You buy flour, eggs and sugar worth $10 — your grocer gets your $10.

You use those ingredients to make a huge cake you sell for $20. You now have $20 and can spend that $20 to buy more ingredients or a different product you want from someone else.

The additional $10, is created by nothing but work — it’s not taken from someone else. New wealth is created where it didn’t exist before. Your cake baking increased the value of “stuff” in our world by $10. Now all over the earth, every day, billions of others are doing the same thing. This is why, unless interfered with, the amount of wealth and value in the world keeps naturally growing.

The key lesson is that, just because someone has or creates wealth it does not mean they stole it or harmed someone else to get it.

Someone who takes $300k worth of land and wood and makes a home that sells for $500k has created wealth, someone who takes blank pages and writes a Harry Potter novel or takes empty computers and programs a Facebook creates value where none was before.

A company like Apple might invest a billion dollars on R&D and create a product idea worth five times that which in turn creates thousands of other opportunities for suppliers, accessories makers, app developers, retailers, shippers and so on.

Fifty years ago Stan Lee and Jack Kirby sat down with nothing more than pen, ink and paper and created The Hulk, Spiderman, The X-Men, The Fantastic Four, The Avengers and other beloved superhero characters. Today, armies of creators take those same characters, teaming with writers, directors, set designers, costume supervisors, special effects experts, caterers and hundreds of others and, from absolutely nothing they fill a blank high quality digital master tape or film reel worth $90 with a movie worth half a billion dollars that will be duplicated on big screen DVD, Netflix and iTunes and enjoyed for decades. Because of their collaborative effort you can enjoy the $100+ million effort over two or more years of hundreds of talented professionals for less than the $10 profit you made from your cake.

Trade and capitalism is not a win lose game where someone who has $10 or $10 million or $10 billion had to make someone else lose it. In fact, in almost all cases in a free market, that wealth is gained exactly like the above example: by creating value where there was none before and providing products or services to people who want them.

Virtually nothing we use today is or even could be created by one person alone. Billions of people on earth are pursuing their own specialties for their own reasons. Never before has our earth been so complex and so connected with so much opportunity. Never before have there been so many opportunities for the poor to break from poverty. Never has there been a better time to live full, create value and make our world better.