>That's actually correct. The stock market is a mechanism for investment to be transferred from less productive uses to more productive use No it is not. Imagi

>That's actually correct. The stock market is a mechanism for investment to be transferred from less productive uses to more productive use No it is not. Imagine a stock market consisting of two people and a single certificate representing a corporation. Now imagine both people constantly trying to sell to each other that certificate at a higher price and buy the certificate at a lower price. This is essentially a scaled down version of the stock market. Nothing of value is created, only a game is played similar to gambling. You can scale this example up to thousands of companies each divided up into shares with thousands of people making transactions, the principle is the same. The act of a transaction is just paper and money being traded. Without farms, food and factories no utility producing action is happening. Issuing stocks can generate utility, but trading stocks generates nothing because you are trading paper. >That doesn't follow. Just because wheels are very useful, doesn't mean wheels are the only thing that need be produced. It does follow. You can have an economy of farmers, factories and other products WITHOUT stocks. Because these things are the primary drivers of an economy. You cannot have an economy of just a stock market without physical goods because the stock market is just an abstraction on top of what is essentially the true nature of an economy: the exchanging of products with utility. A stock certificate only represents utility. >No, they are not. Ideas and execution have value, too. That's why, for example, libraries have value - in the form of the information in the books, not the physical manifestation of the books. What does it take to form an idea? You need to feed yourself food to sustain yourself, you need energy from the physical world to formulate the idea. And it doesn't stop there, an idea by itself has no utility until it is deployed into the physical realm as a physical product or service. The formation of an idea up to it's crystallization into the physical world involve the injection of energy. THe process from beginning to end involves the reversal of entropy. The ideas in a library took energy to form. Additionally even the storage of those ideas require physical tomes in order to be set in stone. An idea, like utility is not as ephemeral as you think. All ideas take physical space to store whether it be on a hard drive, your brain, or the pages of a book.