Wealth accumulation

“ Not only, indeed, did the pursuit of wealth by acquisition, as distinguished from production, not tend to increase the total, but greatly to decrease it by wasteful strife. Now, I will leave it to you, Julian, whether the successful pursuers of wealth, those who illustrated most strikingly the force of this motive of accumulation, usually sought their wealth by themselves producing it or by getting hold of what other people had produced or supplanting other people's enterprises and reaping the field others had sown. ”

“ But the accumulation of riches, and consequently of an excessive purchasing power, in the hands of a class, soon satiates that class with socially useful wealth, and sets them offering a price for luxuries. The moment a price is to be had for a luxury, it acquires exchange [19] value, and labor is employed to produce it. ”

“ Some degree of duration and a consequent susceptibility of accumulation seems to be essential to our usual conceptions of wealth, not only because produce of this kind seems to be alone capable of forming those accumulations which tend so much to facilitate future production, but because they so essentially contribute to increase that store reserved for consumption, the possession of which is certainly one of the most distinguishing marks of riches compared with poverty. ”

“ Very little newly-created wealth is thrown into the common treasury of the world. Every fresh accumulation represents some new inequality in the general distribution of wealth. What the State exacts it makes some return for; but what a house like that of Nucingen takes, it keeps. ”

“ In great towns, on the contrary, trade can be extended as stock increases, and the credit of a frugal and thriving man increases much faster than his stock. His trade is extended in proportion to the amount of both; and the sum or amount of his profits is in proportion to the extent of his trade, and his annual accumulation in proportion to the amount of his profits. It seldom happens, however, that great fortunes are made, even in great towns, by any one regular, established, and well-known branch of business, but in consequence of a long life of industry, frugality, and attention. ”

“ And he showed the accumulation of wealth increased by time, and still now in the hands of a few, who held the country estates, the houses in the towns, the factories of the industrial centres, the mines where coal and metal slumber, the means of transport by road, canal, and rail, and then the Rentes, the gold and the silver, the millions which circulate through the banks, briefly the whole wealth of earth, all that constitutes the incalculable fortune of mankind. ”

“ But the same effect cannot be produced in any other way than by the gradual creation and accumulation of wealth. The accumulation of capital and consequent low rates of interest are the result of the work of generations. It cannot be created by the establishment of banks, or by the issues of paper money ”

“ In other words, a low rate of interest, instead of being, as Child imagined, a cause of national wealth, by which he meant the accumulation of capital, might more truly be said to be a consequence of such accumulation ”

“ On the contrary, sorry experience teaches us that wages nearly always contract by very reason of this increase. Where, then, does the accumulation of wealth make itself felt as a public benefit? Our author assumes 1,000 farmers who profit, while 100,000 workers toil; 1,000 entrepreneurs who wax rich, while 100,000 artisans are kept under their orders. Whatever good may result from the accumulation of the frivolous enjoyment of luxuries is only felt by a 100th part of the nation. ”

“ in this manner returning their surplus wealth to the mass of their fellows in the forms best calculated to do them lasting good.
Thus is the problem of rich and poor to be solved. The laws of accumulation will be left free; the laws of distribution free. Individualism will continue, but the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; ”

“ In answering it I see that ability is only another name for an already accumulated wealth. If our ability to give is to be large, we must in past time, before the demand arose, have accumulated stock, in which accumulation we are likely to receive small approval from anybody. ”

“ This large capital, which had so fructified as to produce more than twenty-five millions as interest, was an accumulation, penny by penny, shilling by shilling, and pound by pound, of the savings of that class of persons who, in every country, have the greatest difficulty in accumulating. Habitual efforts of self-denial, and a rigid determination to postpone temporary gratification to permanent good, could alone have enabled these accumulators to retain so much of what they had produced beyond the amount of what they consumed. ”

“ But without these considerations, which I allude to more for their general than for their special bearing, it is evident that superior accumulations of wealth can account for greater consumption of wealth only in cases where accumulated wealth is decreasing, and that wherever the volume of accumulated wealth is maintained, and even more obviously where it is increasing, a greater consumption of wealth must imply a greater production of wealth. ”

“ This is but a repetition of what we find so many times in the history of nations, that when any important class exacts, by some artificial process, a vast amount of wealth that does not naturally and justly belong to it, it ultimately finds the earning capacity of its accumulations declining. ”

“ I have realized with a shock of shame that my greed for cash to spend on jewels has led me to embark in ventures which merely divert into my coffers the proceeds of other men's efforts, without adding anything to the sum-total of usable wealth. I mean to withdraw from all such monetary acrobatics and utilize my surplus in extending my estates, in buying others, in cattle-breeding, sheep-raising, goat-herding, and in the cultivation of olives, vines, and other such remunerative growths, along with wheat-farming. ”

“ The immediate supply of loanable funds is indeed a matter of great importance, but before any economic interpretation of that condition be made it is essential to examine the sources of those funds.
Underlying everything is wealth, which in the economic sense is physical property, either in the form of land, buildings, railways, machinery, etc., and stocks of commodities. A relatively small element of wealth is the physical property that we know as gold. ”

“ The surplus beyond the prices which would be fixed by a freedom in exchanging property, gained by the owners of factories, transfers property without any equivalent, and goes in company with the other enumerated means, to the accumulation of a property-transferring capital, and not to the increase of a property-exchanging currency. ”

“ Many men, unused to the possession of so much money, became so very extravagant that they spent more than their income, and began to live at such a high rate of expenditure, buying carriages and horses, and living in such a fashion that only men who possessed untold wealth and capital could afford to do it. ”

“ The new supplies of gold, by making money plentiful, inflated the price of all commodities and stimulated production in every department of agriculture and manufacture; but the time-worn yet ever-new passion for wealth, disseminated afresh throughout the civilised world, probably acted more powerfully on the material progress of mankind than the actual possession of the new riches. ”

“ Even here he merely indicates that he considers the annual income of a society as its real wealth: whereas most economists prior to his time had conceived wealth as the accumulated stock of durable goods which a society possesses. ”

“ If they want to regain their former wealth they must adopt the same methods by which wealth is created elsewhere; they must produce more, much more than they spend, and they must carefully husband and gradually accumulate their surplus earnings. That is the way to create wealth and capital available for future production. ”

“ And in a very few years, at the most, large properties would thus pass from the hands of such individuals, and would be distributed among those who know how to accumulate wealth and to preserve it when accumulated. ”

“ Now these are the facts, and with them before them who will pretend to say that the class who have not produced anything have added to the aggregate wealth? Whence has come this increase of wealth? From the wealth producers, from the labouring classes and from no other source. Industry being the sole source of wealth, it could have come from no other source. ”

“ But all methods for the production of surplus value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows, therefore, that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. ”

“ The part played in our days by the direct robbery from the labourer’s necessary consumption-fund in the formation of surplus-value, and, therefore, of the accumulation fund of capital, the so-called domestic industry has served to show. ”

“ When the progress of accumulation has reduced profits either to the ultimate or to the practical minimum,—to the rate, less than which would either put a stop to the increase of capital, or send the whole of the new accumulations abroad ”

“ The family man in a large city who meets these several demands to his entire satisfaction will have little of ten thousand dollars left for the purchase of a trotter, a fur overcoat, and a diamond pin.
The growing consciousness of the value of these complex demands of our modern civilization, when intelligently gratified, acts at the present day as a cogent incentive to make money, not for the mere sake of accumulation, but to spend. Gross accumulation with scant expenditure has always been sanctioned here ”

“ Therefore, not all things which have an exchange value are wealth, in the only sense in which the term can be used in Political Economy. Only such things can be wealth the production of which increases and the destruction of which decreases the aggregate of wealth. ”

“ If invention and improvement still go on, the efficiency of labour will be still further increased, and the amount of labour and capital necessary to produce a given result will be further diminished. The same causes will lead to the utilization of this new gain in productive power for the production of more wealth; the margin of cultivation will be again extended, and rent will increase, both in proportion and amount. ”

“ Chapter XI The effect of material progress on the distribution of wealth To say that wages remain low because rent advances is like saying that a steam-boat moves because its wheels turn round. The further question is, what causes rent to advance? What is the force or necessity that, as productive power increases, distributes a greater and greater proportion of the produce as rent? ”

“ That portion which he annually saves, as, for the sake of the profit, it is immediately employed as a capital, is consumed in the same manner, and nearly in the same time too, but by a different set of people: by labourers, manufacturers, and artificers, who re-produce, with a profit, the value of their annual consumption. ”

“ If the accumulation of money, or of exchangeable property, were a certain means of extending existence, it would be useless, in discussing economical questions, to fix our attention upon the more distant object—life—instead of the immediate one—money. ”

“ The surplus value which has been appropriated, after it has successfully cast off its commodity-form in the market, appears as a given amount of money. This money-form is the form of its absolute value, the beginning of its career as capital. ”

“ Exemplifications of such Economic phenomena may be observed in any community where at any time speculative Prices for Land have figured. In such circumstances, so long as Wealth is sufficiently increased by Labor—whether from improvement in Labor-power or from progressive advantages in Land opportunities,—increasing Rent is offset by increasing Wealth, and Economic prosperity abounds. But when increase in Wealth-production lags behind Rent, prosperity is checked and a “slump” in Land-values, Economically perilous, follows. ”

“ When paper is substituted in the room of gold and silver money, the quantity of the materials, tools, and maintenance, which the whole circulating capital can supply, may be increased by the whole value of gold and silver which used to be employed in purchasing them. The whole value of the great wheel of circulation and distribution is added to the goods which are circulated and distributed by means of it. ”

“ Land, labour and capital are the factors of production. The term land includes all natural opportunities and forces; the term labour, all human exertion; and the term capital, all wealth used to produce more wealth. In returns to these three factors is the whole produce distributed. The part that goes to landowners as payment for the use of natural opportunities is called rent; the part that constitutes the reward of human exertion is called wages; and the part that constitutes the return for the use of capital is called interest. ”

“ The accumulation of money, moreover, implies a stage of human development where the accumulation of capital is possible. It implies foresight, the suppression of present wants in the interest of future wants, and almost always money has been a commodity well suited to serve as provision against future contingencies. Cattle, slaves, knives, fish-hooks, cooking implements, and similar things have been money. The "store of value" function manifests itself early. ”