What is wealth?

What is really the source, the basis, for economic value?
How is wealth created?
Why does our society locate the "ownership" of wealth in individuals?

Wealth has its source in production. In result, it is the labor of production, or of resource extraction, or of service, that originates the value of wealth.
Wealth is the materialization of excess labor, of labor value reserved by society to be invested in tools of production to the end of increasing the productivity of labor.
It is socially organized labor that is the basis of economic value.

Wealth is created by withholding some product of labor from consumption --consumption for sustenance or pleasure-- by the laborer. That is, by reserving and aggregating that withheld product in some form that can be made available to investment in the tools of production.
Toward the end of achieving this investment, society establishes roles (and the corresponding statuses, positions in social organization) that bear the responsibility for aggregating (capitalizing) the withheld and reserved product.
The establishing, organizing, and incentivizing of such aggregative behavior is the foundation and essence of capitalism.

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Misconceiving wealth as primarily (inherently) private, rather than as primarily (inherently) public.
Conceiving of education as a private benefit rather than as a public good, and refusing sufficiently to finance it from the public share of the national wealth, to finance it like all such necessary infrastructural elements should be financed . . . roads, clean water, the national energy distribution system, health care, education.  It is the public disposition of these factors of community life that provides the shared means by which shared labor produces wealth.

Capitalists are merely the aggregators of the "excess" value generated by cooperative labor applied to appropriated resources. The source of economic value is the material resources, gathered and processed by cooperating labor and distributed similarly, and all organized by social relations which all participants mutually create and effectuate. Individualistic industrial capitalism incorrectly mythologizes the individual as ontologically prior to the group; neither is.

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