I am a firm believer in social control. So No, I don't believe that things work themselves out by themselves without any "social engineering".

Capitalist are always extremely anxious to instill the notion that government is the problem and that's because they don't want social control and that is because they are holding a royal flush and are not in the mood to reshuffle the deck.

I have a better (I believe) definition: wealth is the ability to achieve one's desires

I would say that power and they are not equivalent

I meant is not dependent....

I guilty I guess. I'm defining wealth narrowly as token of power or privilege in the capitalists sense. Obviously, as you point, out the word is a metaphor for many things. I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be snarky either, it's just that this is a very serious topic for me.

Ellen can faithfully be trusted to speak up for the poor weak idle gin drinking class every time.

The value of Intellectual Property is protected by patent. All you need is enforce patent law.

Ellen, on the bigger point, I have to say that you are not getting it. Sure there might be a guy who sits in his cave and dreams of an artifact (we now call a shovel) and makes drawings of it. He goes on to dream about bricks and mortar and ducts and wires and all sorts of nifty things in his cave. He is a GENIUS, no doubt about it. He can dream up the whole process of building a modern office tower all by himself back then in his cave say circa 500 BC. In fact there are cases such as the case of Leonardo de Vinci who had some drawings of a primitive helicopter way back when. But nothing will get done unless there is the manpower to PHYSICALLY CREATE IT.

You devalue manpower and are overawed with intellectual power. But they go hand in hand Ellen. We can rephrase Kant slightly and say "Intellect without manpower is impotent and manpower without intellect is blind".

It is true that intellectual power is a lot scarcer in this world than a strong back. It is also true that intellectual power has the potential of creating a lot more wealth than brute force. Therefore, I agree that the guy who invents in his mind all these things should be handsomely rewarded and protected by Intellectual property laws. But the guy who contributes to the realization of our homo intellecticus' scheme is not superfluous but essential in the entire process.

Are there more strong backs than bright brains: yes Does that mean that strong backs are just expendable "ants"? Gee that's so elitist! I see harmony where you see contempt. That seems to be the difference.

And mark this: it is homo intellecticus who cooks up these worthless Ponzi schemes to defraud the people in his wicked little brain. So while brain power has the potential to have a bigger effect than the shovel, the effect can be destructive and that's the downside to that particular species. The guy with the shovel could never create as much destruction as the crooks that thought up this latest economic crisis.

Right.

But on a slightly different note: these worthless drones that are really leeches on society are venerated and envied in capitalist (and general) culture.
That might be just because we are all greedy by nature and dream of living off the fat of the land while others slave away. That is a distinctively ANTI social element in our natures that needs not to be reinforced and venerated but kept in check.

You can argue from an evolutionary point of view that the instinct for getting something for nothing has had survival value and as such should not be suppressed for the sake of the health of our species. (I don't make that argument but I think Spenserians and (ironically) fundamentalist Christians might).
But the irony of evolution is that we have evolved as a species to such an extent in terms of intellectual capacity and material abundance, that these primitive instincts are more of a hindrance than an asset in our lives. Our intellects have outpaced some of our more primitive hard wired genetic dispositions*. The struggle for survival (as say Hobbes describes) is a distant echo of our former selves as we sit here in cyberspace exchanging ideas.

We don't need our fangs anymore!

And with the advent of intelligent robotics, we might not need Joe the Plumber or Jim the ditch digger either anymore. Then what?

* that in itself poses a danger given that we live in an age where nuclear weapons and mass destruction in general is a technological reality.

Re: globalism
I found John Ralston Saul's The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World most thought provoking and informative.

Andrew,
I'd say the tableau of the ditch-digger and his boss is a useful scenario, but we need to expand upon it to reflect what's actually going on in our crazy "marketplace."
First, the ditch-digger does not have a shovel. He has a $50,000 backhoe which he purchased on credit with the basic idea that he could get a lot more digging done in a shorter period of time.
Second, he does not "work" for the boss. He is more likely than not an independent contractor with a 1099, and he assumes all the risk of operating a small business. No healthcare, no job security, no pension. His negative life savings are wrapped up in that backhoe, and a big fat insurance policy to cover any screw-ups on his part.
The boss is probably not "the boss". She is most likely a subcontractor herself. As a sub, she may have been hired to run this one aspect of the project, a footing for an office building, let's say. Her value in the project is as a manager and planner and salesperson, assuming the risk involved in making sure the job gets done to spec, and acting as a sort of rep for, in this case, maybe a concrete manufacturer. That manufacturer sets her prices, access to materials and does business with her as long as she keeps orders rolling in.
She is, however, no one's employee. She is "independent." She doesn't work for the general contractor, she doesn't work for Consolidated Concrete. She has worked hard to qualify for an enormous line of credit with which she pays the Ditch-Digger and everyone else she has contracted to set this footing. Chances are she may have leveraged her car or house to qualify for this credit line. Her business owns little in terms of assets save for a closely guarded rolodex but she pays for a huge insurance policy to cover the risk of doing the job. Again, she is responsible for all the expenses of running a small business, just like Ditch Guy, but has very little to show for it.
Meanwhile, this scene plays out ad infinitum across the construction site, into offices and schoolyards and battlegrounds. The past 20 years has made the old capitalism quaint. All the workers who may have been unionized a generation ago have been made into little tiny capitalists.
We work for ourselves and are beholden to insurers and usurers to pay for it. Meanwhile the companies that used to actually make and do things are just sort of big risk-averse paper-wielding money collectors.
And we're all running around fighting over the crumbs that occasionally fall from the big muffin that is American Capital.
What flavor of Muffin, you ask? Why it is a Financialization-Insurance-Healthcare-Nut Muffin.
It seems to me that a radical shift in our distribution of wealth would be a re-distribution of Risk and Reward!

One good thing, in my opinion anyway, about the capital gains and dividend tax cuts was making the two rates the same. The precise rate for these "non-income" taxes is less important than keeping them from diverging wildly

Also, divergence in rates insures work for tax lawyers and accountant for the rich, to figure a way to shift their money into wherever it is taxed lower. I.E., create a corporation to put it into, or take it out of a corporation and make it personal income, whichever has the more beneficial rate. Of course, sometimes, but not always, Congress enacts such as incentives because they want the rich to shift their money in a certain direction. Most often I haven't seen it work out as intended, though.

I was reacting to this, ""Idea" people are ridiculously overvalued, (by themselves, mostly)." I see idea people as including engineers, one of which I was, when working, and rarely were my peers anywhere near overvalued. When I retired most of us idea people were paid less than the people we supervised, who had an effective union. I didn't mean to imply that you were on the wrong side of the issue, just that not all idea people are overvalued.