Value of people

There was a discussion around the dinner table the other night about "How much is a person worth?"
The context for the discussion was trade: "Is it ethical for a company to move because the labor in another country is lower? Isn't that exploiting those low-pay workers offshore?" Well, if you can make the same quality product cheaper elsewhere but you don't move, your company will probably have to compete with someone who does move, and you will go out of business. As long as the workers have a choice, i.e. it's not a one-company town, then the workers get to decide whether the wages are high enough or not; if not, they go elsewhere.
From there, the question arose as to what a person's intrinsic value is. The Compassionate member of the family held that each person is priceless; the Economist insisted that a person is worth what someone else will pay for his knowledge or services.
They're both right, since, as BB pointed out in the comments to a previous post, it depends on who's doing the pricing. I may value a random person on another continent at zero--I wouldn't pay anything to support him. Some unknown furniture worker might be worth $200 per year to me, as shown by what I'm willing to pay for the furniture. I don't know him, so there's no value in the relationship. On the other hand, I have friends to whom I've given hundreds of dollars, when I didn't really have a hundred to spare. And there are some people--my wife, my son, a friend or two--for whom I can say that I've sat down and thought it through and decided that yes, I would be willing to die for them if the need arose, or to support them indefinitely (however, Josh, you still need to plan on getting a job--Ed.). The value is in the relationship. The corollary is that you--I--need not to be a hermit, but to go out and create relationships.