Have I misunderstood Econ 101, or did someone else? - Democratic Underground

Have I misunderstood Econ 101, or did someone else? - Democratic Underground
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Is there something about the fundamentals of economics -- and by that I mean economics of any political persuasion -- that is simply lost on the majority of human beings, including more than a few DUers? Or have I been operating on a flawed premise all this time?

It seems to me that economies, all economies, start with three basics:

1. Agriculture and other food production (including fishing, hunting, raising crops, gathering berries, whatever)
2. Mining and other resource extraction (including timber cutting)
3. Manufacturing of all objects not found naturally.

The first is essential to human existence at any economic level, even paleolithic.

The second is essential to progressing beyond #1 to #3 and the creation of transferable wealth.

All of these require the addition of human labor in order to make them useful to the human creature. Homo sapiens sapiens has to pick the berries or grab the fish outta the water in order to eat. That's labor. The addition of labor makes the resource usable.

There is no value to anything without the addition of labor.
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And capitalism was born. The Berrys didn't do any work. They added nothing in Labor to the production of the fruit they were selling. They owned the land and they hired some Harvesters to do the real work, and they kept the profits.

And the next year it was six fish a bucket. And the Berrys bought out the family who made the village's leather. The Tanners retired and the Harvesters brought in some immigrants to run the tannery, but the Newcomers didn't control the price of the product or the quality. They didn't own the tannery the way the Tanners had; they just sold their labor to the Berrys. The Berrys paid them way less than the Tanners had made, but the Berrys were able to lower the price and still took the profit. And they used that profit to buy out the tannery in the next village and the next. The people in the villages had nowhere else to buy their leather, and they knew the new stuff wasn't nearly as good quality as when they were buying from the people who actually owned and ran the business with their own LABOR, but hey, the prices were cheap and what could you do?

Next thing you know, the price of berries is eight fish a bucket. The Berrys are getting richer all the time, but they are producing nothing. And the priests who make all the after-death promises are saying the Berrys are perfectly right in what they do, so all the people who live in misery as a result of the Berrys are told to shut the fuck up!

The Berrys and all of their ilk eventually create the whole banking and "insurance" industries, all of which create no wealth; they simply facilitate the transfer of it, sometimes for good, sometimes for not so good, and either way th bankers and the insurers take their cut.

What too many of us have not realized -- or not been taught -- is that without productive LABOR, the kind that produces the transferable wealth, there can be no economy. Banks are not an economy. Insurance companies are not an economy. Stock markets are not an economy. Labor is. Labor that produces useful goods and services (such as health care and teaching that facilitate labor to produce physical goods) is the foundation of any and all Economies.

We need the Boatwrights and the Spearmakers. We need the Carters and the Fishers and the Farmers and the Miners and the Tanners and the Shoemakers. It's possible to have an economy without the Bankers; it's not possible to have an economy without Labor.

Until more of our people understand this, we won't be able to turn this catastrophe around. And sadly, there are a whole bunch of people on DU even who don't get it.

Or else the one person who REALLY doesn't get it is ....