The Crawfs are moving house soon. A valuer came round today to look at out furniture, too much of it for the new place.

Over many years we have spent, say, £20,000 on these pieces of different shapes and sizes. How to get anything back now? If they go to auction we’re told we’ll be lucky to get £6000, from which auctioneers’ and other fees will be extracted.

eBay is fine if you have the know-how and energy to use it, but with the hassle factor of photographing and describing and posting all sorts of different things will it really do us much better than getting the whole lot whisked away in one sad van?

Some of our quirky souvenirs (a chess-set or two) picked up on sundry expeditions round post-communist flea-markets are worth a bit. Perhaps. The furniture? Sorry, but no thanks.

Is this fair? What about all the craftsmanship that went into some of those solid yet graceful Edwardian wardrobes and sideboards? Is it really worth not much more than firewood?

Does the Labour Theory of Value (worked up by K Marx and others) not help me here?

Or am I left with the Subjective Theory of Value:

… a buyer in a free market who offers to pay a price lower than that which is commensurate with the amount of labor used to produce the good merely communicates information to the seller about the value the good might create for the buyer…

The offer is in one sense an expression of the buyer’s opinion, which the seller is free to reject.

Well sure, I am free to tell the valuer and auction house to get lost. But removals day looms fast – where then will all this stuff actually go?

Tastes change. Lifestyles change. As the valuer asked, "Who drinks from teacups or uses fish-knives these days anyway?"

Hmm. Not us, most of the time at least.

All of which mournful self-pity takes me (via Browser) to one zungzungu who has views on why modern journalists are a dying breed – their products were falsely insulated from competition for decades and weren’t in fact much good (my emphasis added):

Print journalism is dying because the writing being produced by amateurs has enough use-value to show how over-valued in market terms professional writing has become or perhaps always been…

… what the internet has done is break the guild monopoly of a few publishers and allowed the market to “correct an inefficiency,” as the bloodless language of economics has it.

When people make the choice not to pay for your labor, that’s the voice of the market telling you to “re-train and re-skill,” a market that has just figured out that it can do without you.

And without my beloved furniture.

Sigh.

Market forces help you sing lustily – when you’re winning.