A comment left elsewhere regarding wealth.
Wealth can certainly be crated.
Every act of creation creates wealth. Every time you write something you contribute a little to global wealth. Even on Facebook–though we are (inadvertently) giving that wealth (which, individually, isn’t worth very much) to Facebook, which is why they’re so rich.
If you create something, if you write a sonnet or draft an essay or write some computer software or build a shed–you create wealth.
(Keep in mind that fundamentally, “wealth” is “something desirable.”
For many forms of wealth, we are often willing to translate that desire into financial terms–which is, at its core–a proxy of our own efforts to create wealth. Meaning if you write a great book, I may be willing to trade some of my wealth–created by writing software, and selling it to someone else whose wealth may have been amassed through different means–for a copy of your book.)
And despite what’s said by the materialist Marxists or the modern day hard-left ecologists, wealth is not intrinsic in the raw materials of the Earth, unlocked by workers who toil in labor. Meaning that–despite the fact that in a mass production economy prices tend to move towards the cost of raw materials plus the cost of production–the wealth of a thing created is not the raw materials plus the cost of labor. Wealth is proportional to desirability.
Which is why a large corporation can create an economic disaster: consider, for example, the Edsel, whose value was clearly less than the cost of materials plus the cost of labor.
On the other hand, a painting made by a master painter can certainly be worth far more than just the cost of the canvas plus the cost of the paint. (The difference which the painter, in an act of speculation, can reap the rewards from.)
And sometimes the value of a thing depends on having a corporate structure to frame that thing in a profitable fashion. Which is why I make so much money freelancing for other companies, while my own attempts at building something to sell myself have flopped; because I don’t have a corporate structure (or really, the knowledge) to add value to my software, whose wealth I can then reap the excess rewards from.
Given that “wealth” is “desirability,” it should be clear that wealth can be destroyed.
Anything that makes a thing ugly or undesirable destroys wealth.
If you wreck a building, you’ve destroyed wealth. If you destroy a fine work of art, you’ve destroyed wealth.
Worse, wealth is fickle: what is desirable today (a machine that can mass produce bikinis, for example) may be worthless tomorrow (in a hypothetical era where bikinis are outlawed).
And this can happen at the scale of nation-states as well.
The collective wealth of a nation is, after all, the sum of individual actions by people in that nation. If you take away their incentive to do things–because you’ve put your finger on the scales trying to force your own idea of the right outcome–you run the risk of people simply deciding not to work.
And the wealth of a company–what makes companies desirable–is it’s ability to produce things that people desire.
Too many workers walk off the job (because they’re not being well compensated for the work they’re doing), or the company produces too many “Edsels”–too many things people don’t really want or desire–and the company loses value. It stops being quite so desirable.
And that “desirability” is generally measured by that company’s “market value” or market capitalization for a publicly traded company.
Which is why Venezuela is now poor.
Not because its wealth was stolen; not because Venezuela’s value was somehow represented by stacks of gold bricks in a vault somewhere which were taken secretly in the middle of the night by the CIA.
What happened in Venezuela when the government started imposing price controls and started seizing control of many private corporations. This forced corporations to lower the amount of money they were able to offer their workers to work.
This left people no longer wanting to work: the thing they were being offered was worth less to them than simply having their time back.
(Remember: time is also a desirable commodity.)
Which in turn caused companies to stop being able to produce the things people desired. Which made those companies less desirable.
Which made Venezuela as a nation less desirable.
Which decreased Venezuela’s wealth.
🤷♂️
Fuzzy little things that I find interesting. 