Guest Post: The Super Bowl and the Wonders of Wealth Creation, by Matthew S.

My brother wrote this up on Facebook the other day, and I think it's good enough to re-post.

People who pass along memes tallying the money spent on Super Bowl ads and bemoaning that that money wasn't used to feed the poor or some other emotional cause do not understand how wealth is created. The Super Bowl is portrayed, by the left, as a terrible waste of resources - a giant vacuum sucking money from the poor and pouring it into the rich. This is utterly false. The Super Bowl, and all other manner of 'decadent' entertainment, creates enormous wealth out of NOTHING. The left believes there is a finite supply of treasure and it is their job to spread it around evenly. Thank God that they are wrong about this, or we would all be living in mud huts and eating bugs.

In 1900, the vast majority of Americans were barely surviving on a meager supply of food and a limited number of actual possessions. If you owned shoes, you were doing better than 42% of your fellow citizens. THINK ABOUT THAT. Really stop and think. Because the miracle that is the engine of economic progress driving our economy has made it so that almost every homeless man owns a pair of shoes today and most Americans own 5 or 6 pairs, including specialty items like boots for the snow, running shoes for the workout, work shoes that are fancier, flip flops for the beach, etc. Or...to put it another way, even after accounting for inflation, the average person in 1900 was grindingly poor compared to the average person today.

There are six ways to create wealth out of nothing:

1. Invent something new that people want (you may think, they have to buy it from their limited resources!, but no...creating demand for something causes you to be able to create jobs to make the something...if enough people are doing this, there is more wealth for all).
2. Teach people how to properly use/maintain/repair something or do that work yourself (every time we can keep an object useful and extend its life, we are creating value).
3. Teach people the skills they need to create wealth some other way.
4. Maintain/track/supply data that empowers the innovators.
5. Make something (manufacturing).
6. Serve people (the service, entertainment, and retail industries) - this one may be less obvious, but humans need cultural experiences...they need outlets for their natural aggressions, creative desires, and to soothe them when they are in need of an escape...those are all hardwired into our genetic code. Art, sport, culture, and story-telling being necessary for the happiness and prosperity of the people, their presence creates wealth (not to mention all of the jobs those parts of our society create and the assistance that advertising gives to innovators and manufacturers and food service etc).

And all of those things make all of us richer, so that more of us have extra wealth to give to charity, to help our fellow men, and to squander on inefficient leftist government policies that try to re-distribute the imaginary static pool of wealth that would never have existed if not for the rise of industrial capitalism.

Chaser: Capitalism Has Made Human Life Fantastically Better