Mercantilism said that exports made you rich and imports made you poor, a fallacy mocked by Adam Smith when he pointed out that Britain selling durable hardware to France in exchange for perishable wine was a missed opportunity to achieve the ‘incredible aug mentation of the pots and pans of the country’. Marxism said that capitalists got rich because workers got poor, another fallacy. In the film Wall Street, the fictional Gordon Gekko not only says that greed is good; he also adds that it’s a zero-sum game where somebody wins and somebody loses. He is not necessarily wrong about some
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