Quote of the Day: The Ultimate Resource is the Human Mind

It bears repeating – and repeatedly repeating – that there is no such thing as a truly natural resource. All resources that have market value possess that value only because of human creativity and effort. Nothing that we today regard as valuable “natural resources” – not land, not forests, not petroleum, not iron ore, not magnesium, not fish, not New York harbor, nothing – would be a resource had not human creativity devised ways to make that thing into something so very useful to the achievement of human purposes that that thing becomes scarce. 

And one happy consequence is that, having made some raw materials scarce by discovering previously unknown and economically viable uses for these materials, human creativity – in economies that are at least reasonably free – is set to work, by the very incentives that are ‘natural’ to free markets, at the task of making these resources less and less scarce over time. 

As Julian Simon so insightfully taught, the ultimate resource is the human mind.

(italics original)

This is from Professor Donald J. Boudreaux at the Cafe Hayek.