For Smith, because saving leads to investment, there are no lags and leakages of income; neither hoarding nor uncertainty is possible. Consequently, debt has no role in his system while saving is both good and natural to us. As Smith puts it, "Parsimony, not industry, is the immediate cause of the increase of capital … whatever industry might acquire, if parsimony did not save and store up, the capital would never be the greater." Frugality thus becomes virtue while prodigality becomes vice such that "if the prodigality of some was not compensated by the frugality of others, the conduct of every prodigal, by feeding the idle with the bread of the industrious … [would] impoverish the entire country."

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 297