1. The Transaction

But without the disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, every man must have
procured to himself every necessary and conveniency of life which he
wanted.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

The common commercial transaction, representing a single trade, serves as the unsung hero of our civilized world. Whether the transaction represents the buyout of a billion dollar company or the purchase of a single item from a supermarket, it is essentially a trade that typically enriches all parties to it and contains enough information to make all the parties better at making trades and better serving each other.

This is the first post in a blog that is intended to explore the magic and power of the commercial transaction. Although the transaction may have an ordinary and mundane reputation, I believe this blog can be exciting to most readers who will discover for the first time that without the simple transaction we would have no music, books, the internet, or any of the other advantages that we enjoy above the subsistence of the Stone Age. More excitement can be found in discovering how the transaction can enrich our lives from the information that it provides to us and the people that serve us.

This study of the transaction will follow two very parallel paths:

1. The wealth that is generated by the mere fact of making a trade (transaction). Without the trades between ourselves and those that make pencils for us, for example, we would need to spend the better part of a year’s labor producing a viable writing instrument; yet, because of the trades between rubber manufactures, lumber mills, and many other service providers, we are able to purchase a pencil with a few minutes of our typical wage or salary;

2. The transaction is the fount of all that business people can know about their business. In the computer age, we are able to correlate and analyze business transactions to determine the type of store, customer, service, and employee provides the greatest value for us and the people that we serve. The use of transactions in business intelligence is in its fledgling stage and promises a future of greater and more efficient businesses to serve us all.

The transaction creates wealth and information. From the dawn of history, the wealth of transactions has created our cities, industries, and even our very civilizations. From the current age forward, however, the transaction will produce the information that will enrich us further, improving our cities, industries, and our civilization.

The transaction isn’t something about commerce; it is commerce, and this blog will explore the power and promise of the transaction as the foundation of our civilized world.