Capitol Hill Blue Forums Misc. Topics General Stuff What is wealth? How is it made? How is it accounted?

An example of creating widely distributed wealth in a community...

A thought provoking presentation on deficit spending.

What this woman says is viscerally counterintuitive to me, but nonetheless it is a subject that I have been wondering about for years. Could it be that our thinking about debt and money is just as culturally biased as any ideology?

Both money and debt exist only because of agreements, after all... what limits the agreements that are possible?

Then there is this: https://eand.co/trumps-america-is-in-freefall-f1cafbb93461

Yes, in some states (particularly those with Republican governors) it's going to get a LOT worse. But most of the other governors are willing to listen to epidemiologists and public health experts. This rise can be flattened if people would just take the usual mask, wash hands. social distance stuff seriously. It's not about your freedumbs or social control, it's about saving your life AND saving the economy.

We have been conditioned to not listen to experts from the government by decades of Reagan-theology. Government can't do anything right, government IS the problem. Sounds great because less government saves us money. Until it doesn't.

This is the Trump way: It's killed over 120,000 of us so far. To say it isn't working is a vast understatement. Waiting until January to do something different is a suicide pact. I wonder how many elected officials and judges it has to kill before they act.

The problem is that the Trump Virus disproportionately impacts (read:kills) the less well to do. The very rich can easily create their own private virus-bubbles and lead a pretty normal, for them, life. The less money and resources one has, the less likely one is able to protect one’s self from being exposed.

If the proles want to believe gut-feelings and emotions instead of science and mistake chicken hawk bluster, hate and fear for Strength, Freedom and Rights while consuming themselves to death, then let them. The Market’s up.

In their own bubble? I don't think so. All those rich people have servants, and the servants go home to a essential worker spouse and kids who are having Covid-19 parties. Even Trump and Pence are surrounded by Secret Service agents and staff who have tested positive. The original spread into the US was by people rich enough to fly to other continents.

My wife and I may be in a rare, isolated life style: We have no hands or servants on our little mostly idle ranch.

Ah! You’re talking about the rich.

I’m talking about the rich, the people with live-in staff. You know, the people who really matter.

One of the thoughts that stimulated this topic has to do with population growth and wealth. If, at a given time, a finite amount of wealth exists, and the population grows, then that wealth, per capita, will be diluted.

This is why it matters what wealth is, and how it is created. As the population grows, if more real wealth is not created, then humanity as a whole becomes poorer. So a situation like the stock market, where wealth is "traded", but not necessarily created, and debt, where there may be an assumption that the borrowed capital will be used to create more physical wealth, but not a guarantee (and the interest on the debt being likely a bleed on the possible new wealth created), may not create real new wealth, but only cause inflation. Inflation is not a source of new wealth, it is merely a mechanism of dilution.

In an earlier post I speculated that new wealth is most likely tied to the conversion of natural resources into new material things, which are often accounted as new wealth. But if that conversion of natural resources is accompanied by unaccounted externalized costs, then it may not be a real increase of wealth, but a decrease.

What has actually happened is that wealth and population both grew, but wages stagnated, so the top 1-3% all got rich like pharaohs while everyone has had a slow but measurable decline in their quality of life.

In addition, the same bastards are milking people harder than ever. You take a look at "bank fees" in 1980 vs now. Or even more outrageously, things like APS (in Phoenix, but soon everywhere) putting demand charges on household electrical accounts. Which means you still get the same service you always had, only now you pay $150 more per month.

Or to put it another way, we are presently enjoying the Great Flowering of Capitalism! Life for humans has never been better... (we don't care about life in general, it's not in the playbook!)