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The Power of Dreams
Free-Market Motivator 1  2

What do you do for a living?
     I'm looking for an economic theory that explains to people, "Oh yeah, let's do this so I can be rich, and my cousin can make a living."  The existing, scarcity-based theories don't work.  I've made a career of demolishing them.  I'm trying to formulate a real theory that will help people live better and more successfully, and know what to teach their children.

So, most people don't know where wealth comes from?
     They're told that one man's gain depends on another's loss.  That's no longer true.  We live at a time of change greater than the Agricultural or Industrial revolutions.  We are now able to create a potentially unlimited amount of wealth out of worthless matter, using our minds.  If you realize that, you're in a much better position to take advantage of the opportunities that surround us.

But I keep hearing that our economy is terminally ill.
     If you listen to the news, you'll hear there's this terrible recession.  That's false.  In a recession, there aren't enough jobs for the people who need them.  We have jobs: The daily papers are full of "Help Wanted" ads.  What's happening is that improvements in technology are making certain jobs unnecessary, all the time, and creating new jobs.  The musical compact disk industry is bigger than the vinyl record industry it replaced.  The news media tells us all about plant closings.  What they don't tell us is that most of the people thrown out of work are rehired in a different job within six months at a 20 percent increase in salary.
 

But aren't whole industries declining?
     Yes.  What I'm saying is that the signs of supposed economic decline, such as unemployment, loss of manufacturing jobs, bank failures, don't represent decline at all, but change.  Wealth is being displaced from one sector of our economy to another.  In 1930, the U.S. had 30 million farmers who fed 100 million Americans.  In the next 50 years, advances in chemistry and biology made food production so efficient that by 1980, even though we had only 300,000 farmers, they produced more than enough food for almost 300 million Americans.  Did we lose millions of agricultural jobs?  Yes.  Was it bad?  No.  It freed up money and people to do other things and produce more wealth.  The same kind of thing is happening today in manufacturing, except it's happening much faster.  Instead of taking 50 years, as it did on the farm, it's happening within one person's working lifetime--every 5 or 10 years.  Today, people will keep getting wealthier if they can keep learning new skills.

What do you call wealth?
     The things people want in their lives: houses to stay warm and protected, cars to ride around in, technology to inform and entertain them, and the freedom to spend time with their families.  For the first time in history, everybody can have them, and without taking from anyone else.  Look at any $10,000 GM car: Bolt for bolt, it's a better car, with more features, than a $10,000 car three years ago.  Consumers are getting more and more real wealth for their money. 

How is that possible?
     We live in an age where alchemy is real.  The medieval alchemists were looking for the secret of turning base metals into gold, because they believed that God would not have created a world where you can only enrich yourself by making someone else poorer.  We are now realizing the alchemists' dream: We take the basest matter there is--sand--and use it to create the chips that make possible a $150 billion computer industry.  Crude oil was a bad-smelling nuisance until human ingenuity figured out how to refine it into a fuel.  The lesson is that wealth doesn't come from gold or oil or land.  It's created by the technology, driven by human ingenuity, that makes those things useful to us.  Wealth is unlimited because it comes from our minds.

But won't we run out of raw materials eventually?
     No.  We have more reserves of oil than we did 20 years ago, because we've gotten better at finding and extracting it.  We're also using it more
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