Everyone knows that exchange dramatically increases the wealth produced. You don’t have to do everything yourself; you can exchange what you make for what you need. Exchange is possible only because we are all different and have different concerns arising at different times. Exchange is the use of our inequality for our benefit. In exchange, an awl is not equal to soap. One gives up the awl for soap, the other gives up soap for the awl.
Here is something very important. Wealth arises directly in both parts of our inequality: in the awl and in soap. If, however, you deal with a “one-sided exchange,” then wealth is not created but destroyed. Example. A thief stole your money and bought food with it. Redistribution occurred, mainstream economists will tell us. Unfair, some will add. But overall, nothing terrible about it, they’ll say — you could have bought the same food with that money. However, unlike economists, ordinary human experience does not accept that “nothing terrible happened” here. After all, there was no voluntary exchange between you and the thief. The thief gave nothing in return and, consequently, total wealth decreased. If you had voluntarily and with a clear conscience given this money to the thief as a gift, then indeed nothing terrible would have happened. In this example, by the way, one can clearly see that wealth cannot be measured. But one can say whether it became less or more.
The practice of exchanges leads to the emergence of a great rule of society — if you want to get something from other people, give them something useful. Doing all kinds of nasty things turns out to be unprofitable and, actually, not easy.
Notice that in the course of all this arduous activity, people, without intending to, received by-products in the form of social institutions — for example, law and money.
Money introduces great confusion into understanding reality. The use of money creates the impression that it has some inherent value. Of course, money possesses (or rather — possessed) a certain value as a mediating commodity. But by itself, while it is used as money, it is not wealth. Nobody works for money. Everyone works for the goods that can be exchanged for it.
Despite the fact that exchanges are made with the help of money and, as it seems to us, for the sake of money, in reality, real values are always exchanged. A worker from “Yuzhmash” exchanges one ten-millionth of a rocket in a store for a bottle of vodka. A fashionable singer exchanges one-tenth of her mega-super hit for a country house. Your humble servant exchanges this note for the services of the housing office, the ability to use electricity, gas, and the internet for a month, and so on.
I feel that now someone will say “That’s right! We don’t produce anything, and that’s the whole problem. We need to build more factories of all kinds and then everything will be fine!” It won’t. Real values are what can be exchanged for other values. It can be what a factory produces. And it may not be. All the economic salvation plans for Ukraine that I have seen and heard presuppose in advance that their exact results are already known to the authors and will definitely have value. No plans are needed — leave this matter to people, and they will figure it out.