Quote from: Impaler on January 03, 2014, 03:47:12 AM

Quote from: kjj on January 01, 2014, 02:01:13 PM

If your enterprise can't at least match the global growth rate, perhaps the world would be better off without you doing it, leaving that capital available to those who can.

And if their are idle resource and people then your argument falls apart because idle resource simply decay (both human and machine) and produce ZERO returns, any positive return is better then that. The history of interest rates clearly shows that interest dose not ONLY reflect an average of growth rates or even the average return on investment activity (which is what you meant to say).

This statement is easily disprovable. Just because some resources are economicly 'idle' doesn't mean that they are in decay, some improve with the wait for increased demand. A great example is that of contruction quality timber, a field that I have recently aquired better than a layman's education due to a move of mine to a large piece of rural propery with a great deal of (mostly) wild woods. While there are some things that a tree-herder could do to improve the marketable yield of a few acres of woodland, forestry does pretty well as a zero-intervention resource, happily growing without humankind. Obviously, as those trees age and grow, they become more economicly valuable for construction timber. I can think of several situations that an 'idle' resource is economicly best to wait. Another is wine, for well known reasons. Bourbon is another for similar reasons. Even beekeeping falls into this catagory under certain conditions, since both honey and wax have no known spoiling rate while inside of a living hive and, so long as the hive has room to grow, the hive won't consume more than they need whether or not they have it. Some hobby beekeepers have been known to let hives grow for many years before taking any honey or wax, and both can keep inside jars for centuries.

Another, more modern, example is likely one that you have not even considered.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository

Yucca Mountain Repository is claimed to be designed to house spent nuclear fuel rods from US light water reactors for thousands of years, but no one who is involved with it's design actually expects them to be there that long. The reason for this is, 1) the technology exists to recycle spent fuel and is already in service in Europe and 2) the US has no natural uranium mines. Almost all of US fuel supplies come from Austrailia. US law requires spent fuel to be stored; not because it can't be recycled, but because it can and storing the spent fuel just in case we (as in the US govenrment, military, etc) are cut off politically or economicly from Austrailia and can no longer buy more fuel (either commercial or military) internationally. Such a "waste" storage facility could literally pay dividends, both by keeping hazardous materials away from geologically unstable regions with high groundwater tables (i.e. where most of the human population actually lives) in the short term, but potentially to become a primary source for uranium 235 during periods of extreme scarcity.