Frederick Bott
2 min readDec 20, 2021

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I would retire the game as a scenario tried and tested, with the result "Failed".
The three difficulties you pointed out are serious, but not game-over concerns.
Whereas the unsustainable energy requirement and the consequences of trying to meet that without providing an adequate energy source is a game-over event.
Without knowing about the energy impossibility, which exists also with with communism, we might try to keep playing the game of capitalism, but the end result won’t change, it will always be "Failed".
Fundamentally, capitalism by definition means the handling of all energy as capital.
That means for energy to be valid in the game of capitalism, it has to be expressible as capital. Like a kWhr, or a barrel of fuel, each of which comprises a known amount of Joules of energy.
So the creation of it can only be considered in terms of limited packets of energy, Joules.
Yet the true source of it, where it all came from, the only way of quantifying that, is as a rate of flow of energy, in other words, a power, which in physics is expressed as Joules per second, Watts.
There is no way of representing that as a fixed quantity of Money.
It can only be represented by tokens of money issued per second, to correspond with the Joules per second of actual energy received from the sun.
Now lets say we issued the money like this, indefinitely, just as an experiment.
Everyone it was issued to would quickly find they only need to spend only a small proportion of it, to meet their own needs, which would be the amount they normally might spend from savings accounts.
The remainder, they would give to whoever or whichever causes they thought were important.
Why would they bother saving, if the money was freely received forever?
As a result, they would soon realise they no longer need savings accounts, or investments, or even debts owed to be repaid.
That would not be capitalism though. That would be a new game, one we hadn’t tried before.
What should it be called?
Energyism?

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Frederick Bott
Frederick Bott

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