If labor and labor alone determines the value of an item, what of the fact that a cherry pie and a mud pie contain the same number of labor hours, and yet the former is far more valuable than the latter? The response of the unsophisticated Marxist is that what he has in mind is not labor per se, but rather “socially necessary labor,” or some such. (...) But to define “socially necessary labor” as that which is correlated with value (the cherry pie has more of it than the mud pie, which, it turns out, has none), is to leave unexplained its genesis.
