- From wages, which are paid by enterprises that create the goods that are consumed
- From investment gains in enterprises that create the goods that are consumed
Its consumption all the way down.
There is an order to things. It all begins with first producing/making something, no matter what segment of the economy you're talking about. Sure, you can start by borrowing (from someone else that has produced something), and eventually you still have to produce to pay for that front loaded consumption.
Further, how do you plan to continue consuming sunlight on your skin, without producing something to then get food and shelter to survive another day or week of absorbing sunlight? How did you buy that living time in the first place, without producing anything to get you food and shelter to be alive in the present? Someone had to produce first.
And if you want to go more elaborately into the concept economically (sunlight based energy generation), you need land and technology to turn that sunlight into consequential electricity. You must produce first to generate and consume the sun-based electricity.
The benefits of sunlight can only be acquired if one has acquired a place on Earth to stand, suitable places to stand have been enclosed by land titles, and land rent or profits which can be acquired from ownership of these titles without having to produce anything make up at minimum 20% of national GDP.
Land and sunlight are consumed by virtue of occupying a physical space on Earth, and play an extremely large role in the economy, but land and sunlight were never produced by the economy or as a result of economic processes. They are instead the product of natural physical processes which pre-existed the evolution of humans.
All goods are certainly not the result of economic production, as this would create a chicken-and-egg problem where human civilization could not exist unless another human civilization was around to produce it.
It is called a durable good. Land is about the most durable of all.
Consumable is another name for a non durable good.
Use of consumer durable goods is not the same as consumption - it is typically considered depreciation.
The process starts with government who can spend money without producing anything. Where do you think the actual currency units came from? Money doesn't grow on trees.
Just ask Venezuela how monetary production with collapsed supporting production works out.
Yeah, this isn't how it works at all. Not surprising that people like you don't grasp very basics but try to think this through carefully:
Governments can and do regularly summon and dismiss debts out of thin air. It's the very definition of sovereign.
Venezuela's problems, like all sovereign debt problems before and since (see Germany, Zimbabwe, Rome), are due to its external dependencies. It has external debts. That means it participates in relationships where it is not a sovereign. Do you really think if Venezuela didn't need to import certain items (and therefore didn't need to borrow dollars) it would have any problems at all? And so no, "monetary power" actually has nothing to do with production capacity.
In fact it is the only real capital that exists. The rest is just leverage. In a real economy all debts must be settled with sovereign debt ie currency.
> The government could give everyone a trillion dollars, but whoever actually owns land and factories and natural resources will still be the people with capital.
You've fallen to our own confusion. This is the classic mistake of people who don't understand Marx: the mere presence of assets doesn't make you a capitalist. Everybody has assets. It is only the people with currency (more precisely, the people owed currency) that are capitalists because their assets are sovereign liabilities and therefore must be accepted for all debt settlements. The "inside economy" can actually grow as long as people accept the sovereign debt for payments. The only limit of this process are the sovereign's borders and the existence of foreigners who refuse to be paid with the sovereign debt.
This is important, particularly if you want to understand what's actually happening in China, where the entire system is driven by massive amounts of sovereign debt but the country as a whole has zero external debts (including its external assets). Growth, as the last forty years of China's history makes very clear, is not limited by any kind of exogenous investment. Countries don't need to borrow money to grow despite the narrative pushed by the global bankers.
I agree with and accept your points about debts and liabilities etc., and they don't seem to conflict with what I was saying otherwise.
Maybe we just agree and are clarifying semantic terms…
Yes, we agree. My point is that "private ownership" is just another way of saying that people have accumulated sovereign debt. There's no reason the sovereign must issue these debts by the way, the sovereign could directly seize control of all assets and try to satisfy all wants itself, but these days everybody pretty much agrees the sovereign should issue debt and not try to do everything itself.
When it comes to growth, (the original question, "Where does the capital come from that flows in to savings?"), all of the debt in the system (particularly the private debts that are created when capitalists borrow and lend money) must be leveraged off existing stock of sovereign debt. If there was no sovereign debt there would literally be no money (in any form) to invest or borrow.
As far as creating currency, as I understand it, it works out to be a lot more effective and efficient for the state to issue that debt-currency (and create demand for it through taxing it back) and thus create markets using it than to directly manage resources through a top-down bureaucracy. (To be simplistic admittedly)
If we live more consuming lifestyles, we drive up the demand for resources which could increase the motivation of people to get them and thus drive economic growth short-term, until/unless we use up the resources entirely. And that all still ignores externalized costs (pollution and other harms) that can come from the extra consumption.