Ask you teacher if you walk down a road and see a diamond sitting on the ground, if picking it up is enough labour to make the diamond "wealth".
Dirk:"Any material thing, produced by labor, which satisfies human desire and has exchange value. "
He's combined the labour theory and the subjective theory of value. Labour is not necessary to satisfy desire. Also exchange value is entirely dependent upon a counterparty desiring your material thing. Also, his definition doesn't include slaves, animals, or water.
And ironically, it doesn't include (digital) money.
How much are you paying to take this course?
liberty student: How much are you paying to take this course?
He's paying for the degree which gets him a good job - I hope?Or to fully understand "the enemy" so as better to fight him (theoretically).
The difference between libertarianism and socialism is that libertarians will tolerate the existence of a socialist community, but socialists can't tolerate a libertarian community.
Actually, the course is FREE! Haha.
(minus the labor and capital it takes for me to show up, I suppose...)
According to my teacher: slaves, animals, water and money are not wealth.
Also according to my teacher: the diamond sitting on the ground would transform into wealth upon being picked up. It would remain wealth until someone wanted to purchase it. Then it would magically transform into capital for the time of the transaction., then back into just wealth.
"All wealth is capital. But all capital is not wealth."
Can anyone point me in the direction of refuting this...?!
I believe that the definition of wealth from the perspective of a classical economist is accumulated capital. The following is a passage from Hernando de Soto's The Mystery of Capital:
"Great classical economists such as Adam Smith and Karl Marx believed that capital was the engine that powered the market economy. Capital was considered to be the principal part of the economic whole—the preeminent factor (as the capital issues in such phrases as capital importance, capital punishment, the capital city of a country). What they wanted to understand was what capital is and how it is produced and accumulated. Whether you agree with classical economists or not, or perhaps view them as irrelevant (maybe Smith never understood that the Industrial Revolution was under way; maybe Marx's labor theory of value has no practical application), there is no doubt that these thinkers built the towering edifices of thought on which we can now stand and try to find out what capital is, what produces it, and why non-Western nations generate so little of it.
For Smight, economic specialization—the division of labor and the subsequent exchange of products in the market—was the source of increasing productivity and therefore "the wealth of nations". What made this specialization and exchange possible was capital, which Smith defined as the stock of assets accumulated for productive purposes. Entrepreneurs could use their accumulated resources to support specialized enterprises until they could exchange their products for other things they needed. The more capital accumulated, the more specialization became possible, and the higher society's productivity would be. Marx agreed; for him, the wealth that capitalism produces presents itself as an immense pile of commodities." (pp. 41–42)
George Reisman describes capital as the following, in "Economic Recovery Requires Capital Accumulation, Not Government "Stimulus Packages"":
"In the case of the economic system, that something is capital. The economic system is not functioning properly because it has lost capital. Capital is the accumulated wealth that is owned by business enterprises or individuals and that is used for the purpose of earning profit or interest."
Later on in the same article:
"The reason that stimulus packages cause a further loss of capital is that their starting point is the consumption of previously produced wealth. That wealth is part of the capital of the business firms that own it."
In Human Action, Mises says the following:
“There are men who are commonly stigmatized as monetary cranks. The monetary crank suggests a method for making everybody prosperous by monetary measures.”
And so, wealth can be defined as accumulated capital—money still has to be backed by capital. In any case, a dictionary definition:
All goods and services with monetary, exchangeable, or productive value.
Capital is savings.
Too bad it is free, it would have been awesome for you to ask for a refund.
Your teacher is completely clueless. Get your grade and move on.