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Comment by codyrobbins | Hacker News Reader

No. Perhaps most of the wealth that you saw, working in finance, may have come from brute force (although I would disagree with that claim, prima facie, as well); but that doesn’t mean most wealth is accumulated that way.

You get money by using leverage to take other peoples money

No. That theory is called mercantilism, and we figured out that it’s wrong about three hundred years ago. You get money by bringing about the manifestation of value into the world. People who make money via leverage are doing that in a very specific way, but it’s far from the only way to do it.

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The point still stand. Once you have created wealth, you need the ability to claim it and that is always a function of preexisting capital. The only difference when you "create" wealth being that you are in better position to negotiate with your various contenders than otherwise.

1949 was 300 years ago?

1700 was three hundred years ago, when John Locke pointed out in his Second Treatise that the amount of wealth in the world is not fixed.

Interesting... I would be like to look up the direct quote. Would you have the chapter or section reference?

You need a citation that some guy once said that the amount of wealth in the world is not fixed? What would the world look like if it weren't true? There's no reasonable or useful definition of wealth for which the world of today has exactly as much wealth as the world of 10,000 years ago. (Or 1,000, or 100. 10, well, that can be successfully argued either way. It's not been a great 10 year run.)

I believe he's looking for a reference that Locke was a proponent of the idea, not that the idea is true. Similar to how you might ask for a reference if somebody suggested Shakespeare as the originator of the Theory of Relativity — it's not that you disagree with relativity itself, just the history given.

It's not a quote but the implication of Locke's entire discussion of property in his second treatise. He explains that value (wealth) is created by the labor expended to create products. It follows then that wealth is not fixed.

>He explains that value (wealth) is created by the labor expended to create products. //

This is not at all the same as:

>"You get money by bringing about the manifestation of value into the world." //

IMO value is created by labour enacted to process [raw] materials. You can get money however without creating value. Indeed a lot of trading appears to be a way to extract money without adding value. Optimisations to avoid wasted production are not creating value IMO. They can be beneficial, I feel, but I also find that we've gone way past the point at which financial markets are genuinely optimising the creation of value. The main mode of getting money appears to be exploitation of those expending labour to process materials.

Some poor unfortunate sell their kids to coffee plantations in Western Africa and a wealthy trader sits at a computer and extracts the value of the kids processing.

Exactly.

The value creator does not necessarily become wealthy without forceful leverage.

You can quote economists till you are blue in the face but it doesn't change that in reality money is taken, not earned.

And at which date did the major powers stop engaging in mercantilism?

Why did you mention 1949?

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