I'm surprised at the problems people have with understanding my pinned tweet. I realize many have ideological blinders that make it hard to see the actual words and their literal meaning. But a more fundamental, and much more alarming, issue is that so
many seem to not understand the concept production. The point of production is to make something more useful and thus more valuable. Our default and starting point as a species (and, typically, for us as individual beings) is to do and having done nothing. We do things because
that offers (or at least promises) more value in our lives (survival, reproduction, comfort, entertainment, etc.). If we do not act, we do not produce those valued outcomes. That is by definition to live in #poverty. The alternative, to have access to a great mass of produced
'things', is, consequently, the lack of poverty, i.e. prosperity. There is really nothing more to it. This is not to say that production is easy or must be successful, it is not to say that there are no obstacles or hindrances for such undertakings, and it also doesn't say that
we have equal opportunities or abilities or access to resources. The point is not *access* to specific resources, but the fact that for prosperity to exist at all those resources must first be *created*. This is apparently provocative, which to me is terrifying--if we do not know
where prosperity comes from, then we are also fundamentally unable to recreate the prosperity we have, and equally unable create more of it. This, then, means we're headed for poverty: as soon as we have consumed the produced means of prosperity (and those means are never ever-
lasting), we'll all be in abject poverty. The goal, in contrast, should be to lift everyone out of this 'default' state. And we can only do this through innovative production. Considering our present and historically unheard-of level of prosperity, albeit not equally distributed,
previous generations know or understood the necessity to produce. We're living off their legacy, and it is our moral duty to add to it to offer future generations even better lives. Anything else is as selfish as it is destructive.
