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Wealth is, abstracted, control over resources.

How does someone else controlling resources prevent you from obtaining resources?

Well, because they control the resources.

The entire concept of rivalry in economics is about this. Only in the case of resource that are not rivalrous does pre-existing wealth become a non-factor.




If you just redefine the word then there's not much of an argument. Resources are constrained, wealth isnt. You can create value somehow and generate wealth, regardless of what someone else is doing.


Part A) That isn't a redefinition.

Wealth is a measure of assets. Assets are, for the most part, rivalrous goods.

Ownership's most fundamental quality is the exclusionary right to prevent others to use or occupy the asset in question. Owning lumber, for instance, has value because it lets you prevent other people from walking off and building their houses with it.

Accordingly wealth is exclusionary by nature.

Part B) You might think that wealth isn't constrained, but it is.

You can't own more lumber than the sum of all of the forests and cut planks in the world. You can't output more human labour than the sum of the population on the planet can provide, and you certainly can't build an object which is composed of more minerals than our race can obtain. Will those limits increase over time? Sure. But that doesn't mean there's no hard top-end limit.

Even if we jump to non-rivalrous goods and you say "but I can create intellectual property at an infinite rate - those rights and assets aren't bound to physical constraints" - you'd be wrong again. The capacity to create and define non-tangible assets susceptible to ownership requires human labour. If you wanted to produce ideas for comic books, for instance, you wouldn't be able to produce a database containing the brainstorming of 10 billion people in a year. Because you don't have 10 billion people on the planet.

So even at your value maximizing best, applying the best possible combinations of resources, labour and opportunities, you still won't be able to create infinite wealth for all asset classes.

If you mean that wealth isn't constrained because you can inflate the value of the denomination it is traded in, that doesn't change the value of the asset itself - that's completely orthogonal.




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