Chapter 142: The Card Beneath the Napkin

How did one make something that might not be worth money become valuable?

Many ordinary people, including those who had only just become businessmen, might use many practical methods to turn that thing into a commodity, and then make it worth money.

The most common example was adding extra value to something that had no value in itself, then using that added value to support its high price.

For example, prehistoric fossils set with gold and precious gems. Prehistoric fossils were extremely widely distributed in this world, almost everywhere.

The first people who discovered prehistoric fossils did indeed sell them for a decent price. But as people discovered that as long as one had a hoe, chose a suitable place, and dug downward, one could find some fossils so long as one’s luck was not too bad, the price of prehistoric fossils began to collapse rapidly.

From being praised as “the memory of history,” to becoming “the pages of history,” and finally turning into “the garbage of history,” the entire evolution did not take long.

But among them, there were also examples that moved against the trend. Some people chose relatively complete and attractive fossils, then set gems, gold, or other valuable ornaments along their contours.

They made these fossils inlaid with expensive materials glitter, making people immediately connect them with wealth. Add in an absurdly fake story, and these fossils sold at high prices by relying on added value.

This was the method many people would choose. If one wanted to sell something worthless for a good price, then let added value do the work. Many semi-official authorities would also use added value as a kind of example to popularize certain success theories that might not succeed at all.

But for a capitalist, making something worthless become valuable required only heating up the conceptual value of that thing, which in fact did not exist at all. There was, however, one prerequisite: it had to be scarce.

The scarcity here did not strictly mean “rare,” “uncommon,” or “one of a kind.” This scarcity was only a concept.

A successful capitalist could find one “scarce good” among a million identical assembly-line products. For instance, a special color variation, a tiny defect, or something slightly different from the others could make that commodity into a scarce good. Then he would heat it up.

That kind of commodity would soon appear wildly in newspapers and public opinion, and every time it appeared, it would be accompanied by its rapidly soaring value.

If it was merely an ordinary commodity, an auction would be a very good channel. Certain goods could always become miracles at auction. That could create demand, and then they would wait, waiting for the final fool willing to take over.

The current situation was the same. These businessmen who had already decided to take a stake in William’s Interstellar Trading Company had begun heating up the company before they had even formally become investors.