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.

If capital produces most of the economy's wealth and income is distributed on the basis of productive input, the individual can hardly reach his goal - an affluent level of income - solely by means of his labor.

There's only one honest way to measure affluence; that's by comparing the capability of producing goods and services with the desire of people to enjoy them. It's a lousy, crooked trick to compare this society with China or some such place and then say we're affluent. It's a piece of intellectual crookery even to compare this economy with itself ten or twenty years ago. We should compare what we have with what we could have.

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.

But would the young do any better under the same circumstances? Will they do any better when their turns come? The answer is that youth would not and cannot, given the financial and economic framework within which the elders are operating. While the moral convictions of individuals are important in the long run, it is institutions that determine the immediate course of events - particularly the institutions of finance.

The point is to make the pie grow faster and distribute the new growth more equitably.

The first principle of economic symmetry: building the economic power to consume simultaneously with the industrial power to produce.