Re: Well well, Gibson has lowered prices on its 2015 line...
I'll start with a disclaimer. 3 of my 7 guitars are Gibsons. Never paid more than 1600 CDN for one, even paid $400 for one. I'm happy with the price/value I've gotten. But I've never even contemplated buying a 5-8000 historic. So I've got no skin in this game.
But how do you determine the "intrinsic value" of a thing? I don't mean in some fundamental, Econ grad level way, but even in a practical way.
If you see a guitar as a mechanism to hold strings in tune to make noise through an amplifier, I suppose you might say a well-built guitar has an intrinsic value of (making up numbers here) $500.
But then there's how the guitar looks. Attractiveness is intrinsic, you buy many things for intrinsic beauty (a dozen roses versus a bundle of stinkweed). If you want the functional intrinsic value and the beauty intrinsic value, how much will you spend? I guess it would depend on what you find beautiful: a simple finish or something that takes many coats (man hours) to make.
Then there are what you might call extrinsic things, but they can still be very important to someone without that person being Mr. Burns. Maybe a guitar just like the one your deceased father had, or one like the one you looked at longingly when you were a broke kid, and now you have a job.
Maybe you make good money but hate your job. So your one joy in life is to come home and play the same three blues licks on a guitar that looks like the ones your heroes used when you were a kid.
Maybe you just have the collector gene. You know, the guys who want original 1930s toy train pieces, who travel all around the country going to conventions to get them. Is the rarity of the thing an intrinsic or extrinsic value? Depends on if you're that guy or not. My father-in-law has spent the price of a new car restoring an old 60s Mercury convertible. Is he being unwise? He looks pretty happy and fulfilled about it, even though he could have had a brand new Honda Accord which is (intrinsically?) the better car.
I suppose if buying a Collector's Choice Les Paul took money away from groceries for your kids, the buyer might be a bad person. But someone dropping $4K for a nice instrument who can afford it is hardly someone deserving of hate. 4000 is a lot of money to me, but people spend that all the time on vacations or golf club memberships or drinks out (hopefully not all in one go!).
Other guys might like to own 20 $500 guitars. Good for them. Although the 4K gibson owner might look down on them for being wasteful with the Earth's resources (after all, eating foie gras or a dozen big macs are just the two sides of gluttony.)
Hate is a pretty strong word for people with a little disposable income (arguably) paying a little too much for a guitar.
