What, then, is the case for capital-based macroeconomics? Considerations of capital structure allow the time element to enter the theory in a fundamental yet concrete way. If labor and natural resources can be thought of as original means of production and consumer goods as the ultimate end toward which production is directed, then capital occupies a position that is both logically and temporally intermediate between original means and ultimate ends. The goods-in-process conception of capital has a long and honorable history. . . .
This temporally intermediate status of capital is not in serious dispute, but its significance for macroeconomic theorizing is rarely recognized. Alfred Marshall taught us that the time element is central to almost every economic problem. The critical time element manifests itself in the Austrian theory as an intertemporal capital structure.
—Roger W. Garrison,
Time and Money: The Macroeconomics of Capital Structure, Foundations of the Market Economy (London: Routledge, 2002), 7-8.
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