Interesting article, by a fellow electrical Engineer, thanks for posting.

I might have somewhat an inverse view to yours on incentives though.

Like you say, it isn't a good idea to encourage crime, so we might think we should penalise for all crimes committed.

But what does crime even mean, if it is really just poor people trying to do business?

If they were given enough free money to relieve their financial worries, wouldn't this remove their incentive to commit crime?

If so, wouldn't that also relieve most of the business of law and order from having to exist, removing their burden from scarce energy resources?

This might seem like a useless mind exercise, until we realise that there is a very valuable product currently being put to use in the human economy which is not being correctly valued. I hope your background as an Electrical Engineer might help you see this:

There are currently multiple GW of solar power in use in all countries, scaling up as necessary, driven by the incentives of fixing the global environmental problem.

Solar is the only source of energy which adds Joules to those already existing on Earth, therefore is the only actual source of energy.

Those Joules put to use by us are valuable product added to the human economy.

But those Joules are pushed to us, with no extraction needed.

Every promise to pay is a promise to extract, and all money is currently issued on promises to pay.

So in order to reflect the Joules being received from solar per the ideals of Austrian Economics, money has to be issued, tokens representing every Joule received, and given for free, since the Joules of energy were received for free.

So there we see the source of free money which could be given for free to all poeple, removing their incentive to commit crime.

We might think this whole conversation is something academic, removed from reality.

However, we should remember we actually saw free money of these levels issued in recent history, when around $10K per head per month was issued in the US. The dollar price went up, whilst the prices of most capital went down. Oil prices even went negative, the only time ever, for any commodity.

Interestingly Warren Buffet fled the markets at that time claiming "Something had gone wrong with money".

To me, nothing had gone wrong with money, nothing at all, in fact for the first time ever, money was just perfect. With it, everyone had the same power as our Warren, with the ability to decide which companies, commodities, and causes should live or die, with no consideration of which ones were profitable.

Right there we saw the first ever glimpse of true, finely grained democracy, it seems to me.

Now where we are at is money again sliding in value, because it isn't being issued, whilst the solar product continues to scale up, as it has to, to fix the environmental problem.

The only way to fix that Austrian Economic imbalance, is for money to again be issued for free.

Of course the product is the thing of value, not the money, hence the value of money has to slide, if it is not truly reflecting the thing of value.

Mother nature appears to be a chess player, she is at check, with one move to mate.

Of course if Warren, and other capitalists like him could have his way, free money would never be issued for free. But they forgot about nature.

Energy is her currency, the sun is the issuer and enforcer of that currency, with more authority than any bank, it seems to me.

Interesting times!