Axiom About Tastes

Feeling is the most important concept in the science about humans. Feelings can be negative and then called need, poverty or sorrow. Feelings can be positive and then called joy, value or wealth. Earlier I listed eight statements—eight axioms—about human feelings that should be taken into account by anyone, who debates about economics, politics, law, social philosophy or life itself:

About Humanism: Only humans feel; collectives do not feel.
About Isolation: Feelings of other people can be judged only by their acts.
About Insatiability: It is impossible to overcome all needs.
About Tastes: People value powers differently.
About Egoism: Strangers' needs are not important.
About Love: Loved ones are only few.
About Justice: The worse the offense, the more offender is hated.
About Envy: The richer the person, the more he is hated.

Each of these axioms cuts away a huge mass of statements as antiscientific ones. And only the statements not contradictory to these axioms can be considered as scientific.

We have already discussed first three axioms.

Today it’s turn of the fourth axiom—about tastes, or about difference in evaluation of powers, abilities or resources.

Fruitless quest for objective value. Value is quite often treated as objective measuring unit like mass, size or speed. This reasoning is very much supported by confusion between value and price. Some people try to objectively measure “objective value” and make objective conclusions—i.e. conclusions that do not depend on tastes—about value of powers. According to Marx and other followers of labor theory of value, the value of commodity is a measurable embodied labor, “petrified” in commodity. If measured correctly, then anyone would come to the same result—the same amount of value. The more labor is put into commodity, the more valuable it is. But searches of objective value are false searches, leading to false conclusion, such as idea of unproductiveness of trade, or idea that fair exchange is necessarily equivalent exchange.

Subjective nature of value. Human insatiability inevitably comes to the pinch point of deficit of certain powers. Urgency of the deficit of certain power is the value of this power. As long as there’s no deficit, the power is not perceived as valuable, just as you don’t perceive air or water on the beach as valuable powers.

Value by definition is the joy that power brings. To say “more valuable” is to say “more preferable” or “more joyful”. To say, “A is more valuable than B”, is to say, “A brings more joy that B”. Note that more joy for John doesn’t mean more joy for Bill. From Bill’s point of view things may look opposite. Thus it is not sufficient to say “more valuable” or “more joyful”. We must indicate to whom it is more valuable or to whom it is more joyful. Subjective nature of value means that we must take into account the subject who evaluates.

Incongruence of different people’s values. When rating objects by their mass or volume, everyone would come up with the same result. But it is absolutely not necessarily so when rating powers by their value.

Human needs and joys are subjective. We can only judge them by the acts of those humans. And human behavior tells us that humans rate powers differently. As such, people trade, and since they do it willingly, we can draw a conclusion about different evaluation of property that they exchange. By giving away property A in exchange for property B, one values B more than A. On the contrary—another, by receiving A in exchange for B, values A more than B. The bigger incongruence of ratings, the more people tend to each other to mutually receive something much more valuable from another one in exchange for something less valuable of their own.

Productiveness of trade. Axiom about tastes classifies statements about essential unproductiveness of trade as unscientific ones. Both trading parties can reach profit, because they evaluate property that they exchange differently.