All goods are the fruit of natural wealth and of human, physical and intellectual work that is applied to them. Among them is a type of production goods that has a final function not of direct consumption but rather of cooperating towards the production of other goods. These production goods that help to produce others are called capital goods. Without having the capacity to satisfy human necessities in an immediate way, they are good for the production of first-rate goods and insertion in a causal relationship by satisfying such necessities.
Capital goods carry out a function of complementary mediation between work and the current of goods in order to obtain goods that better satisfy human necessities. The high quality of first rate goods, in Menger's terms, is conditioned by the efficient mediator performance of capital instruments that are necessary to achieve the transformation of a high quality good into a first rate one. Through the mediation of instruments directed by human work, high quality goods, following the laws of causation, become goods of the immediately inferior rate and those in the following one end up becoming end use goods or first rate goods and finally, to fulfil human objectives and satisfy their necessities and urgencies.
This is neither of today nor of yesterday. Neither will it only be of tomorrow or of the day after tomorrow, but rather it has been, it is and it will always be. Let us consider what Defoe wrote in his Robinson Crusoe: "I still needed many things, among them needles, pins and thread, as well as a hoe, a pick and a shovel to dig and to transport earth. The lack of such tools obliged me to work very slowly, and so I took nearly one year to totally finish the barrier. The stakes that it was composed of weighed a lot and it cost me a lot of work to move them; I needed so much time to cut them in the forest, to give them form, and especially to carry them to my dwelling that one alone sometimes took me two days, cutting it as well as transporting it, and a third day sinking it into the ground."
The industrial revolution transformed the productive base of society from a system in which the earth prevailed to another where the instruments of trade and industry prevailed. Now we are witnessing the expansible unfolding of the digital society, computer science and of personal knowledge that spreads through all the tracks of the economic sectors. Already then and also now, capital goods allow us to change the way of being, the nature, quantity and quality, of the products of human work. By means of technological progress we try to simplify our activities and make them more comfortable, and in turn, to try to obtain a greater dominion of nature, making reality effective possibilities until now unheard of. In the effective development of that interior radical tendency that man has of humanizing his world, freely and undefined, capital instruments always accompany him. They are the material means which serve "to make their being" with other material goods.
Von Mises explained in Human Action: Today, when general wealth increases, capital productiveness grows and machines and tools play a greater role in production processes. The wonderful economic progress of the last two hundred years was achieved thanks to capital goods that savers generated and the intellectual contribution of an elite of investigators and businessmen."
Capital goods strengthen work in man's task to humanize the matter. The error of calculation of Malthusian pessimism derives from not paying enough attention to the fact that the appearance of machinery allows society to produce "salary goods " - in Malthus terms - with fewer work forces. With his negative vision of economic progress that did not offer any solution to improve the standard of living of the masses, he did not observe that the additional saving of people could be invested in the production of durable capital goods that strengthened the productive effectiveness of future work. The sophisticated capital goods that we now enjoy are at our disposition thanks to the thrifty activity of the last generations. We are privileged beings of the computer and communication era that, without noticing it, are taking advantage of the native original saving accumulated by primitive fishermen who, when making the first nets and crafts, were dedicating part of their time to the task of provisioning better for a more distant future. We have more means of strengthening our work thanks to the fact that our ancestors produced those means for us.
Capital goods, intermediate factors produced yesterday, are the suitable instrumental means in order to increase work productivity. The thrifty effort that we are beginning to exercise in Spain in these last months will end up becoming capital goods of an enriching fruitfulness and productivity. Not only will the Spanish economy thank us soon - it already is, but future generations will also do so.

José Juan Franch Menéu
Business Gazette