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[Reelya]

Imagine that nobody is working, but each person has a vending machine in their room that dispenses, on a regular schedule, some kind of unique good that only that person has. Some people get pumpkin pies, some people get window cleaner, some people get iPhones. Each person in this community is given a fixed amount of money. They must trade amongst themselves to get the resources they need to survive. In this economy, there is no labor, but goods and money still have value. How can the absence of labor devalue anything if an economy still functions more or less normally when it is entirely absent?

In that case, there's still effort required to extract the resource. Because someone has to be in the room to collect it and there's time consumed in exchanging the goods, so even though the goods are extremely cheap compared to the real world, they're not labor or time-free.

It's easy to come up with an alternative, where a single person, alone in the universe, has a fixed budget to spend at many vending machines providing various goods. The money this person has still has value, even though no other humans exist whose time or labor can be commanded.

You have to factor personal effort into the mix. e.g. time and energy is used up accessing the vending machine, those are costs which are part of the labor requirement, hence, there's still labor involved in obtaining the resource.

Of course, all this is getting really silly with magical vending machines which required zero effort to arrive at the location fully stocked. But, it shows without the personal labor of the person in using the machines, the money still has no value.

Another point is how did the machines get there? There's nothing in the labor-value theory that says the labor must be contemporaneous with the purchase. With technological devices, labor can be substituted with "work" (in the scientific definition).

[Jonathan S. Fox]

You've agreed that:

1. The value of money is its purchasing power in goods and services.
2. Scarcity of goods and services drives prices up, which reduces the value of each bit of money.
3. Amount of labor invested is not always correlated with the amount, quality, or price of goods.

These points all lead to the conclusion that:

1. Goods and services are inherently valuable.
2. Labor is valuable to the extent that it can be converted into goods and services.
3. Money is valuable to the extent that it can be converted into goods and services.

This isn't what you're concluding, however. You're concluding that the value of money is its ability to command labor, not its ability to command goods and services. This is despite conceding that prices -- which you have defined as the same as the value of money -- are directly correlated to the scarcity of goods and services, and not to the expenditure of labor.

Your argument to defend this is:

1. If no labor, or at least "work" in a scientific sense, is done, no matter how small or incidental, then money has no value.

My response is that if no work in a scientific sense is done, then no physical forces exist. But physics, while necessary for money to exist, is not sufficient. Similarly, if no humans burn calories, then we're probably not dealing with money, since humans invented money to regulate human interactions. But humans burning calories, while necessary for money to exist, is also not sufficient for money to have value.

A little reflection will show that labor is expended as a result of the potential value of the goods and services that can be acquired by doing so. If you take goods and services away, labor alone has negative value: it is exertion without a product, and people will actually pay to avoid it. Labor, like money, is not inherently valuable, but derives its value from your ability to convert it into goods and services -- and just like money, if you can't get much stuff with your labor, it's not very valuable.