Wealth & Money Quote by Nassau William Senior

Senior is sneaking a quiet marvel into a sentence that reads like bookkeeping: growth can feed on itself. The line captures the core capitalist enchantment economists were trying to name in the early industrial era: not just that work and tools produce wealth, but that wealth, when converted into more tools, training, factories, and infrastructure, can amplify the very capacity to produce. It’s a theory of compounding dressed up as common sense.

The specific intent is polemical as much as analytical. Senior, writing in a Britain being remade by mills, steam power, and urban labor markets, is defending “accumulation” against its moral critics and its political antagonists. He’s pointing to a mechanism that makes restraint and reinvestment look like social virtue: save today, build capacity tomorrow, get more goods for everyone later. “Indefinitely” is the provocation. It dares the reader to imagine no natural ceiling, an economic perpetual motion machine so long as output can be plowed back into production.

The subtext is a tidy erasure of friction. Who owns “their products”? Who gets to decide whether surplus becomes wages, dividends, or new machinery? Senior’s formulation universalizes a class-specific choice: reinvestment is easiest when profits are concentrated and workers lack leverage to claim more of the product now. It also brackets the limits that history would keep reintroducing - resource constraints, demand shortfalls, crises, and the social blowback of growth’s uneven spoils.

As rhetoric, it works because it compresses an ideology into a neutral-sounding process. It’s capitalism’s alibi written in the passive voice.