This sort of highlights the absurdity of the whole way of measuring value. Surely a person’s life and actions are of some use to someone. Someone wants to have their help or hear them speak or whatever. Therefore their work has value. But since the market assigns value, it only has value if someone is willing to pay for it.
So if you have 5 people with all the money and a million people with no money, then those million people end up doing nothing of any value as they farm and eat and build homes for themselves and whatnot, because none of them can assign any value to any of those things by being willing to pay for them. We’ve completely mistaken the metric for the thing we were trying to measure.
If the reason a person has no value to contribute is because their food and their homes and their clothes and so on and so on are all taken care of by an automated production system then maybe their labour is useless? But again, maybe someone else would like their poetry. To imagine someone would have actually no value is basically impossible. We assume people are of value, and if the system doesn’t assume that, there is something really wrong with the system.
