Sec.4. Capital not a Stock of Consumable Goods.  But the distinction between the two forms of waiting, though not fundamental, is none the less worth noting.  It enables us to keep our theory in conformity with fact, to look at the phenomenon of capital the right way up; and it is easy, if we are not careful, to slip into the habit of looking at it upside down.  People sometimes speak as though the commodities which constitute our capital, instead of being mainly, as our plain sense tells us that they are, factories, machinery and other durable instruments, were rather a store or stock of immediately consumable goods.  The argument takes the following form.  It is consumers’ goods, things like food and clothes, which the farmer, the builder and their workpeople consume while they are working.  To enable them to work, therefore, it is vital that such things should not in the past have been consumed as soon as they were made; part of them must have been saved, and carried forward for future use.  Furthermore, the longer the time that the work on which people are now engaged takes to yield its product, the larger must be this store of consumers’ goods.  For these products, when they are completed, will serve (taking society as a whole) to replace the store which in the meantime is being used up, so that the longer this replacement takes, the larger must be the initial store.  Conversely, the larger the store of consumers’ goods available, the more distant is the future for which we can afford to work.  It is thus the store or stock of consumers’ goods which represents our real capital; for it is the magnitude of this store which determines how far we can devote our energies to purposes which are remote in time.

Now this is pure mysticism.  Regarded literally, it is in direct conflict with the facts.  The processes of industry are fairly regular and continuous.  At any moment, large quantities of consumers’ goods of almost every kind are on the point of completion; at the same moment equally large quantities are consumed.  The things which we buy were finished, very likely, only recently; or, if in fact they have lain idle for some time in stock, there is nothing essential or at all helpful in that fact.  It represents rather a defect—­a maladjustment which should be rectified.  Even many kinds of agricultural produce do not need to be carried forward from one year to another, for they are produced in many parts of the world, where the seasons come at different periods of the year.  It is conceivable, therefore, that we might consume all non-durable things the moment they were ready, and the degree to which we approximate to this ideal is a mark of the efficiency of our economic system.  A large store of consumable goods is thus not a fundamental necessity of a prosperous society.