"In a truly free market society 'intellectuals' wouldn't exist or at least have no authority as people would just do what they wanted without interference.
Posted by: Gil | Jun 18, 2008 10:58:14 PM"

I suppose the problem with your ever expressing clear intelligent thoughts is that you never seem to have any.

"Obama said, globalization and automation hurt the position of workers…Boudreaux says the claim is false interpreting position to mean absolute position. I say the claim is correctly interpreted as relative position, and that it's true."

Their relative positions have been hurt? Like, the peasants who used to be subsistence farmers who are now working in manufacturing facilities? They're hurting? Or the ones who used to assemble things by hand who are now running sophisticated machinery? They're hurting? Or the people in America who now work in offices at computers instead of in factories? They're hurting?

Wow, there sure is a lot of pain out there. It's good that righteous, morally insightful folks like Senator Obama are there to point it out to us.

Charlie, if that were the case, why are all the clothes in your closet and the consumer electronics in your home made in other countries?

And, by the way, OF COURSE YOU'RE A TOTALITARIAN, CHARLIE! How else do you get more of that 'equality' you're so keen on, huh? People either give away (redistribute) money voluntarily as charity, or they give money (redistribute) in exchange for something you give them (commerce), or… or… what's left, Chuck? How else are you going to take that money away from them (redistribute it) so you can have your 'equality' you're yearning for, huh? People who worry about equality, as I said in my other post, are reverting back to the childlike state, the one in which people obsess over 'equality'; i.e., whether they have as much money as the other guy. How much do you make a year, Chuck? You might make more than I do, and you know, if that's the case, I think a little equalization is in order. Wouldn't everyone agree? After all, Chuck won life's lottery, and I'm haven't done nearly as well as that rich fat cat Charlie. He needs to "give back," and he can start by giving something to me. I think equality is important. And if Charlie has more than I do, then equality is definitely something I'm interested in. After all, my position has been weakened by automation; it's all beyond my control. Dang robots, anyway. C3PO!!!

Martin, you got it completely backwards. Marx's "embodied theory of labor" was exactly as quoted by him, not Smith. Adam Smith used the term "exchange", NOT labor. It's a big difference. The value of the item was different from the value paid. You can't equate "labor" for "price paid" and attribute it to Smith, but it was what the idiot liberal Marx did.

"The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What every thing is really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people."

and

"The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. Labour therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities."

Smith, Wealth of Nations

"Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much a source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor which is itself only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power."

Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme

Both in Wikipedia under "Labor theory of value".

Earlier, in Capital, Marx develops a labor theory of value, but he simultaneously discusses "use value" which he distinguishes from a good's value measured in labor inputs. Unlike Smith, Marx doesn't refer to the laborer's own valuation of his contribution but to some abstract "social utility" of the labor, so the Marxist valuation of labor is more like marginalist value, i.e. it's not the value the laborer places on his output but the value that others place on it.

That's at http://uregina.ca/~gingrich/s23f99.htm.

Of course, Marx was a contemporary of the marginalists, and Hayek maintains that Marx was aware of them and altered his thinking in light of marginalism after writing Capital. That's in Wikipedia under Marginalism.