The primal question in economics has always been: how do we get rich?

One of the earliest schools of thought were the mercantilists, who thought the answer was more gold. This makes sense. If you as an individual have more gold, you are richer. But at the macro level, having more money in the economy just pushes up prices.

A subsequent school of thought were the physiocrats, who thought value comes from land. As such, the more land you have, the richer you are.

Both of these theories were destroyed once the Europeans realized that the new world was significantly poorer despite having an abundance of gold and land.

Adam Smith did a great job of criticizing these schools of thought, but he too had a faulty theory. Adam Smith was the originator of the labor theory of value, which would later be promoted by the commies.

While money, land, and labor are all important, they are not the source of value.

Instead, wealth comes from economic activity itself. The more economic activity you have, the more wealth creation you have. Since value is subjective, you cannot prescribe what people ought to do ahead of time, they must be left alone to trade in a free market in order to generate prosperity.

This is why things like lockdowns, taxes, tariffs, and government in general are extremely gay. They reduce economic activity, which makes us poorer.