The Source of Wealth

What is wealth? Wealth is the possession of higher than average amount of valuable, useful material or information. Wealth is of course relative and cannot exist in a society of one person. Give me two people and in time there will be one wealthier than the other.

Producers create all new and interesting products and services, and since others (even other Producers) have not created them before, the value of these things (if in demand) is above average. The Producer is creating wealth. It is not the newness of the creation that determines its value, rather it is the usefulness that is key.

You are not just a Producer of a cooler kind of music player, or rocking chair, or portable outhouse, you are a Producer of wealth. And you produce wealth not just for yourself but also for other people who work for you in various capacities.

Like the smell of blood to a shark, non-Producers can smell wealth from afar, and they circle and plot to get some, too. These people are the worst, perhaps plotting frivolous lawsuits, or entrapping Producers in schemes to drain their wealth. Laws and regulations may be changed to swindle a Producer out of his work. The possibilities are limitless, even in law-abiding America.

I’m no fan of Microsoft (more on that later), but they are a huge target of wasteful lawsuits. Why? Because they have collected a load of wealth in their role as a Producer, and the lawyers smell it. Recent antitrust lawsuits are a great example. At any point in time, dozens and perhaps hundreds of lawsuits are pending against Microsoft. They also file their share, having sued competitors, alleged trademark infringers, spammers, and consumer fraud purveyors (email phishing schemes). The lawsuit activity is so fluid that I could not find a current count of suits in progress. Microsoft’s 2003 Annual Report lists literally dozens of suits it is defending, and does not even bother to enumerate them all.

Other excellent examples of this are the asbestos lawsuits, which have bankrupted numerous manufacturers. Payouts in the hundreds of billions of dollars have been made, with no end in sight. If you don’t believe me, do a quick Internet search for “asbestos lawsuits” and you will find a multitude of attorneys actively soliciting clients so they can dip their hands into the pot of free cash generated by the Producers (note that word) of legitimate asbestos products.

Let’s not forget the breast implant debacle. There is much debate about the medical safety of these implants, and this only empowers attorneys to attack the wealth created by Producer Dow Chemical / Dow Corning.

Likely you are an individual Producer, and not the CEO of a huge corporation, so you may not be so prone to gain the attention Guck, Muck, and Slime, Attorneys at Law. But we all pay every time a Producer is taken to the cleaners by these attorneys. Why? Because the cost of defending lawsuits is built into the price of every product we buy. A recent report estimated the cost of litigation in 2003 at $246 billion, or $845 per person. ^[3]

Even in the Bible, the prophet Isaiah said hundreds of years before Christ:

No one sues righteously and no one pleads honestly
They trust in confusion and speak lies ^[4]

No one would deny that there is such a thing as a ‘righteous’ lawsuit, and many are prosecuted every day, But many lawsuits are not ‘righteous’, but are thinly veiled attempts at extortion.

You might retort, “How else are these non-Producers going to make their car payments? They have no Producer skills.” You are absolutely right!

Our society has created an entire class of people who cannot ‘produce’ their way through life. They must attach themselves to those who can, pick up what scraps they can find, or tap into a main artery, taking enough to live richly, but not enough to kill the host.

When I enrolled in electronics school in the 1970’s, the professor who conducted our orientation session told us all that only about 25% of us would graduate. I thought, “What am I getting myself into?”

Sure enough, about 20% graduated. But during the first semester, about half of the students switched majors to Business Administration. That is, they switched out of a Producer curriculum to a largely non-Producer curriculum. About half of them dropped out completely, and the rest are now cubicle dwellers in local businesses.

Now not all these people are idiots or losers or anything like that. They have jobs and feed their families by providing their services to their companies, and directly or indirectly to Producers like you. But the fact remains, they did not become Producers of new and unique products and services, but they are profiting from Producers nonetheless, compensating for their own shortcomings.

This situation might not be so bad, you say. After all, these people are beholden to we Producers, right? Well, not exactly, because while the Producers were studying and learning their craft and profession, the non-Producers were working their way up the management food chain, perhaps even earning an advanced degree in Business Administration.

The result is that the Producers provide the wealth that feeds the non-Producers, but they are actually working for the non-Producers! The people with the right degree, the proper family connections, the right name, or the skill to kick others off the ladder, direct the Producers to create the products and services that they can not produce themselves, nor do they understand in detail.

There we have it. The people who have put in the long hours learning how to make wealth out of rocks and sand (like the silicon computer chip) are controlled by the people whose only experience with rocks is in a cocktail glass. (Remember, think wry, not cynical.)