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Previous: Chapter 18 - How to Get Started - NOW
CHAPTER 19 - PRINCIPLES OF WEALTH ACQUISITION
You cannot retire successfully unless you have an assured income or great confidence in securing an adequate income. I want to give you a little lesson in economics—not the kind of economics you might learn in schools or in colleges. In fact, I don't know of any schools and colleges that will teach you this kind of economics. But this is the kind of economics I live by, the kind of economics I have succeeded with. It may be cruel and heartless as many have informed me, but riches are not garnered by soft philosophies and kid gloves.
As a starter you must remember this—keep it in mind always lest you unwarily fall into the wrong hands. ALL WEALTH IS THE END PRODUCT OF LABOR. EVERYTHING THAT HAS VALUE IS VALUABLE BECAUSE OF HUMAN LABOR EMBODIED IN IT. All that is useful is not necessarily valuable. For example, water is our most useful product. Yet it is practically free because little labor is necessary to acquire it. On the other side not all things are valuable because labor may be embodied in them. You can go out and spend twenty days with a pen knife and a piece of timber to make a wagon wheel. A great amount of work has been expended but the labor embodied in all this has not been applied to create a socially desirable product. Hence the labor is worthless. ANOTHER POINT! ONLY EFFICIENTLY APPLIED LABOR CREATES NOTEWORTHY WEALTH. Which is to say that labor is expended unnecessarily unless the best and latest production techniques are utilized. Who would think of using lung power to blow bottles and glasses in these days when a machine, itself a magnificent example of embodied human labor of various and manifold types, can make hundreds of thousands of bottles and glasses during the same period of time.
NOTEWORTHY WEALTH are those products which command a price in the market place. In the long run all products exchange the one for the other at their value. Price is but the
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