People who produce buy housing with the money they earn, or money they borrow on future earnings.

The net amount of wealth grows, fed at every level by people who are creating value in return for it.

If someone loots money from Caterpillar, the steel companies, construction companies, and the others and then hands that money to someone to buy a house (never mind the reason), it doesn't really work, does it? Nor does printing that money out of nothing, or borrowing it not based on future production, but future borrowing and printing.

The idea of the "consumer" as an economic term, used to define someone who simply exists to buy things to keep the economy going, is a relatively recent one. Unsophisticated economists decided at some point that if you simply handed them loads of other people's money to buy things, the economy would thrive. The "other people" tend to fall out of their equations, which don't have a lot of variables.

I came up with a thought experiment a while ago. Find a poverty-stricken Third World country living hand-to-mouth. The kind where annual income is like $200.

Give everybody in the country $5,000, or the equivalent in their own currency. If Keynes were right, the economy should take off. What do you think would really happen?

No market is "self-supporting." Unless you're Robinson Crusoe, at some point you trade with others with varying skills to improve your own life.

A free trade is where each person trades something that is currently of lesser value to himself for something that is of greater value at that time and place. The values are assigned by the traders alone.

I have a chicken farm, and many eggs. Eggs are easy for me to come by, and have little value to me. My neighbor grows corn, but has no chickens. I don't grow corn. My eggs are much more valuable to him than corn, and vice versa. A trade makes both of us richer. When you buy something at a store, there's a reason both you and the clerk say "thank you." Neither is doing the other a favor, and both come out of the transaction better than when they went in.

This has been going on for thousands of years in hundreds of cultures. There were great trade routes criss-crossing this entire country long before Europeans ever touched its shores.

This process is not something that can be harnessed or controlled without causing damage. A complex industrial society is millions of these transactions by millions of individuals making millions of on-the-spot value judgments. This makes attempts to control everything centrally more damaging, not less.

Leftist use of terminology has infected everyone. Most people can't use the word "producer" without visualizing some rich, greedy fat cat. The guy whacking a hammer on that new house? He's a producer. Anybody who uses his skills, time, and effort to add value to something is a producer. Taking two dollars worth of apples, sugar, and other ingredients you can make a pie worth twice that on a free market. That's created wealth. You can also be a lousy cook, and destroy two dollars worth of ingredients. That's destroyed wealth.

Economics is not hard. What makes it complicated is when economists try to twist it to make socialism sound like a great idea.

Which brings us to the opposite of "producer" which is "looter," but that's another story.

P.S. "Free to Choose" is available online. YouTube too, if you look around for it.