Where Does Wealth Come From?

It's not complicated.

The question, “Where does wealth come from?” is not really that different from the famous question, “Where do babies come from?” or the question “Where does food come from?”

The simple answer to all of these questions is, of course, from people—people creating wealth and babies and food.

But it’s amazing how many stupidly wrong answers there are to these questions:

• Babies come from the stork.

• Food comes from the supermarket.

• Wealth comes from interest earned by capital.

Food, a particular kind of wealth, comes of course from people doing the work that is required

• to cause good seeds (created over sometimes thousands of years by people in the past, such as the American Indians who bred grass to make it maize [corn])

• to be in soil conducive to their growth (soil made conducive by people plowing the land with either back-breaking labor or the use of machines built in factories by workers using raw materials mined and transported by other other workers)

• and often fertilized (with manure from animals that people fed and cared for)

• and cleared of suffocating weeds (by people weeding the crop)

• and then harvested (by people working to do the harvesting, often with machines that people in factories worked to build, using technology that engineers worked to invent by using education that teachers worked to teach them in school buildings that construction workers built using raw materials that miners and forestry workers worked to obtain)

• and then transported on roads (built by people using machines)

• by truck drivers (driving trucks that factory workers built)

• to stores or processing centers (where food workers process)

• and then placed on supermarket shelves (by store workers)

• or in some cases fed (by farmers)

• to livestock (kept healthy by veterinarians who were also educated by teachers in buildings built by carpenters)

• that people then butchered (or milked) and transported as cuts of meat (or milk)

• to supermarkets (built by carpenters and other tradespeople)

• or to processing centers (where people make things such as yogurt and sausages)

• and then transported by truck drivers (many of whom in order to drive need eye-glasses made by…you get the drift now, right?)

• to supermarkets.

So yeah, food comes from supermarkets, right?

Or maybe the agri-business folks are right when they say with much greater sophistication (doncha know?) that “Food comes from capital invested in agri-business,” uh?

So where DOES wealth come from?

From people doing work, obviously! This really is no more necessary to explain—to adults with a head on their shoulders—than the answer to where babies come from is necessary to explain to grownups.

And yet, our rich ruling upper class does not want us to know—or at least does not want us to be reminded—where wealth comes from.

We’re told that wealth comes from rich people creating jobs. (Read how absurd that notion is here.)

We’re told that wealth comes from interest on capital, and that REAL wealth comes from COMPOUND interest on capital.

We’re told that wealth comes from banks making loans (and thus creating money out of thin air in the process.)

We’re told that wealth comes from the incredibly smart and important doings of people in the boardrooms of Fortune 500 corporations and mega-banks, and from the wise actions of billionaires who provide these corporations and banks with their wealth-producing capital.

And so guess who we are told deserves to OWN and BENEFIT from the wealth in our society and live in LUXURY (check it out here) while treating the have-nots like dirt (as detailed here)?

Fortunately, most people know where wealth comes from. They also know that it is impossible— and a fool’s errand even to try—to quantify how much any particular person created any given item of wealth or how much more wealth one person created compared to another. And they know that a person’s rightful share in the wealth of society depends on WHETHER or NOT they contribute reasonably according to ability and NOT on how MUCH wealth they (supposedly) created.

Most people thus believe that wealth should be shared on the egalitarian principle of “From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need.” This is the basis for a society in which there are no rich and no poor. Most people (who are, to their credit, NOT Marxists, by the way, as I discuss here and here) want our society to be this way, as I prove here.

Here is what such people look like:

These are just a sample (see the rest here) of 500 of my zip-code neighbors who are proudly displaying a sign that reads, “We the People want affordable housing for all. To get it we aim to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor.” Why were there so many such people in my particular zip code (02135)? Duh! Most people in all zip-codes except the very rich ones like Beverly Hills’s 90210 would ALSO proudly display such a sign—an egalitarian revolutionary sign—if you asked them to do so (why don’t you?)

Read here how YOU can help build the egalitarian revolutionary movement so that the people who speak honestly about where wealth comes from are the people who determine how to share it and use it.