Rondam-Ramblings-A-catalog-of-wealth-creation-mech #

And the reason for linking the east coast of the United States with China was that a ship full of goods from China (including, for example, high quality china with a lower-case ‘c’, which at the time was produced nowhere else) could be sold in the east-coast cities of the U.S. at about a 300% profit. Money and wealth often go together, but they are completely different things. You can transform money into wealth, and vice versa (which is the whole point of having money), but you can have money without wealth and vice versa. Just as moving things around is the basis for the shipping industry, storing things is the basis for the retail industry. Stores are called stores because they used to be places where things were stored, not necessarily places where things were sold. A lot of wealth gets created this way, but of all the ways to make money it is arguably the least effective. Once upon a time, information was strongly bound to physical objects like books or vinyl records, and you could make money by producing these things because they were instances of #3.