We, the good people, created the world and all its wealth
On August 2, 2026, the Wall Street Journal published a prominent opinion piece titled “A Brief History of Wealth Creation” and subtitled “The ancients aggregated wealth. America was built by creating it. Socialists are blind to all this.” (“A Brief History of Wealth Creation. The ancients accumulated wealth. America was built by creating it. Socialists are blind to all this.”)
In it, the author, John Steele Gordon, not only demonstrates a profound and strategic historical blindness regarding how the United States created wealth, but also a growing nervousness on the part of the establishment regarding a shift in public opinion among the American people toward “the blind socialists.”
Gordon begins with a correct observation, which he uses to distinguish his own Empire: “The grandeur of the Roman Empire was built on the aggregation of wealth. Using its superior military organization, Rome conquered its neighbors, took their gold and silver and sold their populations into slavery. When the empire ran out of neighbors, the Roman economy began to falter.”
Immediately afterward, the author not only makes a leap of a thousand years—ignoring the history of capitalism that has destroyed and exploited every continent in the world since the fifteenth century—but also glosses over the founding period of the United States, from the colonists’ assaults, thefts, and massacres of their Indigenous neighbors to sell their lands (especially following the Royal Proclamation Act of 1763) and then the theft of more than half the territory of its Mexican neighbors, all the way to the accumulation of wealth based on slavery—an institution that laid the foundation for the extractive accumulation of the major banks and corporations that would later invest in industry and that, even today, exist under the same names.
When Gordon describes how the Roman Empire became rich and powerful, he does so by perfectly describing the American Empire. Let’s rewrite Gordon’s first paragraph: The greatness of the American Empire was built on the accumulation of wealth. Relying on a superior military organization, the United States “conquered” its neighbors, from Native American territories to Mexican territories; it seized their lands, their gold, and all their resources; it reinstated and expanded slavery where it was illegal or nonexistent. When the empire ran out of neighbors to conquer and overseas protectorates to subjugate, the American economy began to falter.
Despite his own quote about Rome, Gordon confuses wealth creation with accumulation: “Today America is in the midst of the greatest epoch of wealth creation the world has ever known. Our history is one of innovation, and we are all richer because of it.”
The United States is undergoing its greatest era of decline. Its greatest extraction of wealth comes from what President and General Ike Eisenhower warned about with concern: the Military-Industrial Complex; it comes from wars and financial speculation; it comes from the virtual creation of dollars… All of these are unproductive, destructive, and extractive practices. The real creation of material wealth is now led by China and, to a lesser extent, other countries, including poor nations such as the Congo, from which the raw materials for the electronics industry continue to be extracted by hundreds of thousands of slaves—including 40,000 children who earn a couple of dollars a day without being able to attend school, while they are poisoned in the mines that fuel and make our prosperity possible.
Innovations have been commonplace throughout different periods of history, such as the explosion of scientific and technological innovation in the Islamic Empire, whose mathematical discoveries and developments (from numbers to algebra and algorithms) and the separation of reason from religious truth laid the foundation for modern science. Even simple inventions that took centuries to develop—such as the wheel or writing—were thousands of times more important to humanity’s history and present than the Internet or the chips that Mr. Gordon reveres.
With a naivety that not even an elementary school student would display, Gordon believes that wealth creation is demonstrated by the Forbes list of millionaires:
“In 1982, the first year of the Forbes 400, it took $100 million to make the list, and the wealthiest American was Daniel Keith Ludwig, worth $2 billion… In 2025 it took $3.8 billion to make the list, and the man at the top was Elon Musk, worth $428 billion as calculated on Sept. 1. How did this rapid increase in wealth come to be? Simple: the microprocessor and the internet.”
In 1982, Washington continued to destroy democracies in Africa and Latin America and to support dozens of fascist and neocolonial regimes, including South Africa’s apartheid regime, and began its phase of inducing debt in the countries of the Global South. The logic was and is simple: we printed unbacked dollars, lent them to countries with natural resources and real production, so that they would have to export those resources at rock-bottom prices in order to buy dollars and, with those dollars, pay us back debts they could never repay—nor do we want them to, for obvious reasons.
Mr. Gordon then goes on to praise the inventions of the Industrial Revolution as if they were the original Creation—an old Western habit. Of course, this Revolution brought about enormous changes, as did many other revolutions. The one Gordon refers to took place in England in the second half of the 18th century—two centuries after England had destroyed the nascent industrial revolution in India and Bangladesh, the centers of the global economy in the centuries preceding the arrival of the “European companies.” No, Mr. Gordon; the steam engine was not invented by James Watt in 1781. Taqi al-Din, in present-day Turkey, had already built a steam turbine in 1551. Earlier, in the 10th century, the Arabs created automatons with valves and hydraulic control systems. A thousand years before them, Heron of Alexandria, in Egypt, did the same.
Like almost all European discoveries and inventions since the Renaissance, these were reworkings of technologies and scientific ideas already known and practiced by cultures and peoples that European supremacism conveniently buried under tons of earth, not only forgetting earlier legacies but also its own intellectual thefts and its own crimes, which—during the era of capitalism alone—have claimed several hundred million lives.
The English Industrial Revolution itself would not have been possible without the privatization of communal lands in Europe and without the theft of all manner of economic resources from Latin America (and later Africa), which served to feed the displaced peasants crammed into the new industrial cities. What’s more, inventions such as the cotton spinning machine led to slavery being expanded—shortly after England outlawed the trade in Africans—by the Americans a few decades later into Texas and other Mexican territories where it had previously been illegal. In other words, Mr. Gordon, this is the perfect definition of “extractive wealth.”
Well, Mr. Gordon, just get it over with: “In 1859 the first oil well was drilled. By 1900 the names Rockefeller and Flager were legendary, and the price of kerosene had dropped…” Once again, all achieved through violent coups d’état and even more violent dictatorships in “backward countries.” Extraction? Oppression? Oh, no, “wealth creation.”
Finally, Gordon concludes his Frankenstein with the following paragraph:
“Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak soon founded Apple and developed the first mass-market personal computer to reach consumers. Microsoft provided software to IBM, and Bill Gates became, for a time, the wealthiest man in the world. Thanks to these men, school kids today carry around more computing power in their backpacks than the Pentagon could have afforded in the 1950s.”
Of course, the author isn’t going to mention that none of these “geniuses” created anything of real significance, except for privatization schemes and wealth-extraction enterprises. The technological innovations of the 20th century are not only based on thousands of years of innovations—the heritage of humanity—but the most important and costly research was carried out by governments that had money extracted from neo-colonized countries: Paris, London, and Washington. Even the Soviet Union contributed innovations such as the first satellites. Elon Musk’s Starlink owes Stalin something, in addition to everything it has directly siphoned off from the U.S. government—that is, from taxpayers.
Regarding the title: Kipling’s lament and self-praise about “the white man’s burden.”
Jorge Majfud, August 2026
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