You are committing a selective attention fallacy. You are completely ignoring my refuting argument and simply restating what the original user said. You’re also engaging a definist fallacy, although you at least addressed that one. You simply (and vaguely) define wealth as “something that people value.” First of all, how many people have to value what I’ve created before you consider it wealth? One? A hundred? A majority? Second, by that logic, all I have to do to create wealth is produce something that meets that arbitrary number.
For example, suppose I and one other person value fire ash more than anything in existence. By your logic, (if I had the power to confiscate all these things, of course) I could take by force and burn millions of acres of farmland…thousands of works of art (I’ll throw some Rembrandt’s and some Monet’s on there for more kindling)…hundreds of millions of dollar bills, a small city’s worth of structures, buildings of all kinds, medications, technologies, all the digital media containing the map of the human genome…and produce a lot of ash. And I’ll have created wealth. I’ll have “produced things that people value.” After all, it doesn’t matter if you or anyone else I stole from thinks I’ve destroyed wealth…because as you said: slavery doesn’t mean your production has no value…it only means the slave’s production has no value to the slave. In the same way, the ash that I’ve produced by burning all of that fuel doesn’t mean it has no value…it just has no value to you.
In essence, your entire argument is no more sophisticated than the original poster who essentially said the same thing: that as long as someone values what is produced, then wealth is created. And my entire refutation is that that is simply false. Unless both parties involved benefit (that is, both voluntarily agree to the terms and outcome of the arrangement) then wealth is not created…it is merely transferred. This second is the part you completely ignore.
I do not deny that when you force a slave to produce something that you value, you are wealthier. But this does not mean you have created wealth (i.e. produced wealth that didn’t exist before). You have merely taken the wealth of the slave. Sure, you had to force him to convert it to a form you preferred…but that transfer doesn’t mean you’ve created new wealth. In other words, the act of converting the wealth to a different form doesn’t constitute wealth creation…it just means there’s an extra step for you to have to take before you steal it.
To address (and attempt to refute) this truth you commit yet a third fallacy. The argument at hand is whether wealth can be created through force. And you state quite clearly (paraphrase): stealing the wallet [the act of force] is not the act of creating the wealth…it is what you use the wallet and the money for, after you have stolen it. So basically, your argument is that “yes, wealth can be created through force…because you can initiate force and then create wealth afterward.” This is nothing more than a sort of post hoc false cause fallacy…that A can be caused by B simply because B can happen and then A can happen. Your examples are a product of the same fallacy. You even state: “…all economic systems based on the use of force and coercion that also produced large amounts of wealth.” Now whether that sentence was meant to say that it was the force and coercion that produced the wealth, or you were just simply saying that wealth was produced in economic systems that included force and coercion, I can’t be sure. But if it’s the first one, then you’re contradicting your statement that came before it, and if it’s the second one, then you’re not saying anything more than wealth can be created in societies where force and coercion are used. That does absolutely nothing to prove one is caused by the other.
Not only does this make your argument invalid, it supports the notion that you agree with the very premise you are debating. By stating what you’ve said, you essentially imply that wealth cannot be created through force…You initiate the force, and then create wealth later through non-forceful, voluntary acts. If you believed wealth could be created through force, you’d simply claim the forceful act created wealth.
You attempt to skirt around this fact by speciously admitting that perhaps the wealth created after the force has occurred is less than would be created if it didn’t occur. But this does nothing to refute the entire point being debated. The question was “can wealth be created through the use of force”…not “can wealth be created after force has been used.”
I would guess your best hypothetical of this would be if I did steal your wallet, I could invest the money I stole into something that produced something I or others valued. But again, this is no different than the transference I just spoke of. Just because I had to convert what I stole from you into something that I actually valued does not mean I have created any new wealth. And what’s more, the act of investing the money—the part you claim is the wealth-creating part—would be a voluntary transaction…so you’ve made my point for me.
The slave example is debunked by the farmland analogy. Just because you can force someone else to convert their time and labor into something that you value, doesn’t mean you have created wealth any more than if you burn everyone’s farmland…just because I can burn farmland and bring more fire ash into existence (thus making me, someone who values ash, more wealthy) does not mean I have created wealth. I have merely stolen things that other people value more than I do and turned them into things that I value more than they do. There is not more wealth in the world. There is just existing wealth that has been transferred from those people to me. It’s no different than if we all valued the same thing and I simply stole it all. The result is the same: I have more of what I want most because other people have less of what they want most. This is not wealth creation.
However…if right now I value your cow more than I value my car, and you value my car more than your cow, and we voluntarily trade, then we are both better off. We are both wealthier than we were before. If either one of us didn’t think he would be better off in the arrangement, it wouldn’t have voluntarily taken place. Wealth has been created where it didn’t exist before. This can only take place through voluntary action.