Welcome to Bookmarker!

This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

Source code on GitHub (MIT license).

Concerning risk: it is true that whoever lends money takes the risk that he or she might not see that money ever again. And the greater this risk is, the greater the interest demanded will tend to be. That does not mean, however, that interest is the ‘just wage’ for risk. In fact, the reverse is the case: capitalists want to increase their money, make a return on it. That is their goal. To do that, however, they have to take a risk. Their profit is not compensation for a risk. On the contrary: the risk is the condition for the profit. The profit motive comes first. A car company also does not want to produce and distribute cars, thus taking on a risk and receiving profits as ‘compensation’ for the risk. The risk is, by the way, not something natural, but rather socially conditioned: in capitalism, an investment is risky because all competitors want to make profits and struggle with each other for market share, but not all are able to succeed. To state things more generally: in a society in which production is not regulated in a cooperative and political manner, but rather commodities are produced for an anonymous market, it is only revealed in retrospect whether the investment was worth it, whether the product produced is actually sold. The entrepreneurial risk thus arises not solely through the profit orientation, but already due to production for an anonymous market.

—p.63 Capital in the Twenty-First Century--What to Make of It? (55) by Ingo Stutzle, Stephen Kaufmann 6 years, 4 months ago