Wealth is created only by engaging in value-added activities. By the same token, Service sector activities do not create wealth, they merely transfer, redistribute and eventually dissipate wealth as consumption. Thus, as value-added activities move offshore and the U.S. labor force shifts to the Service Sector, wealth is dissipated, not created. And the U.S. standard of living declines as a result.WEALTH: The net ownership of material possessions and productive resources. In other words, the difference between physical and financial assets that you own and the liabilities that you owe. Wealth includes all of the tangible consumer stuff that you possess, like cars, houses, clothes, jewelry, etc.; any financial assets, like stocks, bonds, bank accounts, that you lay claim to; and your ownership of resources, including labor, capital, and natural resources. Of course, you must deduct any debts you owe.
VALUE ADDED: The increase in the value of a good at each stage of the production process. The value that's being increased is specifically the ability of a good to satisfy wants and needs either directly as a consumption good or indirectly as a capital good. A good that provides greater satisfaction has greater value. In essence, the whole purpose of production is to transform raw materials and natural resources that have relatively little value into goods and services that have greater value.
SERVICE: An activity that provides direct satisfaction of wants and needs without the production of a tangible product or good. Examples include information, entertainment, and education. This term good should be contrasted with the term good, which involves the satisfaction of wants and needs with tangible items. You're likely to see the plural combination of these two into a single phrase, "goods and services," to indicate the wide assortment of economic production from the economy's scarce resources.
The Road to Productive Wealth
The only true key to wealth lies in production. While you can increase your own wealth at the expense of others, we all become wealthier when productive resources are increased. Greater wealth for our economy lies in increasing the quantity or quality of productive resources -- labor, capital, and natural resources. This is done by investing in education, capital goods, research and development, and technology.
What works for our economy, can also work for each of us. You can acquire wealth by education, buying productive capital goods, inventing a new product, and assorted other improvements in productive resources.
You also claim that "service sector activities do not create wealth".
Then you say that "the whole purpose of production is to transform raw materials and natural resources that have relatively little value into goods and services that have greater value".
So, in other words, services have "greater value" than "raw materials and natural resources that have relatively little value" and therefore constitute wealth since wealth is created by "engaging in value-added activities" but "service sector activities do not create wealth".
Your argument is pathetic word-shuffling and essentially meaningless.
The capacity to provide services is a valuable resource. A mechanic may or may not own a car. But if he has the knowledge to fix other people's cars (i.e. add value to cars) then his service directly adds value and is clearly a source of wealth.
If you told him he had a choice of either losing his bank account or forgetting all knowledge of how to perform his mechanic services he would choose the former. Why? Because he knows what wealth consists of - the ability to generate value.
Your Marxist distinction between production of tangible goods and intangible goods (like knowledge) is as bankrupt as the Soviet Union which adopted it.