If that was true then the french unemployment problem could be solved by turning all those unemployed into traders.
You claim that 35 hours of work are not enough and strangle the economy. And in the same post you seek to absolutely dissociate labor from wealth...
You seem to have a limited approach of what is exchange. Every economical relationship is an exchange, production is an exchange, work is an exchange, even research and development is an exchange. Let's imagine that you're a farmer selling 10 tons of wheat and thanks to a better productivity, you grow 15 tons of wheat the year after, then you'll sell more wheat, hence you'll be able to
exchange more.
If you'd like to make your own car by yourself, in your garage, you would need hours and hours of painful work. But in a modern manufacturing plant, the worker just need to push a button and check if there's nothing wrong with machines. In one day, he has produced 10 cars. Of course, this is a charicature, but the point is simply to make you see the idea.
That's not necessarily wealth, that's price. You and most economists may look at it as a measure of wealth (in fact, the equivalent of wealth), but not everyone agrees.
Forget the price, there's no price, money doesn't exist. They could just trade objects. The only point is that there's no absolute value, each individual sees a different "utility" or satisfaction he can get thanks to a specific object and the value each individual attributes to that object is dependent on this. And hence, different to the one his neighbour will attribute to the same object. Some people couldn't live without a computer, other people couldn't think living with a computer. They don't give the same value to the same object.
We're in an island lost in the Pacific Ocean, money doesn't exist, I'm a wheat farmer and you're a cattle farmer. I'm bored to eat bread all the day, and you're bored to eat meat all the day. As a result, we don't give the same value to wheat and cattle. That's why we both agree to exchange wheat and meat, and we're both happier once the exchange is done. Indeed, both of us have exchanged something we considered having less value for something we considered having more value. We are both more satisfied afterwards. We are both "richer".
Money is just a good which is easy to trade with something else. It doesn't represent any kind of absolute value. If I would produce twice more banknotes, the value of the money will be twice lower, and as a result, all the "prices" will double.
Yes, it's really a pity. If you had read something about him you might have found this:
I've just mentionned Adam Smith because he's a very well-known economics pioneer, not because his words are gold. The modern theory of value has been discovered by the neoclassical school of economics in the late 19th century, one century after Adam Smith.
What I was denouncing was simply that despite there's no economics class in High School, we still teach us Marxist and Malthusianist theories of economics in litterature and philosophy class, without mentioning any other theories of economics.
Many of these lefty candidates are always there. And they don't even pretend they're in for being President (they say so !). IMHO, all of them are not credible :
)).
The agricultural lobby is powerful in a way that its small size couldn't account for. Most of the French are just madly in love with the old "rural France" myth and usually side with the farmers.
