What is your value to society? One broadly applicable and fairly objective measure is your lifetime earnings: the total amount of money and other assets that was ever willingly and voluntarily forked over to you.

So Bill Gates doesn't have much value since his salary has always been tiny compared to his wealth from stocks? That would interpret earnings too narrowly. Gates' true earnings include cash he received as salary as well as through sales of stock and other assets he's earned, and the current liquidation value of his remaining assets. Thus, he has enormous value to society—you and I, not so much.

Your lifetime earnings are not the same as your current wealth because you may have blown all your earnings on video games or given it away to charity. Warren Buffett's value to society didn't change when he gave away much of his money to charity.

In some arenas, better measures exist. In sports, players can be measured on their contribution to wins. In basketball, a player's value is correlated to points scored, rebounds grabbed, assists handed out, blocks made, ect.

But even in a case such as this, earnings become representative of a person's worth. It's usually accurate to say that more wins means more revenue, and better players are paid more. Even overpaid players who are no longer worth the large contracts they signed earlier are on the receiving end of a willing and voluntary exchange of money.

Sometimes lifetime earnings aren't really the best measure. Posthumous earnings, particularly for artists underappreciated in their lifetime, can dwarf the meager earnings they eked out while alive. Even earnings may not be the proper measure here if a painting continues to increase in price in auction. Neither artist or estate participate in any further price increases, yet the value to society that the artist produced with that one painting is best measured by its current market price.

Furthermore, some people may have near-zero lifetime earnings but have enormous value to society, even if they produced nothing that can be bought or sold. Perhaps they raised their children or helped others or released works into the public domain.

So perhaps it is not easy to define a person's exact value to society, but we have a basic guideline that works fairly well fairly often: the more people are willing to hand over their own assets and wealth in appreciation of a person, the greater his or her value.

What about politicians? Are the best politicians the ones that raise the most money for their campaigns? If not, where does the logic of this measuring break down?

The actions of politicians are of generally two types: those in the best interests of all and those in the best interests of a few. Special interest groups contribute to politicians in the hope that they will bless their constituency with special laws. There are price floors on sugar to benefit the sugar lobby, agricultural subsidies to benefit large farms, tariffs on certain imports to benefit particular domestic industries, and untold earmarks, pork belly projects, tax loopholes, and other favors to benefit the contributors—all on our nickel.

It will be this way so long as elected officials have the power to redistribute money and assets. But it can be minimized. On the federal level, all that is required is a strict limitation on the powers of government officials so that they only focus on issues of national defense, and not on what kind of toilets are illegal or managing farm industry. All that'd be required is some kind of document that spells out what Congress can do, with all other functions relegated to the states or citizens themselves.

Of course, we have such a document. It's called the Constitution. And every elected politician swears to uphold it. Yet very few do.

If all politicians truly acted constitutionally, then their level of campaign contributions might indeed be a good measure of their value to society. Until then, the soaring levels of contributions in many cases only reflect the politician's value to those who would take our money by force.

phil@maymin.com