| This question <2|9> overall <5|9> JohnGalt: <8|8>. |
| Question 4: Can one say that happiness is the only true wealth? |
| [8] JohnGalt: Happiness cannot be considered the only true wealth if you adopt a Marxist perspective of wealth. In a bourgeois society wealth can be considered an accumulation of commodities, with its unit being a single commodity. Every commodity has two aspects to it---both use-value and exchange-value. |
| A commodity as defined in an article on marxists.org is “anything necessary, useful or pleasant in life,” an object of human wants, a means of existence in the widest sense of the term. The use-value of a commodity has to do with the physical palpable existence of the commodity and has value only in use. Therefore, wealth always consists of use values. Use-value is the immediate physical entity in which a definite economic relationship exchange-value is expressed. So essentially, wealth is basically composed of use-values. |
| Saying happiness is the only true wealth also ignores that notion presented in our reading that wealth can be anything that enhances human life, not simply happiness. It would seem that sorrow and other human states of being might also enhance human life. |
|
|
|||||