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1. Creating wealth means adding value to the economy through manufacturing or other material improvements up to and including expedited communication, intellectual property and so on. By contrast, people engaged in financial services, stock and futures trading and so on are, in fact, taking wealth from other people. If Tom builds a car, he has created wealth, which you can purchase. If John finances your purchase of the car, John increases your costs and makes a tidy profit for himself, but he hasn’t added anything to the value of the car — he hasn’t added anything to the economy or created any wealth. This is not to say John’s services aren’t useful — credit is a necessary component of any capitalist economy. But an economy where most of the growth is in services is an economy that is bleeding real wealth.
3. Most jobs actually producing things though hard work have been shipped off to other countries. But it’s a mistake to assume that job with a high degree of idleness isn’t stressful or worth compensating. The popular analogy comparing office cubicles to veal pens is basically accurate; office drones suffer from a wide range of health and psychological problems that are byproducts of having to sit in one place, relatively unmoving, without natural light or fresh air, for 8 to 10 hours a day. As far as that goes, scanning blogs is essentially a coping mechanism for dealing with a tremendously stressful situation. In spite of this, the productivity of American office workers is still higher than that of office workers in most of the rest of the world and Americans overall work longer weeks and have significantly fewer holidays and vacations than people in other countries.
