A Quote by James Surowiecki

In the struggle between capital and labor, more often than not capital has won, because the real source of value for most companies has historically been the hard assets that they owned and controlled.
The biggest revenue target is the preferential rate for long-term capital gains, which raises a perennial question: Why should capital income be taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary income? Capital assets are owned overwhelmingly by the rich.
From my earliest acquaintance with the science of political economy, it has been evident to my mind that capital was the product of labor, and that therefore, in its best analysis there could be no natural conflict between capital and labor.
Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
The financial doctrines so zealously followed by American companies might help optimize capital when it is scarce. But capital is abundant. If we are to see our economy really grow, we need to encourage migratory capital to become productive capital - capital invested for the long-term in empowering innovations.
Thus, the capital owner is not a parasite or a rentier but a worker - a capital worker. A distinction between labor work and capital work suggests the lines along which we could develop economic institutions capable of dealing with increasingly capital-intensive production, as our present institutions cannot.
Empowering innovations require long-term investments, which tie up capital for years and years. So companies are using capital to create more capital, and consequently, the world is awash in capital, but the innovations we need to advance aren't there.
Capital is a result of labor, and is used by labor to assist it in further production. Labor is the active and initial force, and labor is therefore the employer of capital.
If a lending institution is faced with bids for a package of toxic assets that are less than the carrying value of those assets, the sale of those assets would trigger a further loss and reduce the underlying capital of the institution.
For every company that sees the value of their capital go up, there's another company that has been disrupted, and the value of their capital gets marked down because it's not going to compete in the same way.
If, for example, each of us had the same share of capital in the national total capital, then if the share of capital goes up it's not a problem, because you get as much as I do. The problem is that capital in capitalist countries is very heavily concentrated, especially financial capital. So then if the share of income from that source goes up, that actually exacerbates inequality.
In a capitalist world, the word capital has taken on more and more uses. . . . human capital, for instance, which is what labor accumulates through education and work experience. Human capital differs from the classic kind in that you can't inherit it, and it can only be rented, not bought or sold.
Capital is always available for good companies, but the only question is value at which you raise capital. In bad times, you raise capital at low valuation, and in good times, you get a fair price. It separates winners from the rest.
We are coming to see that there should be no stifling of labor by capital, or of capital by labor; and also that there should be no stifling of labor by labor, or of capital by capital.
It seems to me self-evident that we cannot have capitalism without capital and, very importantly, that the ultimate source of all economic capital is Nature's capital
Labor is superior to capital and precedes capital. Without labor, there is no capital.
I'd love if people relearned the lessons of the 20th century all over again. Which is to say this country progressed economically and socially when we had a better balance between capital and labor. Neither capital or labor won every argument. The battle between the two created economic tension, and transformed the working class into the middle class, and grew the economy.
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