[skedaddle]

> My point is that all production is social production. The productive assets of every age are the joint product of all preceding ages, and all those born into the present are legitimately joint heirs of those assets.

TLDR if you're trying to grapple through the 1,300 words leading up to the author's first point, this is it -- the wealth of a nation... that it exists, I suppose (ignoring that they occasionally have to get rebuilt from nothing).

The introductory essay has no examples, it is just a long quasi-theoretical discussion of things like causation and value. These concepts are completely intractable by real economic theory (because an economy is a complex dynamic system run by humans). So you need to look at the real world. What actually happens to the economy in nations where privately held wealth doesn't exist? What happens to the people? That is what you have to reckon with, morally. This ABC implies fairness stuff shows pretty well the amount of effort that was put into this.

... the piece is SO LONG.