Trade is Primarily Driven by Consciousness, Or, Secularism is Wrong

There is no materialist justification for trade. 

Any materialist assessment of prices gives you an objective price. A price that's the same for everyone, due to the objective nature of physics. Trade gives you nothing. Might as well keep it.

They like to say e.g. a mine owner will have more iron ore, thus locally a higher supply and thus a lower price, while you have more beans or whatever. However...why don't you just dig up your own ore? Why can't he grow his own beans? Answer: no reason. 

If he gives you some ore, and you give him some beans, what's changed? Some transport costs. You spent joules or kilocalories handing it over and accepting the return. The world is poorer, not richer. Better if he grows his own beans and you mine your own ore, and save the transaction costs.

Conclusion: it's not called "godless" Communism by some sort of historical coincidence. 

 

Okay it's not really no reason. You can try to rescue some minor trade from differences in your mobile meat gundams. It's easier for him to mine ore and easier for you to grow beans. 

Haha no wait
Why would anyone care if it's easier? Why not just work ten hours instead of eight? Why not double the transaction costs? 

Why is there any reason to maximize material gains? 

Why not just walk off into the sea and die?

There isn't. Without consciousness, there is no reason at all. Hume was right.

You can test this with brain-damaged patients, by the way. You can lose only your emotions. These patients have full rational abilities, perfectly capable of all the rational arguments and understandings they were capable of before the injury. They just don't do anything. They can't make any decisions, because they have no preferences. 

The emotional outranks the logical. Rationality exists as a servant to feelings.

Almost all trade is driven by differences in value, even if we were to assume there is some way to rescue materialist values from the meat-gundam differences. It's not meaningfully easier for him to mine ore; rather, he finds it less stressful than you do. Meanwhile, you find growing beans less stressful. 

This is especially evident in low-skilled occupations. The usual trade is the husband doesn't much mind mowing the lawn, and the wife doesn't much mind doing the dishes. Materially, there is no difference if the husband does the dishes and the wife mows the lawn instead. There's no training at all involved in pushing a cart forward. It's purely down to subjective preferences. And yet, this is a profitable trade. 

The miner doesn't value ore less because he has more of it. The miner has more ore because he values mining more. You don't value beans less because you have more of them. You have more beans because you value farming more. (Equivalently, value more => cost less.)

It's worth the transaction costs, even though there is no meaningful material difference, because conscious values are better satisfied. You can't just swap jobs, because you don't like tunnels and he finds the sun annoyingly bright. 

The monetary prices or "dollar values" we put on things is merely the best-known way to measure conscious values. When the miner gives you a chunk of ore, the actual monetary value of that ore goes up. It's worth more in your hand than it was in his. Gains in trade are the result of diversity in consciousness.

Trade is amazing precisely because ~nothing materially changes, and yet the total value of the world goes up. If you have a lot of trade, paying very tiny costs causes a lot of value to be created. And that's why non-peasant merchants are rich, even though they can't capture much of the value created without stifling the very trades they're facilitating.

Capitalism is the result of not denying the rather obvious reality of the spiritual.