A Quote by Thomas Malthus

Population regulates itself by the funds which are to employ it, and therefore always increases or diminishes with the increase or the diminution of capital. Every reduction of capital is therefore necessarily followed by a less effective demand for corn, by a fall in price, and by a diminished cultivation.
Remember that accumulated knowledge, like accumulated capital, increases at compound interest: but it differs from the accumulation of capital in this; that the increase of knowledge produces a more rapid rate of progress, whilst the accumulation of capital leads to a lower rate of interest. Capital thus checks it own accumulation: knowledge thus accelerates its own advance. Each generation, therefore, to deserve comparison with its predecessor, is bound to add much more largely to the common stock than that which it immediately succeeds.
In general it may be said that demand is quite as necessary to the increase of capital as the increase of capital is to demand.
Capital, however capital may be defined, would practically cease to exist as an income producing fund, for the simple reason that if money, wherewith to buy capital, could be obtained for one-half of one per cent, capital itself could command no higher price.
LABOUR, like all other things which are purchased and sold, and which may be increased or diminished in quantity, has its natural and its market price. The natural price of labour is that price which is necessary to enable the labourers, on with another, to subsist and to perpetuate their race, without either increase or diminution.
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.
capital is the result of saving, and not of spending. The spendthrift who wastes his substance in riotous living decreases the capital of the country, and therefore the excuse often made for extravagance, that it is good for trade, is based upon false notions respecting capital.
Every increase of needs tends to increase one's independence on outside forces over which one cannont have control and therefore increases existential fear
Capital, never concerned with distribution, is now less and less concerned with production. Capital is driving for power, for the control over markets, lands, resources. Capital, in corporate hands, can move anywhere and thus demand and get the utmost in concessions and privileges as well as the freedom to operate in the interest of ever-increasing wealth and assets.
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.
So capital is in fact borderless; that's the problem. On the other hand capital has to keep borders alive in order for this kind of cross-border trade to happen. So therefore the idea of borderlessness has a performative contradiction within it which has to be kept alive.
If then the prosperity of the commercial classes, will most certainly lead to accumulation of capital, and the encouragement of productive industry; these can by no means be so surely obtained as by a fall in the price of corn.
The purpose of finance is to enable business to acquire the ownership of capital instruments before it has saved the funds to buy and pay for them. The logic used by business in investing is things that will pay for themselves is not today available to the 95% born without capital. Most of us owe instead of own. And the less the economy needs our labor, the less able we are to "save" our way to capital ownership.
Hedge funds, private equity and venture capital funds have played an important role in providing liquidity to our financial system and improving the efficiency of capital markets. But as their role has grown, so have the risks they pose.
Every increase of protective duties is necessarily followed, in the present condition of our country, by an expansion of the currency, which must continue to increase till the increased price of production, caused by the expansion, shall be equal to the duty imposed, when a new tariff will be required.
Equality of economic opportunity, in the context of private property, means equality of opportunity for the millions of capital-less households of today to buy, pay for, and employ in their lives the non-human factor of production, capital.
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.
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