That's the zero sum theory. Fortunately, it's false, and easily shown to be false. If a famous artist sits down and paints a picture, he creates wealth. It is not taken from anyone.
Having said that, it's all too easy to find instances of wealth 'created' on the backs of other people, or on the back of natural resources that will run out. I've seen way too many people with college educations get taken advantage of, fresh out of school, just because the employer could. Why not?
The evidence against the zero-sum perspective of wealth is overwhelming.
You can go and harvest the wheat. Or, you can let the wheat rot, and spend your day digging a hole and filling it in. Same energy spent. One creates value, the other doesn't.
You can light the gas under your stove, or you can set your curtains on fire. One destroys value at speed, the other doesn't.
You can sew something with a needle and thread. Or you can use a hand-wound sewing machine you inherited from a relative. Same outcome, one is far more energy-expensive than the other.
I'm interested in this topic - what to do about corporations. Something I think about: if we don't have corporations what replaces them? How do you implement business that require commitments that are larger than family?
For example. Consider a digital social network that was oriented around commercial arrangements. You could form complex contracts in a group, and produce a reputation system formed from sets of people. There would be a deposit system, and an opt-in judiciary for dispute resolution. Could this - a digital upgrade of the icelandic commonwealth - be a more powerful mechanism than The Corporation?
There's a big difficulty in wanting to get rid of corporations, and that is that they emerged from a process of true evolution. The Dutch and then English East-India companies allowed humans to do things that had just not been viable previously. In fact, they were so successful that they could have obsoleted nation states. Certainly the East India company could have, and was reined in only because its shareholders and employees continued to show deference to the crown. Nation-states got scared at that point, and imposed significant political controls - corporations are not allowed to maintain standing armies. So I think it's important to appreciate what powerful tools they are. Any discussion about getting rid of them needs to consider - how do you implement large-scale projects in a hypothetical world without corporations?
The challenge, as I see it, is to have governments with a spine, but governments not so big that they stifle freedom or crowd out opportunities. Governments need to be powerful enough to overrule the biggest corporations so that corporations can exist without the cronyism. Power alone is insufficient though because even a powerful government is peopled by individuals who can sometimes be bought cheaply.
The East India Company is a somewhat terrifying example of what is possible with unbound power for corporations. It's an equally bad and unsubtle endpoint as an all government central economy. Diversity of thought and composition, as in many places, yields better results than homogeneity.
I think corporations are necessary for large-scale, long-term commercial endeavours. Certain classes of services to both individuals and businesses need continuity and corporations are well-suited to providing that kind of continuity.
Where we are today forgives incumbent large corporations too much and (certainly in Canada) makes it far too difficult for entrepreneurs to start small businesses.
Slavery, colonization and wars enabled a lot of prosperity building too, and also a lot of technological innovation.
there is no case where value is created and no energy was spent.
thus wealth is limited by energy.
Natural resources don't run out. The quantity of elements on earth has and will remain the same for a few billion years. Application of energy and information permits inter-conversion of their combined forms as we wish, if we're smart enough. Not a given, I admit.
The creation of global wealth over the last 20-30 years has brought millions out of poverty. This is unprecedented. And it hasn't been wealth taken from others.
You say natural resources don't run out, how about clean air and clean water? Species diversity?
our technological ability to extract power from the sun is so limited we are forced to mine the earth to extract solar energy from the past (aka oil).
natural resources do run out. they are frequently converted into forms that are unuseable. in the rare event that a natural resource can be converted back to a usable form (recycling) we must further tax our energy reservoirs to perform such feat.
the wealth that was taken from the earth was not taken from anyone you know now. Perhaps your great great great grandchildren will live in a society where oil is more expensive then gold.
However even when we remove all the factors I describe above there is still wealth 'theft' taking place in our society right now. The issue is that some forms of wealth need to be extracted by many people working together. when you have these creatures called billionaires that own wealth they in no way produced all by themselves you know that wealth among these collaberative groups was distributed unevenly. This is known as wealth inequality and it happens as a direct result of extracting wealth from other humans.
when said artist accumulates 1 billion dollars worth of wealth did that mean he painted 1 billion dollars worth of paintings? Did the billionaires of the modern world single handedly each create a billion dollars worth of wealth?
take a 747 airliner. a product worth less than a billion dollars in value. such a product must be built by multitudes of people because projects of such immense complexity require man hours that exceed several life times. If billionaires exist it implies that the billionaire built several products of equivalent value and complexity all by himself.
for a single man to hold such extraordinary wealth of absurd proportions means one thing and one thing only. He built his wealth off the backs of others.
Not at all. There are no bounds to the value of a painting, for example. None of that is wrapped up in the value of the paints and canvas, which is easily demonstrated by my using those same paints and canvas to paint a picture, and I'd have to pay to dispose of the result.
You can have a piece of a paper with "$1B" written on it, but that's meaningless in world where the painting is the only wealth.
But can I create a painting of infinite value? In the history of mankind... has there been an object of such immense value that society has deemed the object worth more than the value of all the lives of humans that have ever existed? No. By virtue of common sense no such product has existed. If no such product has existed then likely there must be a hard physical upper limit to value.
However, this example only hints at a fuzzy description of an upper bound to value. It is not clear what this upper bound exactly is... because a human can use his imagination and say that a piece of paper is worth 2 billion dollars. If human thought has no limits and if human thought determines the value of all things, why don't there exist objects that are worth 2 google gabillion dollars?
Let us develop a concrete definition for value with our first example: the painting. Also let us examine this painting in the hypothetical context of an island bartering economy of two economic actors: a painter and a potato farmer.
The farmer creates products of concrete physical value: food. Food is a product made of energy extracted from the earth and the sun. The painter makes products of abstraction, a painting: an object supposedly worth more than the sum of its parts.
Let's throw this economic simulation in motion. What is the maximum value of a painting produced by the artist? Can the potato farmer say that the painting is worth 10 trillion potatoes when his maximum potato production rate is 2 per day? No. This is impossible. No 10 trillion potato-painting transaction can take place in this economy because the amount of potatoes is limited to 20 per day. Thus in an economy of a farmer and artist the value of the painting is bounded by the total potatoes the farmer can produce.
Lets look at the absurd example of an economy with two economic actors of two painters. Both painters produce a painting and they both trade each other paintings. Then they starve to death because there are no potatoes to eat in the economy. This absurd example illustrates one thing: All economies cannot be made up of solely abstract products of overblown value. All economies must have concrete physical primitives like food an energy to function correctly otherwise people will starve or nothing can happen. An economy of pure abstraction is an economy made of hopes, dreams and imagination, such an economy cannot exist in reality.
So in conclusion what does this mean? It means two things:
1. All economies must have concrete physical products to function. Economies cannot be made up of only abstract paintings, poems and stories.
2. All abstract products within an economy are bounded by how much it can be paid for by the total amount of physical product in an economy.
Thus the conclusion is inescapable. THE VALUE OF ALL PRODUCTS PAINTINGS OR ANYTHING are bounded by PHYSICAL LAW and PHYSICAL LIMITS.
The notion that value is an ephemeral imaginative thing is an illusion. This makes sense in the context of the universe.