[Etheryte]

This mixes up where the value creation takes place. Shitcoins are a good example of this fallacy, I can mint ten billion neilwilson-coins right now and hand them out, it doesn't mean any new value has been created. Perhaps an easier way to understand this conceptually is to think of money as a loan, because that's what it essentially is, a pair of credit and debit. Taking out a loan in and of itself it doesn't create any new value, the value is created if you do something useful with it. Money isn't even a requirement, you can also barter or trade. Money is only a means for mediating trade and do relative distribution, it isn't wealth.

[neilwilson]

How does it mix it up?

The example was a barber. There is no difference between transferring an existing credit to the barber and generating a new credit for the barber. The result is the same - an additional haircut is performed.

In the case of a new credit that is an additional haircut that wouldn't otherwise have been performed because the person wanting it has desire, not demand (desire backed by the ability to pay).

So I disagree. We have a monetary economy. Since the whole point of the game is to 'make money' people will create more output if you offer them money in exchange for doing that.

The 'loan' as you call it drives the new production, as any loan does since all loans are, necessarily, new money.

[Etheryte]

This is a mixup of money and wealth. Money is not wealth, and in the same vein, the point of the game if you'd like to call it that, is not to make money, but to become wealthy. These are two very different things.

Wealth is possession of real assets, natural resources, real estate, valuable companies, in classical econ terms, any scarce resource. Money is not a scarce resource, for nearly marginal cost we could create a near infinite amount of it (and in the digital age of banking we often do create large amounts of it with no direct cost). You can't create more oil, land, houses etc without incurring considerable costs, whether it be in the form of effort, time or etc and that's what makes those resources scarce. Money is scarce if you look at it on a personal level, you can't just create more money for yourself, but that doesn't make it scarce on a global level.

What might create some confusion is that wealth is often measured in money, but that doesn't make it the same thing. Wealth is real resources and money is the means we use to decide who gets how much of those real resources.

[neilwilson]

Yet the wealthy have very large bank accounts and own an awful lot of financial assets.

Almost like you are completely wrong.

Not everybody is enamoured with shiny yellow metal.

The wealthy are not interested in hoarding stuff. The wealthy are interested in the flow of money that lets them do stuff - primarily by freeing up their time.

It's control of the annual pie that's the key, not a sitting on a pile of gold like Smaug.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/How-Get-Rich-Greatest-Entrepreneurs/d...