• CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
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    16 days ago

    Well no, it is possible to create wealth, because money is a proxy for resources, and it is possible to bring more resources into the system or to convert less valuable things into more valuable ones. There is still a finite amount of wealth, because there is only a finite amount of stuff in the system at any one time, but it isn’t a zero sum either, because the actions of those in the system can change the total amount of stuff to go around within it.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      and it is possible to bring more resources into the syste

      That lowers the value of the resource.

      or to convert less valuable things into more valuable ones.

      And when you sell that to people, they’re giving you wealth. Usually via currency. They didn’t magically make it either, it came from their employer who pays them. If not used to purchase your item, it would be spent, invested, or hoarded.

      There is no wealth creation, it’s a myth. To accumulate some, you have to take it from someone, even if that’s thru something conventional like earning wages.

      • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
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        16 days ago

        If I bring in more resources and lower the price, then suddenly people can have more stuff with the same amount of money. How is that not creating wealth? Do you think there exists the same amount of wealth in the world now as there was when currency was invented? That seems obviously untrue, since even if you had literally all the money in the world back then, you wouldn’t have been able to buy as much with it as you could if you had all the money in the world now.

        For that matter, if it were literally impossible to create wealth, people should have had a lot more in the past, due to that wealth being distributed among fewer people. If you go further, you would have to question how wealth exists at all: the concept didn’t exist before people, so if people cannot create wealth, where did it all come from?

        • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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          16 days ago

          If I bring in more resources and lower the price, then suddenly people can have more stuff with the same amount of money

          And lower the price…

          Exactly, you’re not creating wealth, you’re lowering the price of a resource

          You literally just said it yourself

          • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
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            16 days ago

            Wealth is not money, as the concept of inflation demonstrates. It is the stuff money represents. If you create more of that, you’re creating more wealth.