Quote from: capn noe on December 03, 2012, 05:45:16 PM

You can't untangle personal wealth from the global flow of wealth in the same way you can't untangle a rain forest from the ice caps, doing so is EXACTLY the kind of intentional simplification used in order to rationalize....

They are not exactly related though. You are thinking that if someone has $1 of crude oil (a limited natural resource), then the only way for them to double their wealth is to get another $1 of crude oil; and that the total wealth in this example is now only limited to $2.
The fact is, you can refine that crude, and from the products sell black tar for $0.10, gasoline for $0.75, airplane fuel for $0.50, kerosene for $0.30, and plastic for $0.25. You can then collect and recycle that plastic for another $0.10 (prices are very rough estimates purely for example). You can then make even more money by forming that plastic and black tar into useful objects instead of just selling the raw materials for $0.10 and $0.25. So $2+ from just that single $1 resource, and that second $1 worth of oil is still free for someone else to take. Even more so, the people you sell those refined components can make even more wealth by trading it and using it to produce other things, like farming food, or transporting people. Then even more people can use that wealth to figure out and invent yet more services on top of those, thus growing what we can get out of that $1 exponentially. That's what wealth is, and how it was able to grow so much faster in the last century than the amount of mined resources.