The Wealth of Any Nation Belongs to the People Who Create It

 

Nation States are still a fact of life in this world. Economics was invented to create knowledge about the wealth of nations and how it rises and falls over time. Like all collections of postulates, propositions and theories, it has its successes and failures. It is essential that we learn the right lesson from the failures to help enhance the prospect of success going forward.

 

We are almost a year into this destruction process and still have little knowledge of how much wealth was destroyed and how or even why. Oh yes we can identify some of the bad ideas that were used as weapons of vast destruction. Any current accounting of assets that were destroyed or devalued is preliminary at best.

 

The general recognition that printing money is all that is left as a strategy for overcoming the destruction cycle is a sign of how extreme the problem actually has become. I am not proposing that speeding up the printing presses is a good solution simply that it is possibly the only one left that can offer any hope of shortening this part of the cycle.

 

Creation and destruction of wealth appears to be cyclical. When we get the whole concept of work, markets, money and ownership right, wealth seems to be created faster than it is destroyed. When we get it wrong in some significant particular, the opposite happens. When more wealth is created than destroyed, we have economic growth. When more is destroyed, we have recession or depression.

 

The issue today is; how do we get back to rapid wealth creation?