The nature of capital and income

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 102659555X

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-82920

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Fisher, Irving http://d-nb.info/gnd/118533541

Title:: The nature of capital and income

Place of publication:: New York

Publisher:: The Macmillan Company

Year of publication:: 1923

Scope:: XXI, 427 Seiten

Digitisation:: 2019

Collection:: Economics Books

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Chapter

Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Introduction. Fundamental concepts

Collection:: Economics Books

Sec. 4] PROPERTY 23 known as wealth and property does not hold true. A thor- ough examination of the case, however, will remove this objection. Sometimes wealth and property rights are so closely associated as to be confused with each other, so that, un- less one stops to consider the matter, the existence of the two separate concepts would not be suspected. This is true in the case of “fee simple,’ where a piece of land is spoken of as a “piece of property.” For prac- tical purposes, little objection can be raised to such popular usage, but even in such cases strict accuracy requires that the two ideas should be distinguished. The distinction is more easily remembered if we employ the full phrase ““prop- erty right.” A loaf of bread is concrete wealth, not a prop- erty right; the right to eat it is the property. On the other hand, in the more involved. cases of property rights, we encounter the opposite difficulty. The danger here is in separating the concepts of wealth and property too far, so as to consider them as independent instead of interde- pendent. When railway shares are sold in Wall Street, the investor is prone to think of those shares as entirely de- tached from any concrete wealth. It is unlikely that he has ever seen or ever will see the steel rails, cars, and loco- motives upon which those shares are based; and indeed, the only concrete object of which he is likely to be dis- tinctly conscious is the paper certificate itself. But if is clear that this paper certificate is not itself the prop- erty, but merely the written evidence of it and that the railway shares, to be property, involve a real railway (wealth) underneath. That all wealth involves a property right is not likely to be denied by any one; and that all property rights in- volve underlying wealth should be equally evident. But this is not the case. In fact, some of the most dangerous fallacies which beset the business world, including many of the sophisms of credit, are due to the difficulty of recog-

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