Sublime

Capital is whatever can be transformed or used to produce goods that satisfy human wants. It can be stored, deployed, and accumulated, because it is productive.

CAPITAL consists not alone of money, but more particularly of highly organized, intelligent groups of men who plan ways and means of using money efficiently for the good of the public, and profitably to themselves.

From Chapter Four, the social utility of money is realized not in moving on from barter, but in moving on to capital, and from Chapter Five, that capital is very much a resource that needs to be cultivated, nurtured, grown, replenished, and not strip mined!

Valuables by Cent.

Capital is whatever can be transformed or used to produce goods that satisfy human wants. It can be stored, deployed, and accumulated, because it is productive.

This all points to a higher analysis; money itself is not the most important aspect of capitalism. Nor is trade, nor markets, nor profits, nor even assets, but capital. Goods that are used to create consumable goods are a form of capital, but really, we mean something less tangible than any of the former; a kind of economic potential energy stored

Following Hernando de Soto, we see capital as “economic potential energy”; a stock of crystallized and stored time; the memory of experimentation and discovery; a tool allowing us to not need to work completely from scratch, and shared in a common language to spare us equally from isolation.