VALUE

    My view.

    The value of your labor to another is the amount of useful energy the
other can get out of your product, not the amount of useful energy that
you put into making your product.
 
    Value = useful energy out, not useful energy in.
 
    The farmer who spends all day long planting stones in his corn field
has done the same amount of labor as the farmer who spends all day long
planting corn seeds that grow and produce a return, but the value of the
first farmer's work is nil.

    Value does not equal labor put in.

    It is true that products which need a lot of labor and useful energy
put into them in order to be made, tend to command a higher price at the
sale, but only because they are in demand in the first place because of
their potential useful energy out, and because they are more scarce due to
the higher demands of manufacture. 

    If there is no useful energy out, there is no value to the
product no matter how much labor or useful energy went into making it.
 
    Value is determined ONLY by the amount of useful energy people
can get out of a product and by their demand or need for that useful
energy.

    If people have no demand or need for the useful energy to be gotten
out of your product, or if there is no useful energy to be gotten out of
your product, people will not value it, unless they value useless energy
or entropy (which is the opposite of energy). 
 
    Fair exchange is when people trade equal amounts of useful energy for
useful energy.  Sometimes smaller amounts of a scarcer more necessary form
of energy will be considered equal in value to larger amounts of more
abundant less necessary energy.  

    If someone is cold during the winter, he may be willing to trade two
gallons of car fuel which he has for 1 gallon of heating fuel which he
doesn't have, even though two gallons of car fuel has twice the energy
content of 1 gallon of heating fuel. 

    So equality of value needs to take into consideration both the raw
amount of the energy traded AND its usefullness or immediate need. 
 
    'Useful energy' doesn't have to be physical energy, it can be art and
aesthetics too, it can also be free time to play or rest.  Everything that
is valued by human beings is useful energy or potential energy of one form
or another. 

    Homer