What reason do you have to think the Labor Theory of Value is correct? Which of its claims are empirically falsifiable? What evidence do you have that the quantities it posits actually exist?
Again, I'll just share my experience.
No theory about what is valuable is empirical, and no quantity of anything (apart from discreet instances of a thing) can be shown to exist, so that objection is a non-starter.
If your theory is unfalsifiable, why is criticizing it for being unfalsifiable a non-starter? To me it seems devastating. In any event, quantities of all sorts of things can be shown to exist -- energy, momentum, current, pressure, yada yada -- and if "what is valuable" isn't one of them, then that's a reason to stop trying to do economic reasoning by making claims about what is valuable. We've known how to do economics without value claims for about a hundred and fifty years now. The Marxists are as outdated on this point as creationists.
But abstract ideas can be handy nonetheless. Ethics is one example of empirically vacuous thought.
I was impressed by the labor theory of value because it accounted for why and how things are taken as valuable in a way that seems consistent with scientific reasoning,
That appears to contradict your statement that no theory about what is valuable is empirical.
specifically the idea that entropy always tends to decrease on large enough scales.
Entropy always tends to
increase on large enough scales. (And in this case, "large enough scales" means any scale larger than dust particles being randomly buffeted by atoms in a fluid.)
Basically, nothing in the universe is useful to us unless we make it useful by working on it, transforming it from an arbitrary arrangement to one that suits our needs.
That is a wildly counterintuitive claim. Why do you believe it? The universe is filled with all manner of things that are useful to us that we didn't have to work on to make useful. The North Star is useful to us and we haven't transformed it at all. We did nothing to the air to make it breathable. (Unless you count undoing things we'd previously done to the air to make it less breathable.
) Cave men took shelter in caves without first having to dig them. Fruit trees grow wild in nature, and they make fruits we can eat without first working on them.
To do that, we need to surrender bits of ourselves, literally speaking, by expending energy and time, of which our supply is finite on a biological level. Since nobody wants to waste their energy and time, it makes sense to consider labor as the currency of value.
That doesn't follow. In the first place,
whose labor defines the currency unit? Some people's labor makes stuff a lot more useful than other people's labor makes it. Ever heard of Gresham's Law? "Bad money drives out good." If a highly useful and a meagerly useful currency are treated as equal, the highly useful will disappear from circulation.
And in the second place, just because labor makes things more useful and we rely on that to obtain useful stuff, that doesn't mean labor is
the only thing that makes things more useful. All sorts of inputs are helpful in making bits of the universe more useful to us. If you just declare as if by divine fiat that you're only going to count one of them and you're going to define all the rest as zero contributors, it's no surprise when you're able to "prove" from that premise that somebody's "exploiting" providers of the input you defined in advance as magically special. And if you want to believe in your own deduction, it certainly helps to have an unfalsifiable theory to derive it from.
Everything valuable needs to be created by working on something with no value, and work is a measure of energy and time directed through the temporary, vulnerable bodies of organisms. As far as abstract concepts go, this one appears to be the most grounded in reality to me.
But not everything valuable needs to be created by working on something with no value, if by "valuable" we mean that real live people
value it. The caveman valued his cave.
Worse, you're deceiving yourself, by shoehorning a mental zero-sum model into a phenomenon that isn't zero sum. You're treating "value" as if it were an incompressible fluid like water, if you want a cubic foot of which where you're going then you'll have to take a cubic foot with you -- as opposed to a compressible fluid like air, which people routinely take two cubic feet of with them down into the deep and then comfortably breathe two hundred cubic feet out of their scuba tanks. You're motivating your "value" theory with "make it useful" and "suits our needs". Well, usefulness and needs don't follow the accounting rules of incompressible fluids. We constantly get more usefulness and need satisfaction out of our stuff than we put in, because the same thing is more useful to one person than to another. When what I have is more useful to you than to me, and what you have is more useful to me than to you, we can swap, and thereby increase the usefulness of the stuff
without transforming it.
The Labor Theory of Value is an
objective value theory. But the degree to which people value stuff is
subjective. Things aren't valuable full stop; they're trash
to this person and treasure
to that person. No objective value theory can correctly represent that phenomenon. A theory that ascribes a one-size-fits-all value to everything will inevitably imply that in every trade either somebody got short-changed or else people traded equal for equal and therefore got no more usefulness from what they received than from what they gave up. But that would imply they have no reason to trade in the first place. But actual trading makes both parties better off, which is why people do it. So Marx's Value=Labor theory makes exactly the same fatal error as Ayn Rand's Value=Gold theory.
In capitalist production, one party is giving up something very important (most of their lives) while another party decides how it is used. Under any theory of value except labor, this can be excused; ... But only one theory captures the shared interests of the large majority of humans, who do not like work being imposed on them and resist it every day.
So, based on unfalsifiable metaphysics, a metaphorical analogy to your impressions of science, and an artificial accounting procedure that inherently can't ever correspond to people's actual evaluations of usefulness, you propose to rerun an experiment -- abolition of capitalism -- that has already been run many times, and that experience teaches us always results in a police state and usually results in a famine. And you think this is in the shared interests of the large majority of humans?!?
Meanwhile, the minority tries to impose as much work as possible, on and off the job, for as little pay as they can get away with.
And at the same time, the workers are trying to impose as much pay as possible for as little work as they can get away with. Employees and employers are competitors as well as cooperators. They're competing for larger shares of the overall usefulness increase that comes from trading, while simultaneously cooperating to bring about a usefulness increase that neither could create alone.
How that synergistic product is split depends on negotiation, which means it depends on who's in the stronger negotiating position. So if owners are getting too much and employees are getting too little, the solution is to strengthen the employees' negotiating position, not to do away with the trade that's what creates a usefulness increase worth competing for in the first place. Which is to say,
unionize.
There's a reason governments that collectivize the means of production always prohibit independent trade unions. If government power fell into the hands of snake oil salesmen they'd outlaw real doctors. Trade unionists who still think socialists are their friends are delusional. Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
