“The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.” — Proverbs 22:7
Wealth is not a number. It is not a currency. It is not a claim on someone else’s promise. Wealth is energy captured in physical form—human effort stored across time, transformed into something that can be traded for something else.
Consider what that means. A herd of cattle is wealth because it took energy to raise—the grass, the water, the labor of the herder—and it stores that energy in the form of living animals. The cattle can be traded for grain, for tools, for land. The energy is still there, waiting to be used. Gold and silver are wealth because they took enormous human effort to pull from the earth, and they hold that effort in a form that does not decay. They can be carried across a border. They can be exchanged for anything someone else has produced. Land is wealth because it captures sunlight and rain and turns them into food. Livestock, grain, silver, gold—these are not symbols of wealth. They are wealth itself.
This is what makes something tradable in the real world. It stores human energy. It does not disappear when you use it. It can be exchanged for other things that also store energy. And it does not depend on anyone’s promise to make it valuable. It is valuable because it took effort to create and because it can sustain life.
Now consider the other kind of tradability—the kind that exists only in the illusory world. A dollar bill is not wealth. It is a claim on wealth. It says: someone, somewhere, will give you something real in exchange for this paper. A stock certificate is not wealth. It is a claim on future production. A Bitcoin is not wealth. It is a claim on the belief that someone else will pay more for it later. The Token Dollar is not wealth. It is a claim on a claim. These things can be traded, yes. But they can only be traded because enough people agree to treat them as if they were real. Their value depends on trust. And trust can vanish overnight.
Real wealth does not depend on trust. A cow does not care whether you believe in it. A field of wheat does not care whether the market is up or down. A bar of gold does not care what the Federal Reserve says. Real wealth is physical. It exists whether or not anyone believes in it. And when the claims fail—when the trust evaporates—real wealth is what is left.
This is why cheap energy has been the anesthesia of abstraction. When energy is abundant and cheap, the claims can multiply without anyone noticing the gap between the paper and the foundation. When it wears off, the claims will still be there—and the foundation will not.
Nature has run this experiment many times. The results do not vary.
