ABSTRACT
Investment is additive to consumption for the only reason that empty emissions are additive to full emissions. Order would require therefore that investment should be a “nested category” of consumption, in the same way that profits are a nested category of wages. Since Quesnay and Smith, theorists have sensed the very great importance of the amortization of capital inside the production mode. The dual character of the production of profit-goods comes to the fore in a synthetic way as soon as the observation takes as its starting point the initial appropriation of investment-goods by firms. If, at the moment of its formation, each “slice” of fixed capital were the economic appropriation by the set of income holders, the amortization of fixed capital would be reducible to indirect purchases, like the fabric bought with the purchase of a suit: amortization-goods would be brought to households in the same way as the initial capital.
