The actual sale of the chair to someone else is a NOOP, it’s just shuffling assets around.
(BTW,what is NOOP?)
And yes, that’s the issue. The rich are purely asset-shuffling.
Most of the speculatant markets is just that. It doesn’t create any wealth for society, but just takes from people.
Nope, because the chair in the woodworker's posession is worth less to him than dollars, and the dollars in the customer's posession are worth less to him than the chair. The actual sale leaves everyone better off.
The woodcutter, the truck drivers who transported the wood, the factor who bundled and graded it, the woodworker, the customer, the Internet entrepreneur who built the website the customer used to compair & contrast chairs: all are better off than if the entire Internet-chair-buying industry were artificially restrained. There are externalities regarding over-harvesting of wood, truck pollution, road construction, factor oligopolies, unsafe chair construction, Internet oligopolies and consumer-protection which need addressing as well, of course.
As to whether the industry is artificially constrained, I am not arguing for artificial constraint, so I don’t need to respond to that. My point was that making a chair creates wealth. That's true whether you make a chair for yourself, or for someone else.
If I make a trillion chairs, I'll have to drop the price of them to sell them, and the bottom will fall out of the chair market. Meanwhile, wood will become scarce and the price of that will go up. You'll probably even end up with an industry of people dismantling chairs into wood for use in other purposes.
So it's not a simple as "creating wealth" at all.
Please tell me that was intentional?
That's kinda what I'm saying, since the money supply is fixed. The act of selling the chair puts a greater percentage of the money supply in the hands of the woodworker, since the value of the wood (and other COGs + paid labor) is less than the value of the chair.
pg is declaring that "creating wealth", others are declaring that "wealth aggregation", which contributes to inequality.
But really the heart of the matter is: How is wealth measured? Because if you do it in a currency with a (relatively) fixed supply, then people who profit more than they spend are going to be wealth-inequality creators.