← Back to context

Comment by cylinder714

2 years ago

Winemaking requires far more resources, labor, skill and time than simple grape juice production.

Resources and time are, obviously, not labor.

Turning commodity grape juice into commodity wine requires no appreciable extra labor compared to the required labor to prevent fermentation.

The grape juice vs. wine is a rather classic counterexample, but it's hardly difficult to come up with any number of other examples of value absent labor.

Winemaking uses far more, but does it really have to? Does the $10,000 bottle of wine really that much more labor in it to justify that price? or are value and labor only loosely related? If I get lucky and find some diamonds on the ground, have I labored a lot for the value of those diamonds on my patch of dirt compared to your patch of dirt. There's no value with absolutely zero labor, sure, but there's clearly a difference between a carpenter making 100 chairs, and a programmer making 100 copies of a program they wrote.