Pieter and Ben have been arguing about this since they were nineteen. Markets or labour. Capitalism or Marxism. Which one actually honours a human being, and which one just claims to. Neither of them has won, after two decades, and I wrote it that way on purpose.
Because the actual argument — the one underneath the economics — was never really about policy. It was about what each of them believed a person is fundamentally worth, and what a life ought to be organized around. Those are values questions wearing an economics costume, and I think a great deal of what passes for political or economic disagreement is exactly this: two people who'd actually agree on what matters most, arguing furiously about the best mechanism for protecting it.
Values matter — the actual, unglamorous, daily kind, not the ones printed on a mission statement — because they're the thing doing the deciding when nobody's checking your work. Pieter's spreadsheet and Ben's picket line are both, in their own ways, attempts to protect something they believe is sacred. The tragedy in their friendship isn't that one of them is wrong. It's that spending so much energy proving the other one wrong nearly cost them the very thing their shared values were supposed to protect: each other.
I don't think the resolution, in the end, is a values checklist or a five-point framework. I think it's closer to what a priest tells them, gently, about twenty-two years into the argument — that they'd been asking the wrong question the whole time. Not which system is correct, but what a person actually owes another person, regardless of which system they're standing inside.
That's a harder question to answer, and a much more useful one to keep asking.