This part is about wealth creation and its effect on the market, not so much from the point of view of money but from the point of view of reality, i.e. things. The book centres around the use of energy and the world's resources as these are things that are the input into the realities that get traded, i.e. manufactured goods, commodities and services, and eventually, wealth creation.
Economists historically tend to view commerce, trade and industry in isolation from the world as a whole, and as a result do not take into account the effect that commercial life has on ecology and the environment. In essence the world is treated as if it were -infinite rather than finite, the emphasis being on take; consequently as trade grows there is a propensity to take from the earth.
As goods that are manufactured almost invariably depreciate quickly and as supporting services results in depreciating equipment, it can be seen that we are simply going through a process of rapidly depreciating the elements and chemicals and energy resources of the earth.
In fact what is happening is an inflationary process upon reality. One of our main problems is inflation which in essence is only money orientated, but it is my view that there is another way that you have to look at inflation - as the diminishing existence of reality; i.e., there is a tendency to look at the world as a constant with a constant value and that cannot be the case when tangible resources are either burned off in the form of power creation or eventually depreciated to worthlessness.
What we have pushed to one side in our modern thinking is a principle established by Adam and Eve in Genesis, namely what you take and dispose of for unnecessary energetic purposes you cannot put back!
I suspect at the heart of the direction of our thinking is the extent to which we have adopted Greek philosophy and as a result the concepts of the value of more, turning tangibles into notional reality and thinking in straight lines kind of pervades us.
What we have to come to terms with is that the earth is not a straight line: it is globular; consequently there are no real tops and bottoms, and left and rights; that all energy in the universe that is natural is self-perpetuating and cyclical.
Above all else we have to understand that we need principles and we need principles regarding wealth and wealth creation, otherwise it will become a self-perpetuating force out of control, and we won't manage it, it will manage us. I believe that that is already a problem in our society.
One problem that is necessary for us to consider is added value or profit; in essence added value is inflation, i.e. if you have a notion of value, then simply notion an addition to it that is pure inflation, but as human beings we need to add value in order to be able to gain that which we cannot produce ourselves; consequently profit. is merely a means of establishing trade with a base for so doing, albeit imperfectly.
Communists who do not like profit are faced with the problem of how to trade without an in-built resource; consequently if demand is greater. than the capacity to produce resources to pay, they are faced with printing money etc, so that leads to inflation/devaluation, i.e. profit or no profit, inflation is a problem. However profit represents real inflation for a purpose and cannot be avoided.
The chapter on wealth creation, i.e. just another phase for profit-making, will show, however, that profit can become sinister, i.e. that it goes beyond being a capacity to create trade and becomes both an imposition on trade and bends market forces.
Finally, and perhaps my base reason for writing this book, is to say that there is a conflict of interest in society today. This conflict is caused by companies with a mixed shareholder base; such companies, which is in fact most companies with any strong foothold in the market, are made of money and assets and they exist both to keep money and assets and to improve money and assets, i.e. a company is tangible and all that it values is tangible. In so being it has power over reality; anything that a company has or uses that is intangible is merely an expense, a cost of production/sales.
On the other hand, humans are tangible but they are life and their tangibility only exists to support intangibility, therefore all that is a human being and is of value is intangible. Even if the ownership of a good is tangible its ownership is laced with intangible values.
Consequently, company values and private human values are diametrically opposed. Unless this fact of reality is taken into account, serious problems to society will occur as the impending conflict between the interests of wealth creation, people and the earth develops and becomes a threat to the stability of society as well as the earth's ecology.
