liberals don't believe in meritocracies. They value labor and the 'effort' put into something. i.e. someone who dug ditches all day should receive more compensation than someone who wrote code for 2 hours.
Yeah those damn liberals. I totally heard Obama say ditch diggers should have offices in SV with foozball tables and fancy chairs and coders should be paid minimum wage.
What are you talking about? If you don't have anything intelligent to add to the conversation, don't post a comment. Learn about what Jon Stewart and others that follow Marxist theory mean when they refer to the value of labor being the most important thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
"Labor is not the source of all wealth." -Karl Marx (from your link)
It would appear that Marx rejected the Labor Theory of Value. So do I, for that matter. It does not account for the quality of labor, scarcity, or demand. Labor is a factor in value, but it's not the only factor, or even the primary one in many cases.
Leaving behind the 19th century anarchists who were still wrapping their heads around an economy that didn't even exist yet, modern practitioners of the labor theory of value are classic examples of theorists in denial of reality. If the theory and reality are at odds, then clearly reality must be wrong, correct? But they're also pretty irrelevant outside their little ivory towers. Power is collected by realists.
Personally, I think it's much more interesting to consider where capitalism fails at measuring value - basically, the idea that all value can be measured in terms of fungible currency, and anything that cannot be measured in currency therefore has no value. This problem sticks out like a sore thumb at awareness of externalized costs (or the lack of awareness, in the case of the hordes of neoliberal "conservative" fools who have no idea what a real free market looks like). But so much of value can't be measured in dollars.
