One of the most dominant factors of existing economies is the money factor. It is used to determine how and how much one gets "rewarded" or "paid" for his or her services. The problem though with money is the valuation system that is uses in this determination of prices and values. For, when closely analyzed, this system is quite subjective, if not actually whimsical. Someone, somewhere sets a price for a good or service and depending on consumers response, which has usually been positive since some people will pay this price, this becomes the accepted "market" price for that good or service. This approach leads basically leads to wealthier people determining market prices for the poorer people. Therefore if the poorer people do not have something it is usually not because there are not enough resources to meet everyone's need, but instead because they cannot afford the prices that has been placed upon it.
Take the example of an automobile. As the following table shows a of ( kg ( lbs)) actually has less than worth of material in it, yet it’s final market price will be priced at about USD $18,000 or so.
(Materials List & Weights Source:
American Metals Market (AMM))
(Raw Material Prices: See this page)
(Raw Material Prices: See this page)
Also consider this, should a car "computer" (an ECU/ECM) which does the basic task of monitoring some car components and regulating engine emissions and only require a 40 MHz microprocessor and about 1 MB of memory (see in this site) be worth as much as, e.g., a desktop computer having a speed of 3.6 GHz, 1024 MB of Memory, 250 GB of Hard Drive Storage, a 17" monitor, a DVD-RW DL/DVD-ROM player/burner unit, etc.
You can probably find hundreds of such examples where something is not worth what it is priced at. Indeed if products were valued simply on a material content basis, not many items would be worth a hundredth of it’s final price. May 28, 2008