Economics are outside my field but your questions are interesting so I'll have a go.

A few Points:

1. You hinted at this with your response to AlXtreme. I suppose AlXtreme's answer better describes potential wealth. Vast oil reserves represents potential wealth equal to what others will give for it.
2. We have a workable definition if we adopt a variant definition of wealth: Wealth is what I have that I want. With this definition OPEC's oil reserves still represents wealth to it(They burn fossil fuels and thus want oil). Of course they have many other wants that need filling before they will feel wealthy.
3. Up to a point, Oil is worth more to a big consumer(such as the US) than it is to an OPEC nation. There will be things that are worth more to an OPEC nation than oil(perhaps food and knowledge).
4. This unequal valuation of goods among countries encourages trade.

I fear any explanation of economic processes reduces the problem to near idiocy but it is interesting none-the-less. Thanks for your intersting questions.

I'm glad you mentioned prototyping because I think that is a real benefit of an easy programming language. If a user feels confident enough to try and program their own solution it forces them to really think about what they need and want. As a developer of business applications, I can tell you that a user who knows their required features and how those features might necessarily work is extremely valuable. Which is great so long as they're not tied to the original product they developed. That being said, we've been trying to bring software developing to the average user for a long time now.

As an aside, I think there are quite a few developers who have elitist issues going on with anything they perceive as more accessible(vi/emacs instead of Eclipse/Visual Studio; C/Assembly instead of Java/Javascript; etc).

The government is paying a good chunk of your tuition in exchange for 100 hours of community service. Sounds like a fair exchange for me.

Exactly which part of the constitution are we deliberately misinterpreting to give the federal government the authority to do this?

I'm sorry, but which part of the consitution do you think this breaks? Or am I just misunderstanding you?