1. In all markets, including the labor market, trade is by definition marketable.
The prices at which these exchanges are regulated can be said to be both market and economic exchange values, it being understood that the whole of these exchanges is a defined subset of social exchanges The economy is not limited to what is related to these exchanges because some of their terms (money, goods) are massively transferred.
2. Labor remuneration has its own determinants.
Chapters 8 and 9 above, respectively on the distribution (at the highest level, country by country) and on wages all remuneration for work), set out what these determinants normally are, for the most part. The price adjustment between the supply and demand of jobs is not the main determinant of labor compensation. On the other hand, an economic law that a people gains from voluntarily making work is that of sharing the total income of labor through the distribution key that constitutes wage equality and inequality.
3. Placement remuneration has its own determinants.
Chapters 6 and 10 above, respectively on profit (enterprise earnings) and interest (when their key rate is profit), explain what these determinants are. The price adjustment between supply and demand for investments is not the main determinant of placement returns.
4. Ricardo was the first to derive the concept of economic scarcity from the general notion of scarcity.
From the fourth to the sixth paragraph of section 1 of his chapter 1, On Value, of On The Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation, Ricardo wrote (below in italics):
There are some commodities, the value of which is determined by their scarcity alone. No labor can increase the quantity of such commodities, and therefore their value cannot be lowered by an increased supply. Some rare statues and pictures, scarce books and coins, wines of peculiar quality, which can be made only from grapes grown on a particular soil, of which there is a very limited quantity, are all of this description. Their value is wholly independent of the quantity of labor originally necessary to produce them, and varies with the varying wealth and inclinations of those who are desirous to possess them.
These commodities, however, form a very small part of the mass of commodities who are daily exchanged on the market. By far the greatest part of those commodities which are the objects of desire, are procured by labor; and they may be multiplied, not in one country alone, but in many, almost without any assignable limit, if we are disposed to bestow the labor necessary to obtain them.
In speaking then of commodities, of their exchangeable value, and of the laws which regulate their relative prices, we mean always such commodities only as can be increased in quantity by the exertion of human industry, and on the production of which competition operates without restraint.
5. A commodity is economically scarce when it cannot, permanently or temporarily, be produced at will by human industry.
Land space, and more generally real estate, as soon as it is put up for sale and expropriated for compensation by the police, is a scarce commodity with considerable social importance and economic benefits. Other resources that cause economic scarcity include, of course, in addition to valuable Peters, minerals and fossil fuels. Their operations create and maintain manna at the expense of the buyers of the products derived from these resources: who nowadays has never heard of oil rent and has never seen several times some of its effects?
6. The price formation of a large number of commodities sold by enterprises is, unless there are obstacles to competition, brought back to its sufficient level by equalizing the return on capital of the same systemic level.
At these sufficient levels, the price formation of a large number of commodities purchased from enterprises are in proportion to the quantities of labor and investment.171 The political lesson to be drawn from this is undeniable. The organization of savings placement markets and those on which enterprises sell must have the effect of removing the obstacles to the equalization of the rate of return of the same systemic level.
7. To attribute scarcity as the cause of all commodity exchange value and the adjustment between supply and demand as the universal instrument of its determination is pseudo-scientific.
David Ricardo was right to add to the distinction between use value and exchange value, identified by Adam Smith, the observation of the difference between scarce commodities and commodities that can be reproduced at will by human industry. The neoclassicists have circumvented both of these distinctions, thinking that they are thus advancing political economy, but unfortunately without seeing that their subjectivist mathematization distances them from true economic science. The latter does not contravene any verifiable reality when it teaches that all prices expressed in a quantity of money have nothing more in common than that they are commodity exchange values.