Well I am afraid you are entirely wrong. All people have the same moral worth. Now that we have that cleared up, I think it should be clear why I don't care for capitalism.
No economic system has any regard for the "Moral worth" of people, because economics is about resource management, not the true value of the human soul or whatever.
My layman's understanding of the LtV is that the value of an item is determined by the labor that goes into it, including the costs of gathering materials and transporting it to market, and so that under idealized circumstances, the price of the item should be the price of the materials that went into it and the cost of the labor to produce it. In actuality prices differ due to fluctuations in demand, which is where marginal theory of demand comes in.
There's actually no such thing as "marginal theory of demand", I think you're thinking of marginal utility, which has an impact on demand, but so do lots of other things.
You get the LtV broadly correct, and so the problem with it should be obvious. To quote Henlien:
Of course, the Marxian definition of value is ridiculous. All the work one cares to add will not turn a mud pie into an apple tart; it remains a mud pie, value zero. By corollary, unskillful work can easily subtract value; an untalented cook can turn wholesome dough and fresh green apples, valuable already, into an inedible mess, value zero. Conversely, a great chef can fashion of those same materials a confection of greater value than a commonplace apple tart, with no more effort than an ordinary cook uses to prepare an ordinary sweet.
These kitchen illustrations demolish the Marxian theory of value -- the fallacy from which the entire magnificent fraud of communism derives -- and to illustrate the truth of the common-sense definition as measured in terms of use.
Now, in fairness Marx realized this, hence his addition of "Socially necessary labor time" as a patch to get around that little issue, but the problem of that was that it's very clearly that, an ill-defined and vague patch to try and write around a fundamentally flawed assumption, and in doing so it turned LtV from a flawed theory to a useless one, because while you could get prices based on LtV, you can't do so with Marx's version. And LtV itself is useless, as it still has the base assumption that all labor is equally valuable, and that is simply not true. All labor is not equally valuable (also, this isn't even touching on stuff like direct vs indirect labor, but let's keep it simple).
But, for the sake of argument, let's pretend that it is, somehow. LtV is still useless, because prices are still going to be set by what people will pay, not what things are "worth", because if you don't do that you're going to kneecap the entire economy. The ability to charge more than the base price, IE "extracted surplus labor" or whatever, is critical to how the economy actually works. If you build something desirable and that commands a high price, you will earn more money, and be able to use that to expand, hire more people, buy more machines, make more of the thing, and make it more available to more people, and so on. Ban people from doing that terribly extraction, you cripple the ability of the economy to actually grow and expand. Ban it most of the way, by doing something like setting a fixed cap on how much more can be charged, and that's still bad, because while the economy can grow, it's growth rate is restricted across the board (not only can you not hire as many people as you could or buy as much equipment as you could, the people that build that equipment can't sell as much of it as they could, limiting their ability to grow, and so on).
If you want to see what happens when you ignore all those points and do it anyway, lookup the results of rent control.
My smart ass answer was because, while it doesn't actually produce a model of prices, it gets to a significant point.
A theory that doesn't produce a useful model of prices is useless and wrong, no matter what else you think you learn from it.
Why should "ownership" produce wealth? The ability of someone to extract wealth from another's labor is morally bad on the face of it.
Yeah, if management and owners were nothing more than useless parasites taking away from the workers while doing nothing of worth, then you could make a moral argument against them. But that's not what happens in reality, in the overwhelming majority of cases. Company owners and leaders actually do work to advance the company's position and add value, and in addition provide other benifits (the most notable of which being they take on most of the risk, if the firm fails they stand to lose a great deal whereas the workers on the floor are largely immune to such consequences outside of needing a new job, which would happened anyway).
Now you can, and many people like you have, argue something to the effect of "But there's no way Jeff Bezos works so much he therefor deserves 200 billion dollars", to which I have several replies. First off, Bezos doesn't actually have 200 billion dollars sitting in a vault somewhere, look up how stocks work. Secondly, unfairness works both ways, Bezos doesn't deserve billions of dollars in the same way the entry level employees at amazon don't deserve $15 an hour. Third, Bezos more or less singlehandedly revolutionized online and offline commerce, logistics, data storage, and more, that may well be worth 200 billion dollars.
Now, one can argue that people at the top are still overpayed, and that might be the case. However, that's not the full story. Let's take walmart, the architypical mom and pop store crushing, union busting, surplus value extracting evil megacorporation. If you took every bit of money that's paid out to shareholders and executives and so on and gave it to the workers, it adds up to about a month's pay, which spread out over the year is like an $200. Now, I'm sure they'd love the extra money, I certainly would have when I worked there. However, I'm also sure that an extra $200 a month is not going to be a massive, life chancing quality of life enhancement for the vast majority of them, and if it was you could probably do better by just buying everyone a copy of Financial Peace instead.
Given communism's 100% failure rate thus far, I don't think it's worth the risk of turning the entire country into a mismanaged tolitarian state on the off chance we actually get Real Communism this time and everyone becomes a few hundred bucks richer. The communist argument in this case is broadly equivalent to having a car that runs well and does everything you want it to, but it has a really ugly interior, which you plan to solve by blowing up the entire car in the hopes that you can build a more functional motorcycle out of the remains.
As a final point regarding ownership, people have the moral right to do what they want with their prosperity, and private property is something that's seemingly hard coded into human nature, given how common the concept has been (even in tribal societies well below dunbar's number, where in theory a purely communal lifestyle is possible).
And when you see the consequences for actual laborers in places where they lack strong protections from violence and exploitation that is confirmed. And our entire economy is built on access to labor without those protection, so wealth can be extracted by people totally disconnected from the labor involved.
Again, this "wealth extraction" thing your on about doesn't exist, there is no such concept in actual economics. Also, our economy is by no means "built on" any such thing, it is entirely possible to have a functional economy with strong worker protection (there's just no motive for people to demand it, because at the end of the day no one cares about sweatshop labor in dirtpooristan if it means their ipods are cheaper, and aren't willing to make the sacrifices nessary to ethically source everything they use or go without the things they can't source).
Thirdly, they're still better off this way (or at least, no worse off). In some hypothetical, no access to cheap third world labor world, those people would either A) not have jobs at all, depressing their standard of living even farther, or B) would still be opressed labors in terrible or worse conditions, but from a domestic company instead of an international one. Because the problem here isn't capitalism, the problem is some countries are terrible and have terrible worker protection. Someone would exploit that, the only question is who. And if you live in a country with worker protection that weak, poor worker protection is also probably the least of your problems.
And of course, as terrible as that is, we're back to the "blowing up to car to try and cobble together a motorcycle" plan. The risk/reward ratio here is not in favor of starting a communist revolution on the off chance we can marginally improve the lives of people in some far off country somehow.
