Interest is not the “reward” of capital goods—interest arises because the capitalists buy labor and land today in exchange for goods that will be sold in the future. And the capitalists are always at the mercy of fluctuating consumers’ demand.
“The owners of these factors (land and labor) have the money already for which they otherwise would have had to save and wait (and bear uncertainty) thanks to the capitalists, while the capitalist has only a mass of capital goods, a mass that will prove worthless to him unless it can be further worked on and the product sold to the consumers.”
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- 13-5d1 Capital goods per se are not productive
- 13-5e The capitalists are constrained by the aggregated time-preference schedules just as sellers of any other present goods are constrained by the aggregated demand schedules of the consumers
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