This is all good stuff that I consider educational, rather than something just selling us a story. Thanks for the article.
I notice you appear to be using some formal System Engineering techniques to link things up, describing relationships and drivers.
This is something I've been trained for, and have tools for, and done for corporates for many years.
Lately I've done it more as a small business / consultancy, rather than as an employee.
Lately, because it impacts all business including mine, I am finding a need to do it voluntarily on the physical energy system, which is very relevant to the systems of free enterprise and capitalism you just described.
This became apparent whilst I was formally engaged in a virtual world related PhD candidate research program. It turns out that business, pretty much all business for profit, is necessarily ceasing, due to things becoming physically driven by nature.
To me, the things you and I describe are the same system, just different formal views of the same thing, which are all valid in formal Systems Engineering.
Marx was wrong about something else; that labor comes only from humans, and that all humans must do work to be valuable.
Now we are seeing energy alone can do work, and produce valuable economic product, given some work done to enable it, no human labor thereafter per Joule is needed, and every Joule can be itself something which subtracts from the environment, or adds to the environment by being used, or "put to use", depending on where it came from, Earth, or not Earth (The sun).
So we should realise a mathematical sign needs to be formally added to our considerations of energy, in order to ensure the effects of addition and subtraction are correctly assigned throughout the system, so that the sums "Add up" consistently.
Positive, for energy from the sun, Joules added to Earth, and negative for Joules extracted from Earth
We should recognise the former is creation, whilst the latter is destruction.
When we do that, we see clearly we have been engaged almost exclusively in systematic destruction for thousands of years, in terms of energy put to creative use, and that this can't continue indefinitely, or for much longer now at all, as it is becoming unsurvivable. It definitely impacts our ability to do business.
What we've considered "created" by business for profit has only provided localised benefits, relative to those in profit, it is always at the expense of others, who's views are silenced, one way or another, mostly beyond our perception, in the world outside whichever privileged parts we might occupy.
If we are brutally honest with ourselves, it is the systematic removal of wealth from relatively poorer countries that leaves them vulnerable to planetary disasters claiming millions of lives, such as in many places during covid, and more recently in floods and Earthquakes.
If money was available to subsidise builders and the building industry in all places, for example, bribery and shortcuts would not need to be taken in building and environmental safety standards, ensuring buildings don't fall down prematurely in Earthquakes, for example.
To me, having gone through all of the linkages confirming profit, and the value in capital, and what they depend on, it is entirely dependent on where the energy we use comes from, essentially, it is from Earth, it is extracted, it is mathematically negative, it is destructive.
Further, since there is no labor associated per Joule of solar energy product, it can't be monetised by money-as-debt, because debt is effectively only promises to do labor.
So how do we issue the money needed, to reflect and trade with the economic product actually physically being put to use from solar?
There is only one answer to that question, money has to be issued for free, to reflect product received for free.
Until that is done, whilst our use of mathematically positive energy necessarily and relentlessly scales up, money is becoming increasingly less representative of the actual product put to use, therefore we see inflation.
It looks to me like inflation is the silver bullet of nature.
No amount of tweaking interest rates can change the fact that as long as no money is issued on the mathematically positive energy being put to use, money has to devalue.
Hence why, if banks and conventional money issuers continue to ignore this, we may be forced to use proof of work crypto, which is actually a form of converting energy directly to money.
Why care how efficient a process is, or how much is lost, if the root source product is never ending and free, even freely scaleable, to whatever capacity is needed?
This connects with your analysis, by providing the funds needed for all business to become free enterprise, including providing startup funds for all individuals. In fact all are free even to choose whether or not to be in business or in any kind of formal work at all, the business remaining are all things done "For love", which actually is a much bigger creative spectrum, than the one seen historically, fueled by mathematically negative energy, for profit.
At the same time it destroys the value in all capital. Why save, other than pooling resources as enterprises, if we each have guaranteed, unconditional income for life?
I did a provisional numerical study on UK utilities energy data, in conjunction with demographics data, to confirm where we are in this energy transition, regardless of what folk might think, given the current misinformation abounding, on the actual value of solar, demographics data is still a reliable source determining actual power usage and requirements but it appears not to be, we think we are seeing the whole story by looking at utilities energy data, but we don't see the energy produced and consumed by domestic and community solar, which is now a significant portion of economic activity, but no money is issued, to enumerate and enable that business, and the benefits from it to propagate.
In UK this business is currently worth more than 457Bn since 2005.
For this year alone it is 50Bn.
Next year, 120Bn will be added, at the current rates of energy prices and expansion of demestic and community solar.
I've further elaborated how all of this ties together by hydrogen production to create a solar powered, battery free, hydrogen economy, which actually is inevitable.
This is the main direction of my writing in Medium now, to try to assist folk, such as yourself, analysing the system knowing something is amiss, but maybe not quite tying it down.
My job has been to tie things like this down for many years.
I hope it helps you a little, like your analysis also helps mine.