big bond interest and then sell the product at a fair price. I have
never been able to see that.

I have never been able to understand on what theory the original
investment of money can be charged against a business. Those men in
business who call themselves financiers say that money is "worth" 6 per
cent, or 5 per cent, or some other per cent, and that if a business has
one hundred thousand dollars invested in it, the man who made the
investment is entitled to charge an interest payment on the money,
because, if instead of putting that money into the business he had put
it into a savings bank or into certain securities, he could have a
certain fixed return. Therefore they say that a proper charge against
the operating expenses of a business is the interest on this money. This
idea is at the root of many business failures and most service failures.
Money is not worth a particular amount. As money it is not worth
anything, for it will do nothing of itself. The only use of money is to
buy tools to work with or the product of tools. Therefore money is worth
what it will help you to produce or buy and no more. If a man thinks
that his money will earn 5 per cent, or 6 per cent, he ought to place it
where he can get that return, but money placed in a business is not a
charge on the business--or, rather, should not be. It ceases to be money
and becomes, or should become, an engine of production, and it is
therefore worth what it produces--and not a fixed sum according to some
scale that has no bearing upon the particular business in which the
money has been placed. Any return should come after it has produced, not
before.

Business men believed that you could do anything by "financing" it. If
it did not go through on the first financing then the idea was to
"refinance." The process of "refinancing" was simply the game of sending