I literally address this, so I'm already questioning whether you bothered to read it.

Of course I didn't bother to read it. You are long-winded and wrong-headed. I do not value your writing, no matter how much labor you put into it. So how can your labor account for its value?

All your gibberish doesn't change the way the world works. Value is observed, not created. Any analysis of where it comes from is just plain wrong.

I analogize your arguments to what I call the "wantological" proof of God's existence: God must exist because, if He didn't, life would suck. You complain about what my approach to value doesn't explain, but you don't say why that matters. You have this long, impenetrable sentence about capital being the self-expansion of value, etc., but it's not really English, is it? It's secret-handshake stuff that can't be refuted because it makes no damn sense. The idea that something proved by that word salad is "overtly obvious" is beyond derision.

The last two sentences of your reply may be completely accurate. But so what? I did not say that we should observe only consumers' behavior; I said that value depends exclusively on it. Money and capital remain money and capital, subject to such observations as we care to make. Why must a statement about the "value" tell us anything about money or capital? If it does, it does; if not, then not.

Likewise, although I don't have any idea what your final sentence means, I'm pretty sure that it doesn't matter. If, as a consequence of defining value by what people will give up to get it, "all real social context is ripped out," then that's too bad. But value is still what the highest bidder will forego to get it. Everything else is something else.

I take Lewis Carroll at his word. When an author uses a word, it means what the author intends it to mean. You may very well have in mind a concept that you call "value" and which arises from labor. But that's not the value anyone else cares about, so any proofs you may be able to make of it are just tautological theorems arising from your idiosyncratic axioms. It's non-Euclidean economic geometry, i.e., it does not map to the real world and is, therefore, entirely useless there.