There’s a recurring theme I keep seeing everywhere, especially in the comment section of the articles, where the general population expresses its thoughts, and it’s that if someone is much better than the others, there must have been some foul play going on, because it can’t be that some people are that much wealthier, that much smarter, that much better, because “we all know” people are equal, and if they are equal, they should have an equal share of everything, and if they don’t, it’s either because of luck or because of theft.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGg0tMszsXQ

The underlying assumption is that all wealth is finite, and therefore if someone was to have more, others must have less. This is the underlying mistaken assumption of Marxism and its take on economy, and it’s a relic of pre-industrial thinking. You see, in the pre-industrial era we lived in the world of finite resources, because everything that was produced, was produced off the land, which is finite. If you had more land, you could grow more crops. With standard agricultural techniques and manual labor you basically produced a constant amount of wealth off an acre of land, and this varied slightly with weather conditions, and you could occasionally have a volcanic eruption or a small ice age or a flood or a drought which disrupted things, but you basically could grow only so much on an acre of land. You could grow sheep or you could grow wheat, depending on the quality of land, but one person could not just magically make ten or hundred or thousand times more wealth. It was simply impossible. You could steal someone else’s land and thus grow more wheat or sheep, but it was a zero-sum game; for someone to win, others had to lose, and that’s the kind of world that formed the mind of Karl Marx and his minions. The thing is, this can’t be a genetic thing, because in a hunter-gatherer environment, which defined our genetics because we lived that way for almost our entire biological history, if a hunter takes down a bigger animal, he is praised by his tribe and seen as having made an excellent contribution. All women will want to have his babies and all children will want to be like him when they grow up. Nobody will say that he killed the big animal because he magically stole opportunities from other hunters. It’s obvious what happened – he had more skill and courage, he faced high risks, and had great success. You couldn’t even attribute his success to luck, but I’m certain that some did.

Throughout most history, inventions were exceedingly rare. When they happened, they changed everything, like percussion fire making, or a sewing needle, or a spear-thrower, or domesticating animals or growing crops, but they happened every ten thousand years or so, and there was no way for an individual inventor to focus benefits from them onto himself. If a woman invented a sewing needle, all women used it, and although she must have received high praise from them, other than that the benefits to the inventor were few. One could say that this was the probable reason why the inventions happened at such a slow rate.

In the industrial world, however, there is the concept of a patent, or intellectual property which is protected by law, and which allows the inventor to reap benefits from his invention. If he is wealthy, he can start a business that produces his invention, but that is usually inefficient; it’s better to find someone who already has money and manufacturing resources and put his product to the market quickly. Because his invention is protected by law, the wealthy can’t just steal it from him; they are forced to cooperate and share profits with him, and this is the reason why, in the capitalist industrial society, inventors got exceedingly wealthy, and inventions were highly sought for because they provided a huge competitive edge for large industries. For the first time in history, it was possible to concentrate and leverage the power of human invention in such a way that it became the most important industrial input, more important than labor, raw materials or even money, and it threw the economy of finite resources and commodity markets upside down, because there suddenly was a way for one farmer to grow more crops than the other, there was suddenly a way for one miner to extract more ore than the other, and no longer did you have to take someone else’s land in order to double your wealth. You could actually increase your wealth by the order of magnitude of ten billion just by inventing something useful (like electricity or radio), or finding a new use for something that was commonly available but worthless (like petroleum). This means several things – first, it means that wealth is no longer constant, but can be generated “ex nihilo”, basically with only the power of human mind, and furthermore, it means that the upper limits of wealth created in this way were removed, especially when, with the IT revolution, the concept of “manufacturing” became more abstract and started including a much greater proportion of intellectual capital and human invention vs. money and raw materials, to the point where today you can make huge amounts of money by simply buying a computer, buying a cheap online server, and building a valuable online service which only leverages information, with your innovation as a fulcrum.

So, the guy who got a billion dollars by making computer software didn’t steal ten dollars each from hundred millions of poor people. He found a way to improve their lives for the amount that exceeds the sum of money they were willing to pay, essentially he created new value in their lives with his product and got a share of that newly created value. The value was not just distributed, it was created ex nihilo, and then distributed to those who took part in its creation.

So the next time you see someone who earned billions of dollars with IT, remember that he didn’t take that money from the world, he didn’t extract the money that was already there. He actually created new wealth that is a multiple of that amount, and he got a share of that new wealth he created. He enriched the world by much more than what he ended up earning.

And when the communists and socialists and other vermin start manipulating the mob into believing that the “unfair differences in wealth need to be redressed”, and that the wealth needs to be “redistributed”, remember that you are talking about taking from those who already enriched the world by the multiple of their wealth, and giving it to those who make the world poorer by their existence. Because, we need to remember that all humans consume natural resources throughout their lives, but only some actually create more value than they consume, and they are the ones who really deserve to be alive, and they are the ones who matter and who should be supported.