Originally Posted by
andy6025
It seems that none of the pen pushers would agree with your analysis of 'wealth creation,' for you appear to have located it mostly in the act of exchange ('by selling', 'countries can trade') and then last you have machines creating wealth (which they'd all find rather humorous). While merchants do indeed make their bread by 'buying low and selling high', that's not as a rule how the 'wealth of nations' is created.
You might be curious to know (but mostly likely not) that all of the most profound thinkers in political economy unanimously locate the creation of wealth in the productive process, and boil 'value' down to labour, measured mostly in units of time. The usefulness of buying the labour of others is that in doing so you are buying a wealth-creating force. Adam Smith is partly an the exception, who on the eve of the birth of capitalism struggled with its distinct processes and besides the labour theory of value, he mysteriously thought that some objects had an instrinsik (sic) value. But of course, chemists with even the most powerful microscopes to date have yet to find such an illusive substance.
Supply and demand is simply a process that determines variations in price from their normative value. After all, with only a few exceptional saleable goods (such as land) supply comes from the 'mixture' of labour with nature. Case in point, if the alchemists above discovered how to convert lead into gold with minimal effort (i.e. labour) then the price of gold would plummet. And on the other side of the equation, when demand surpasses supply, prices only rise until social labour is reconfigured to address the higher demand.
As for where they got their observations: Smith got his labour theory of value from spending extensive time in a pin factory. Ricardo had originally been a stockbroker. Marx's partner Engels' father owned a factory (in which Engels worked and Marx also spent time), and Malthus - the most ruthless and right wing of them all was a Reverend. Another group of political economists, the French Physiocrats, got their observations from agricultural accounting - hence why still today modern economies and taxation are figured annually and seasonally; to coincide with agricultural cycles.
But I get though that there's long been a movement afoot to shun anyone who bothers to study anything in detail and understand how it works.