Behold the power of compounding, when one event piles on top of another, then another. In the investing world we usually talk about compounding and how it impacts investment returns. Albert Einstein may have won a Nobel Prize for his theory of relativitiy, but when asked what the greatest invention in human history was, he said, “compound interest.”
Have you ever taken something back to a store and all the store will give you is a store credit? It is aggravating, isn’t it? You may not wish to buy anything else in that store. What you really want is your money back so you can go anywhere. With international trade, this is the way local currency works. China takes dollars. Dollars are like store credits, they eventually have to be used here if you want your value.
My wife loves flowers. Her Mom and Dad both liked digging in the dirt, as they say, and they grew lots of things. This was a little different for me when we first got together; my Mom baked, and she was (still is – though she does it much less now) fantastic at it. While I did not grow up in a home that had lots of flowers, I do understand their value.
The need to produce profits also promotes sustainability, which is a very popular notion in our culture today. Most of the time, people who use this word today are speaking of environmental sustainability…I am speaking of economic sustainability.
One did not need a college education to understand that nothing is free. Everything has a cost. Why? Because everything is scarce. Scarcity is the primary issue of the study of economics: how people, corporations, governments, and societies as a whole deal with the fact that “money doesn’t grow on trees.” Even if it did, it would be in limited supply – like Georgia peaches, for example.
