Rudolf Steiner on Receiving Gifted Capital

 

“[In the future] the granting of credit will not longer depend on the condition that money is available or tight, or on the degree of the risk to be taken; it will depend entirely upon the existence of people capable of starting an enterprise or of producing something. Human ability will command credit. Since human capability will condition the amount of credit to be granted, that amount can never be given in excess of human capability”.

R. Steiner, The Social Future, Lecture 2.

 

“Everyone, from the creative mind to the labourer, must acknowledge that it is in his own objective interests not only for sufficient numbers of capable people or groups to have completely unhampered access to capital, but also for them to be able to use their own free initiative in obtaining it. Only they can judge how, but means of capital, their individual capacities will create goods useful to the social organism”.

R. Steiner, Towards Social Renewal, Chapter 3.

 

“At our present stage of development, the creative activity of individual capacities cannot usefully enter into the economic process without free access to capital. This free access must be available if production is to be fruitful – not because it is advantageous to an individual or a group of people, but because it can best serve the whole community when based on proper social understanding . . . In its original, initial aspect, this free access does not bring about any harmful social effect. What is harmful is when the right of access is perpetuated after the conditions have ceased which originally connected individual human capacities to this access in a useful, purposeful way”.

R. Steiner, Towards Social Renewal, Chapter 3.

 

Christopher Houghen Budd on Receiving Gifted Capital

 

"To know how much capital one warrants requires economic consciousness - the ability to see what will result in economic values from the use of the capital. One's consciousness is in this way taken out into the whole economic process and grows beyond one's own activity. This carries within it a profound consequence. To know how much capital one warrants of itself means that one recognises the social responsibility of capital. If we wanted to reach the source of true social action within economics, we would make capital available in accordance with our individual assessments of our own value". 

C.H. Budd, Prelude in Economics (based on the economic ideas of Rudolf Steiner).