Murky and subjective?

Perhaps, Kurt. But restrictive and arbitrary is what I'd call the notion that value is a function of supply and demand, so much so that distorts reality into subjectivity in an entirely different way.

For instance, to make a 'demand' for a 'supply,' rather than just have a need, one must have the means to pay or exchange. Many people in this world have a need for food or shelter or health care, but have no means to make a demand.

Even their labor power is at such a level that it's unwanted by those in the market for labor power. Essentially, they live outside the market, a point I make to some of my comrades when I say many people still suffer from the lack of capitalism, as well as those who suffer from it.

Now I'm of the opinion, along with Marx, that markets are an achievement of human civilization, but that doesn't mean they don't fail or that it's for all time, or that their dynamic side, unrestrained, doesn't wreak havoc in the world.

An economy based on taking all the carbon under the ground and putting it into the upper atmosphere is a case in point.

Markets will exist as long as there is scarcity, under any system. And their failure are precisely where human intelligence, in the form of good policy, tax and otherwise, comes into play.

Myself, I'd like to abolish most of the labor market by having workers run their factories and pay themselves from the profits the firm earns, rather than as wage-labor. Also abolish the capital markets, by having a capital assets tax redistributed downward to community-controlled inventment banks for funding new and innovative startups. But keep the market in consumer goods and services as the most efficient--Hayek is right on that one.

In the distant future, the market withers away as scarcity withers away, and the amount of labor time in any given commodity approaches zero, ie, full cybernation.

But a point often missed by libertarians is that markets are at least three-way relationships--buyer, seller and cop (someone has to enforce standard and measures, at least)--and they only thrive in a context of sustainable sociality and the gifts of nature.

All this is a bit visionary and utopian, but so was Adam Smith in his day. Your desire for a questionable objectivity, however, separates value from its moral dimension, which, in the end, is at its very root.