Money to most people is wealth and wealth to a some people is freedom and to other it is power. The desire to gain money, or wealth, is so desirable that people will do the stupidest things to obtain it. This stupidity can be anything from extreme immorality, to doing things that leave the individual worse off than they started. Of the ideologies throughout history, Mercantilism is arguably the stupidest.
When people desire wealth in regards to money can lead to a person losing all they have. This can look like the various forms of gambling, taking unnecessary risks, or even giving all of your stuff away like with mercantilism. Mercantilism is almost the exact opposite of what a nation needs to do to gain money. The main reason is because after a nation sells all of its resources, it will run out of resources and no longer be able to sell. Worse yet is that the country will not be able to sustain itself and when it is forced to do business with other nations, that nation is at the mercy of other nations as they have a "monopoly" and get to charge convenience fees (the stupid tax). The reason it is not the exact opposite, is because trade on both sides needs to be on both sides, properly. What farmer grows fields of crops, sells all of it, then buys it back at a market? A stupid one.
A great way to "generate wealth" is to buy outside resources for cheaper than it would cost to obtain from an internal resource, refine the resource and give it value, then sell it to the most profitable buyer. Take cotton and dyes as an example. Each by themselves are only worth so much. But when the cotton becomes a shirt, it has a lot more value than if it were a block of cotton. More so, if the dyes were applied to the shirt and in such a way that it becomes a work of art or is made to look like a known work of art, the value of the original raw materials multiples. This is one of numerous examples.
When it comes to the wealth of money, people think they are so smart and even proud of themselves for some of the things they come up with. The more desperate the person, the stupider and even immoral, they tend to become. There are other ideologies just as stupid like socialism and communism. Last time anyone looked, no one left a capitalist state to go to a socialist one. Some people just want the wealth of power which is a whole other kind of stupid.
A good video for this is the youtube video, "The Real Adam Smith" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ruiUOQERnw). Smith says not to do at home what is cheaper to buy.