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It'd be nice if you at least understood and acknowledged the parent's conscious choice to be less rich in order to be more wealthy.

As it is, I don't think you understand wealth and you don't appreciate the choice that parent post speaks of. See, you measure everything in money, and that's not the right way to measure true wealth.

Point by point, 1 is money, 2 is money (unless you mean wisdom passing on to descendants, which I really doubt, having read quite a few of your posts), 3 money again.

I see wealth as having a happy life -- the kind of life where the person feels at ease and social relations are free from strain. When people focus on making money, they make all other goals half-assed. Or spoken in different words, a person who performs some art, such as healing (like a surgeon), constructions, etc., when doing so for money, is bringing ulterior motive into their art/craft, thus invariable and necessarily degrading it. And this is what we see happening all around! Look how crappy the fruits and vegetables are in your supermarket. Shit, you may not even have seen a good looking tomato in your entire life, if you grew up in USA. What they sell in supermarkets across America is CRAP. Why? Because it's efficient -- the fruits are not tasty enough for worms, they don't rot, they last long. The main priority is quantity and lastingness. That's what happens when you do it for money. If you did it in any other way, then you'd make less money. So we have tomatoes that taste like leather, green bananas, mushy and blackened potatoes and so on. Some things you can't even buy, because they're not profitable (but damn, they are tasty). I once had to fight with the store ordering guy to get him to order some beets for the store. His argument, "No one buys beets, so we don't carry it." So what if the majority of culture is happy with just fucken' ramen? And that's likely to happen because they sell crap vegetables. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy: you sell crap produce and drive people to rely more on canned goods and cereal (5 dollars for a box of air) and pasta, etc... People buy fewer vegetables, so you have to carry a less diverse stock and less more expensive cereal. Profit. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

This is not what I'd call wealth. Lots of money flows thru a supermarket store. But everything on its shelves is CRAP and every fuckin supermarket employee I've seen has been a very SICK and unhappy person. Why is that? Because the store treats them like crap. That's why. But they don't have to be treated like that. They could be paid more (and yes, I know... I KNOW the store will make less money if they pay their clerks more, or GOD FORBID, give them part ownership of the store, so they feel responsible for what they do and they feel part of the success of their own work). The result: very very strained human relations. The result of strained relations is segregations of society into layers. The result of layering of society is formations of elites at the top and gangs who have nothing to lose and nothing to live for at the bottom.

Greed and the focus on money as exclusive measure of wealth turns everything into crap. You end up with booming economy, with lots of dollars, but all the people are pissed off, the government is bloated (YES, because, for corps to keep pumping more and more money out of public, they need to get government on board, and this is just a natural extention of doing it for money and seeing money as wealth), and all the products are of bare-minimum quality that the market will bear, and there is no point in excellence if a mediocre thing will sell too.

dada, it is people like YOU who bloat our government. You just don't see how it happens. It's a guy like you who ends up, in luckier circumstances with owning a corporation. And it's a guy like you that at the end of the day goes to the government and asks for laws that protect and ensure your business. You only talk trash when you're a small fry, but once you get more money, you will get a taste for socializing with highly placed people, you'll get a taste for that kind of society, and soon you'll have your own lobby group and you'll be bribing officials left and right. IT's just a natural extention for you. You are the CAUSE of what you so hate -- big government. Oh, sure, at your stage you harp about freedom and indepenence, but once a guy like you gets more dosh, you quickly learn the advantages that government can bring to your then-near-monopoly corp. Because a guy like you sees more money = more good, and knows no limit. So you'd never stop. You'd never reach a point where you'd say to yourself, "I could make even more money, but if I do so, I'll have to piss some other people off and take away more of their freedoms." And that's why you'd proceed all the way to forming a monopoly with a huge government to support it (deregulate when it helps you, and regulate when it helps you).

I wish you'd wake up and understand the causality of what you're doing and wishing for.