Here is the title from an email message I just received: The Best and Most Surefire Way of Building Wealth in Troubled Times:. It is but one of many messages I have seen recently on wealth. It is, in my opinion, a diversion from actually living on the planet. It is overhead.

While we/the system continue to accept that building wealth both can be done and is what should be done, it is really fiction. You can build a house, a boat or even a piece of software. But, you cannot build wealth. What you can do is reallocate wealth.

While this is far from a universal definition, I expect few would disagree that what building wealth means in the accumulation of assets. Capitalist thought tells us that is what we should do, Socialist thought tells us that we should share wealth and Communist thought tells us we should only keep what we need. None of these -isms address whether building wealth, whether it is for personal use, cooperative accumulated or shared, is what should be happening.

Yes, as long as everyone else sees wealth as what matters to them, you should be able to continue down this path. That is, you will be able to continue to trade parts of this thing we call wealth for what you really need—food, someone to fix your roof, medical care or a new car. This works because we see wealth itself as being scarce. But what happens when what we really want or need becomes scarce?

The quick answer is "the price goes up". For a while, that's true. That is, you need to use more of your wealth to get a gallon of gasoline or a 2x4. But, eventually, there may be no gasoline or 2x4s to trade wealth for. That's the end game. That's when you see that accumulated wealth is not what you really need.

Sure, for most things, we are not there yet. But, in some areas, it seems we are getting close. Fresh water is one example. Mostly because of how we live, the availability of fresh water in the world is no longer meeting all the demands. While we can pretend it is an issue of wealth—poor people in Africa, for example—the reality is that this is a huge issue in much of the United States. On the west coast, water is transported huge distances to satisfy the needs of Los Angeles, for example. In addition, the water table in crop producing areas continues to drop.

The wealth economy solution is for a farmer to drill a deeper well. He will then, of course, need more energy to run the pump. That means he will then need to raise the price of his wheat or tomatoes to cover these additional costs and the consumer will have to pay more. In a Capitalist economy, people without sufficient wealth will just have to eat less. In a Socialist economy, those with more wealth will need to share more with others so they can keep buying their tomatoes and wheat. In a Communist economy, the pie will get smaller and we will no longer be able to take what we need.

Enter the concept of a resource based economy (RBE). Step 1 was to recognize that what we call wealth is no more than an abstraction. It is an easy tool for comparison but it is not what we need. In my example, what was really needed was water. The chain reaction caused by the water shortage was expressed in terms of using up wealth but that was just the reaction, not the cause.

If we decide to care about resources rather than wealth, the picture looks very different. We need to address resource usage, in this case, water. There were costs involved in addressing the problem but we distributed them/passed them along. And we justified them as probably being the best, meaning most cost-effective, solution. But, if the goal is the best solution, should we not be looking at what is really in short supply—the water?

If we start here it seems like the only logical solution is to use less water. It doesn't really matter if we use less water to grow the crop or save water in another system. The bottom line is to decrease the use of this critical resource. My goal is for you to see this difference an RBE would offer rather than solve this particular problem but let me offer a few things to consider.

1. Crop growing techniques could be changed. This includes mulching, integrated crops and hydroponics (or aquaponics which is much more water-efficient).
2. Different crops could be grown that require less water.
3. Water consumption for other uses could be decreased. One very obvious example would be to start replacing inefficient sewer systems which require large quantities of water to transport small quantities of human waste into vacuum-based systems. The technology is already in use in parts of Europe—there is no reason implementaton could not start immediately.
4. Recycle waste water by using it to grow crops.

To offer a parallel, when you go to a doctor and complain about a pain, the apparent quick fix is that he gives you something to make the pain go away. Unfortunately, this does not address the problem. What we see on the surface as an economic problem is really a resource problem. Let's stop taking pain killers and try to cure the problem instead.