1. David Wright invited me to a podcast, which is here. I got off to a slow start, so I recommend skipping ahead to about minute 6, maybe even to minute 8, where Wright brings up the book Capitalism without Capital.
2. After being stimulated by Wright’s questions, I wrote an essay on the social construction of value. Titled The Value of Nothing, it begins
If he were alive today, Oscar Wilde would say that a cynic is a man who knows the price of Bitcoin. You cannot drink a Bitcoin. You cannot plant crops on Bitcoin. Its intrinsic value is nothing.
Read the whole thing. I think of it as a deep essay about the fact that value is not intrinsic.
You suggest that Bitcoin is different from water, which one can drink, and farmland, on which one can plant crops. Bitcoin’s value is not intrinsic–it is “socially constructed”–so by implication the value of water and land are intrinsic.
I suspect you are confused.
(since you also say that *no* value is intrinsic)
It’s a shoutback to the lines quoted from “All Along the Watchtower”: “Businessmen, they drink my wine./Plowmen dig my earth.” And then, partly by implication, he says that the value of land and wine is also not intrinsic.
Thanks for the reference. I don’t see why Kling thought it was relevant to his point.