Wealth

Wealth is a concept generally agreed to be the abundance of valuable resources or material possessions, or the control of such assets. While "wealth" is considered to be an ambiguous and nebulous term, it is a concept that nonetheless has an important place in economics.

More specifically wealth can be defined as a claim on, or command of, resources (commodities, capital equipment, time, physical labor, et cetera) that have the potential to make the individual's existence easier, more comfortable or more enjoyable (i.e. "better") than it would be in the absence of such things.

More concisely, wealth is the ability to fulfill human desire.

Because value is subjective, wealth cannot be measured cardinally, but it is possible to measure ordinally.^[1]

Henry Hazlitt writes that real wealth "consists in what is produced and consumed: the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in. It is railways and roads and motor cars; ships and planes and factories; schools and churches and theaters; pianos, paintings and hooks. Yet so powerful is the verbal ambiguity that confuses money with wealth, that even those who at times recognize the confusion will slide back into it in the course of their reasoning."^[2] Since money is a commodity that helps fulfill the human need to engage in indirect exchange, it could be regarded as a form of wealth, but that does not mean that printing additional paper money will add an amount of wealth to the economy equal to its face value. It could, instead, diminish the ability of each monetary unit to satisfy the desire to engage in useful indirect exchange.

Leftists such as Barack Obama have often advocated that the rich be forced to share or "spread the wealth" through welfare programs.^[3] To the extent that these program reduce the economy's overall ability to fulfill human desire, they actually destroy wealth, or in some cases prevent it from ever coming into being.