger myself, or go obtain it someplace else.
The idea that something's economic value is directly correlated with your subjective perception of its utility IS just a scam. Economic value occurs at the nexus between demand (your subjective value) and supply (how hard it is to acquire it a different way). Gold doesn't have intrinsic value, even Menger didn't think so, he recognized that getting one additional (marginal) piece of gold was difficult and it was this labor barrier (i.e. scarcity) that helped gold act as a store of value. At the end of the day, all economic value is inherently tied to human effort, and the economy is a system for the exchange of human effort (and the products of human effort) for OTHER human effort.