I meant you define their labour value in the same manner meaning workers with jobs more demanding are compensated better than those with less physically or mentally demanding jobs
Even then, if you want to talk about economic optimization, you have to distinguish between hard jobs and busy work.
i used coal mining as an example of difficult work, not as an symbol of my desire for more coal
I've seen "coal miner" held up as this kind of blue collar martyr far too many times, when the career should have been exhausted decades ago. This kind of job isn't unique. And there are lots of ways to make sure they suck less that have nothing to do with what a YouTube star does to make a living.
entertainment requiring less capital investment than say manufacturing doesn’t mean that entertainment has either higher use value or higher labor value
It's an apples to oranges problem. Weighting a lump of coal against an hour of TV content only works when you attack it from a strict market model. And even then, it boils down to this Friedmanesque view of exchange value, rather than labor or use value.
At a certain point, you're better off abandoning the view and attacking things from the perspective of a guy like Richard Wolfe. Stop asking how much an hour of labor is worth and start asking how much an hour of labor is needed. If you hit a point at which we've generated all the coal we need for the year, there's no need to keep churning it out. Then, if coal miners want to use their free time to do Twitch Streaming, more power to them. And if they can get people to shower them with gifts in the process, that's outside the scope of a central planner's purview. It only matters in the broad sense of "entertainment has value that consumers demand" and not in the granular sense of "we need to strictly regulate how much a single individual streamer can earn in order to be fair to coal miners".
Even then, if you want to talk about economic optimization, you have to distinguish between hard jobs and busy work.
I've seen "coal miner" held up as this kind of blue collar martyr far too many times, when the career should have been exhausted decades ago. This kind of job isn't unique. And there are lots of ways to make sure they suck less that have nothing to do with what a YouTube star does to make a living.
It's an apples to oranges problem. Weighting a lump of coal against an hour of TV content only works when you attack it from a strict market model. And even then, it boils down to this Friedmanesque view of exchange value, rather than labor or use value.
At a certain point, you're better off abandoning the view and attacking things from the perspective of a guy like Richard Wolfe. Stop asking how much an hour of labor is worth and start asking how much an hour of labor is needed. If you hit a point at which we've generated all the coal we need for the year, there's no need to keep churning it out. Then, if coal miners want to use their free time to do Twitch Streaming, more power to them. And if they can get people to shower them with gifts in the process, that's outside the scope of a central planner's purview. It only matters in the broad sense of "entertainment has value that consumers demand" and not in the granular sense of "we need to strictly regulate how much a single individual streamer can earn in order to be fair to coal miners".