Rob wrote:EmperorIng wrote:Wealth; which is indeed a tangible thing.
He makes "wealth". How very vague. Thanks.
It's not vague if you take the time to think about it. It's economics. Wealth, or money, can be created. Valueless things can eventually be turned into valuable things (like BitCoin, at least for a while). Trump-as-businessman has created new places for wealth creation and the spending of wealth (and wealth destruction in some of his failed ventures), thereby in total increasing the amount of wealth/money in the world and the amount people spend. This is why I said it is indeed tangible, or maybe more cheekily, intangibly tangible. It's not as if by building a giant tower somewhere he stole the world's money from some limited pool. It
cost money to build, yeah, but it also
makes money, both in its creation, maintenance, and use.
It's the primary reason we (privately or publicly) invest in businesses, small or big - they create
value, and generate
new value/wealth to add to the overall GDP and standard of living. The "rising tide" is why even today the poorest person in America, for example, has more than a good shot at living several decades longer than a wealthy person from 400 years ago.
Businesses are not only in the business of creating "stuff", but in creating value (e.g. a product, a concept, a design, a service, and so on - creating the value of a product). Some work, many don't (the history of businesses is that most fail): Gutenberg was one of the first to get into the printing business, and he was one of the first to bankrupt out of it, as well.
Don't take the above as some ardent support of everything capital, because there are plenty of problems that I have talked about before that should be addressed. That being said, it would be wrong to assume that even businesses that Trump has run don't "count" compared to something immediately graspable, like a barber or a restaurateur.
Maybe Tuesday will prove me wrong; I already voted though.
