The Critical Claim Stock: A Thermodynamic Ceiling on Debt Sustainability and an Institutional Design Without Fixed Claims

I developed this paper through an extended dialogue with Claude Opus. Most of the language is the output of generative AI. The arguments, assumptions, and conclusions are wholly mine. The entire transcript is available upon request.

Part I — The problem

1. Credit is a claim, not a substance

Money is not a commodity that circulates. It is an accounting entry recording an obligation, transferable and extinguishable, with nothing underneath it (Innes 1914; Macleod 1856). This is not a heterodox position; it is the operating description of a banking system. A loan does not move existing funds from a saver to a borrower. It creates a deposit and an offsetting obligation at the same instant, and repayment destroys both.

The consequence that matters is this: the token is never the binding constraint on production. Production requires labor, materials, technique and time. None of those vanish in a credit contraction. Plant stands idle, workers stand idle, needs go unmet, and the only absent thing is an entry that costs nothing to create.

Keynes put it as the distinction of an entrepreneur economy: production is undertaken to end with more money than it began with, so the operative constraint is monetary calculation rather than physical capability (Keynes 1933, 1936). Marx made the same observation as M–C–M′ with different politics.

2. The arithmetic shortfall

Credit is created as principal. Repayment is demanded as principal plus interest. At any point in time the sum owed therefore exceeds the sum in existence.

The conventional reply is that this dissolves over time: interest is paid out as income and re-spent, new lending continuously enters, and the stock is never called at once. That reply is correct, and it is conditional. It holds only while growth or credit expansion continues. When either stalls, the shortfall becomes visible in the ordinary way — default, foreclosure, contraction.

Read structurally rather than morally, this means the business cycle is not a malfunction of a debt system. It is the mechanism by which unfundable claims are written off (Minsky 1986). Stability generates the leverage that ends it.

3. The thermodynamic bound

Interest compounds. Compounding is exponential and unbounded. The physical return that must service it is neither.

The Earth is not a closed system — roughly 10^17 watts arrive continuously and the planet radiates at higher entropy than it receives — so surplus is real and net production is possible. But the flux is bounded in rate, and terrestrial low-entropy mineral stock is bounded in total (Georgescu-Roegen 1971). Capital is not accumulation in the physical sense; it is a temporary ordering purchased by a larger disordering elsewhere.

Soddy stated the divergence first and most exactly: real wealth is subject to decay while debt compounds by mathematical law, so the two must diverge, and the divergence is resolved by periodic repudiation (Soddy 1926). He was dismissed for fifty years.

One correction to the strict entropic reading is required, and it changes the design. Real wealth has two components with different behavior. Physical stock decays and requires continuous throughput to maintain. Knowledge does not. It is non-rival, it compounds, and it is the only component of real wealth that genuinely accumulates. It decays only under failure of transmission — Roman concrete, Damascus steel, Saturn V tooling — which makes transmission institutions a real and ongoing throughput cost.

Knowledge raises the ceiling on conversion efficiency. It does not lift the flux bound. Knowing how to build the plant is not the plant.

4. What follows

In a claim-holding society, accumulated knowledge is appropriated privately, because the claim is the instrument of appropriation. Absent claims, cognitive accumulation has no private container and accrues to the whole. Enclosure is not the natural state of knowledge; it requires an instrument.

Four design constraints follow from Part I:

1. No instrument may accrue independently of realized physical return.
2. No instrument may compound.
3. The bound on throughput must be visible in prices rather than enforced administratively.
4. The non-produced endowment, and the cognitive commons, must not be privately appropriable.

Part II — The model

5. The core prohibition

Prohibited: claims contractually owed regardless of realized physical return. Compounding obligations. Any instrument whose service requirement is independent of the throughput it financed.

Permitted and intended: returns to labor and to conversion efficiency.

This is the whole of the restriction. Interest was a claim indifferent to whether anything was produced; that indifference is the defect, and compounding above the flux ceiling is its arithmetic consequence. Yield within physical constraint is the objective of the system, not a tolerated residue. The model is not a zero-yield design.

6. Conversion at onset

All existing debt and equity claims convert to public holding. There is no time-based compensation stream: return accrues to participation, not to waiting.

Stated accurately, this is repudiation executed as a balance-sheet operation rather than as a default. The distinction from crisis-driven repudiation is administration and timing, not kind — the claims were unpayable against bounded throughput either way. The line between who is compensated and who is not is Veblen’s: industry versus business (Veblen 1904). Keynes reached the same terminus from liquidity preference, as the euthanasia of the rentier (Keynes 1936, ch. 24).

Enclosure instruments — patent, copyright, trade secret — are extinguished in the same action. This is not a separate reform. If cognitive stock is the only accumulating real wealth, then intellectual property becomes the sole remaining instrument of private accumulation once financial claims are gone, and a more durable one than debt because it does not decay. Separating the two phases opens a window through which claims flee into method.

Standing objection, recorded. Mansfield found roughly 60% of pharmaceutical innovations would not have been developed absent patent protection, against low double digits across most other industries (Mansfield 1986). Pharmaceuticals are where this provision binds hardest and where public research (§11) carries the greatest burden of proof.

7. Money and prices

Money is medium of exchange and unit of account. It is issued as expenditure, never as loan. The stock is indexed to measured physical throughput. Nobody is in debt for the existence of the medium of exchange.

Prices are retained throughout. Calculation in money persists, so the socialist calculation problem does not arise, and prices continue to aggregate dispersed local knowledge that no central body can hold (Hayek 1945). This is the model’s principal advantage over planned systems and it is deliberate.

Scope of the demand signal. Prices are a valid signal for goods that exist. Demand is not the selector for what gets attempted (§11). These are distinct functions and the model uses one without the other.

Two standing limits on demand as a guide justify the separation. Non-excludable goods are systematically undersupplied by expressed demand regardless of value (Samuelson 1954), and willingness to pay is weighted by ability to pay, so demand measures the distribution of purchasing power at least as much as it measures need. Neither is a reason to discard prices for exchange.

8. The carbon anchor

CO2e is priced upstream at extraction and at import. The efficiency ratio kWh/CO2e is published per process and per firm.

The price is quantity-anchored, not rate-set. It rises as the remaining budget depletes. No authority chooses the number; the physical stock does. Revenue is distributed per capita (Barnes 2006).

This is the structural centerpiece rather than an environmental appendix. It puts the flux bound inside the price system instead of enforcing it through an allocator, which is what allows the model to dispense with administrative ranking of production. Stated plainly: interest was a false scarcity signal, because money is not scarce. Carbon is a true one, because the budget is finite. The design replaces a fabricated constraint with a real one and keeps the mechanism that made the fabricated one function.

Preference remains sovereign and becomes bounded. Wasteful goods are disciplined by price rather than by anyone deciding about them.

Non-produced assets — land, minerals, atmospheric sink — appreciate as knowledge-intensive goods fall. This is intended. They are the genuinely scarce things, and their rents are collected and distributed rather than accruing to title (George 1879).

Scope limit, explicit. kWh/CO2e ranks candidate processes against each other for the same output. It does not rank across uses: ratios are not comparable between different outputs, and an efficient trivial good outranks an inefficient necessary one on the metric alone. That question is answered upstream at §13.1, not by the anchor.

One useful side effect. Because carbon-intensive goods inflate as the budget depletes while knowledge-intensive goods deflate, idle balances do not appreciate against a general basket. The hoarding problem that would otherwise require a carrying cost on money (Gesell 1916) is substantially self-resolving.

9. Provisioning — how a firm obtains means

The question is not how a firm finances capital. It is how a firm obtains it. Financing creates a money claim against future output. Provisioning transfers physical capacity. The machines exist; they are produced under §7 issuance and allocated directly.

9.1 Channels

Worker subscription against members’ own labor claims. Mondragon operates this at roughly 80,000 people; note that Caja Laboral was a bank, and that component does not port.

Capital goods lease from the public stock. The primary channel. Terms denominated in throughput and carbon, terminable on non-performance.

Direct public procurement for lumpy, long-horizon assets that have no other route.

9.2 Why the lease is not a fixed claim

It resembles one and is not, because the remedy is repossession rather than a compounding money judgment. The claim cannot exceed the asset. There is no accrual, no deficiency balance, no negative equity.

9.3 Loss allocation

On failure the asset returns to the public stock. The loss is the throughput consumed in operation and nothing more — bounded, definite, and allocated without seniority tranches. This is the provision that makes a contingent-return system solvable at all: under participation claims alone there is no rule for destroyed real resources.

10. Participation shares

Definition. A share of the residual after operating costs, held by virtue of working in the operation. Paid when residual exists; nothing accrues when it does not.

Not ranked by contribution. There is no founder premium and no idea claim. Ideas are decommodified at §6; applying the same logic internally, the generative insight confers no permanent oversized claim on everything downstream. Knowledge enters the commons; labor draws on the residual.

Not equity. No liquidation claim exists, because productive assets are leased from the public stock. There is nothing underneath to claim.

Not alienable. It cannot be sold, pledged or bequeathed, because its basis is participation and participation does not transfer.

Decay is automatic. The divisor is current participants. A person who leaves stops drawing. No sunset schedule is required, no horizon has to be set, and no interested party sets it.

Realization is near-term. Residual is distributed and spent in near real time rather than held as a stock. This removes the accrual-judgment burden that contingent claims would otherwise impose, and it is why the gains-to-holders objection is inert: hoarding is not the alternative to spending.

Taken together these properties close, without administered rules, what would otherwise be four separate problems: sunset, transferability, inheritance, and most of the verification cost.

11. Innovation and firm formation

Provisioning answers where means come from. It does not answer who gets them.

11.1 Demand is not the selector

The conventional chain — idea, friends and family, private equity, open market — is a sequence of bets at increasing stake against decreasing uncertainty, screened by financiers exposed to total loss. Removing the fixed claim removes the thing risked, and with it the screening incentive. The model does not attempt to replace that screen with a demand estimate, for two evidenced reasons.

1. Judged single-shot selection performs poorly. Judges’ scores, expert panels and machine learning were all near-useless at predicting survival and growth in the Nigerian YouWiN! competition (McKenzie & Sansone 2019). Expert evaluators could assess technical quality but not commercial viability; the two came apart (Scott, Shu & Lubynsky 2020).
2. The venture chain does not work by selecting well. Returns are fat-tailed and ex ante selection is weak; what the system does is fund many cheap parallel experiments and terminate fast (Kerr, Nanda & Rhodes-Kropf 2014). The information is generated by staged capital against milestones, not by the initial judgment (Gompers 1995).

Business plan competitions are therefore rejected as the primary mechanism. A single-shot judged event replaces a high-variance portfolio with a committee’s point estimate and selects on pitch articulation.

11.2 Public research as source

Publicly funded research is a principal source of new technical possibility, and it is the channel consistent with holding ideas as commons (§6).

Calibration, recorded honestly. Roughly 11% of new products and 9% of new processes could not have been developed absent recent academic research — concentrated in pharmaceuticals, medical devices and information processing, and small in machinery, metals, process industries and consumer goods (Mansfield 1991, 1998). The linear science-to-product picture is not supported (Kline & Rosenberg 1986), and a substantial share of innovation originates with users and operators rather than with universities or corporate laboratories (von Hippel 1988).

11.3 The mission-agency structure

The functional approximate is mission-agency provisioning with program managers and termination authority — the DARPA and NIH structure (Mazzucato 2013), not university competitions. The operating conditions that make it work are specific (Azoulay, Fuchs, Goldstein & Kearney 2019):

1. A defined problem with identifiable technical approaches.
2. Program managers holding real budget and termination authority.
3. Term limits forcing turnover.
4. No in-house laboratories.
5. A transition path to an adopter.

Termination tolerance rather than selection quality is the variable that produced results: HHMI’s tolerance for early failure yielded more breakthroughs than NIH’s grant structure (Azoulay, Graff Zivin & Manso 2011).

Heilmeier’s catechism is the usable selection instrument and makes no reference to market demand. Recorded honestly: its “who cares” question asks who benefits without asking who pays, which is a beneficiary criterion in different clothes.

11.4 Plurality is load-bearing

Several independently budgeted provisioning bodies, each judged on realized throughput of what it backed, with mandatory continuation review rather than one-shot award. This reproduces staging without credit and without a single committee’s taste.

A singular allocator is the failure mode that historically kills systems lacking credit markets — not that capital is unavailable, but that one body’s view of what is promising becomes the only view (Scott 1998).

11.5 The transition path

ARPA-E produced strong technical results with weak transition: good technology, no adopter. DARPA’s transition path is defense procurement and NIH’s is clinical practice; both have an external criterion standing in for demand.

The public capital stock (§9) serves as the procuring adopter. Provisioning bodies fund development, the stock procures what results as means of production, and the carbon anchor supplies the procurement criterion, since kWh/CO2e ranks candidate processes for the same output. This closes the transition gap without a demand signal and without an assessor of need — the criterion is physical rather than preferential. It works for means of production only.

11.6 Household staking is rejected

Allowing households to wager commons dividends into unproven ventures is rejected. It incentivizes gambling with subsistence means, and the screening benefit does not offset the welfare cost.

12. Commons distribution

Per-capita shares of carbon revenue, land and mineral rents, and collective fund distributions (Barnes 2006; George 1879). Every living person holds a share of the non-produced endowment.

Decreasing per-capita returns per household are required, to negate a natalist incentive to acquire shares.

There is no equal-outcome objective. Participation shares differ by operation and by residual. The commons distribution is a floor, not a leveling. Governance of the commons itself is a substantial literature (Ostrom 1990) and is not addressed here.

13. Provision, surplus, and concentration

13.1 Basic provision off the top

Necessary goods — subsistence, shelter, health, insulin and its class — together with education and public health, are provisioned directly under §7 issuance. They are not subject to the ranking question, because they are not competing for allocation.

What remains after basic provision is discretionary by definition and therefore a near-zero factor in the allocation problem. The apparent dilemma of necessary goods versus trivial ones arises only for goods that have not been provisioned; provision the first category and the comparison does not occur. The utilitarian question underneath has a long settled literature and is not re-derived here.

Unlabeled parameter, recorded. The model does not state which sufficiency threshold it adopts or on whose account. That is a live choice with distributive consequences, and leaving it implicit hides a judgment rather than removing one. It should be named in any operational version.

13.2 Surplus and concentration

Residual accrues to participants (§10) and to a collective fund, taxed in significant portion and returned as public expenditure.

Concentration is largely self-limiting: participation shares are non-alienable, non-heritable, and cease on departure. What remains is stock accumulated from distributed residual, which must be spent near-term to be realized.

Exposure. If state expenditure comes to depend on collective fund returns, the state acquires the creditor’s interest and will defend the return requirement. Norway is the live case. Fund distributions should therefore be per-capita rather than budget-substituting, which keeps the state’s interest out of the return.

14. Transition sequence

PhaseAction
0Simultaneous announcement and execution. Any lead time is arbitraged into hard assets and foreign claims.
1Conversion of all claims to public holding and extinguishment of enclosure instruments — one action, not two (§6).
2Upstream carbon price stood up; per-capita distribution begins (§8).
3Public capital stock constituted from converted assets; lease channel opens (§9).
4Provisioning bodies chartered with independent budgets and termination authority (§11).
5Banking reduced to payments and custody.

Phases 1 and 2 are one action. Separating them produces a window in which claims flee into intellectual property.

Part III — Assessment

15. Failure modes

15.1 External boundary — dominant. The model is closed; the world is not. Carbon pricing requires border adjustment on embodied emissions, and holders exit into foreign claims and hard assets ahead of conversion. There is no internal solution — only capital controls, autarky, or simultaneous multi-jurisdiction adoption, none of which are plausible in isolation.

15.2 Program manager scale. DARPA runs roughly $4B across about a hundred program managers in a single mission domain. Economy-wide firm formation is orders of magnitude larger, and the model depends on recruiting exceptional individuals who then rotate out. Nothing in the literature suggests the structure scales; its record is generally attributed to being small and unusual.

15.3 Diffusion of user innovation. The locus of innovation is contested. Von Hippel’s own sample splits — scientific instruments and process equipment show high user-origination, polymers and additives show manufacturer-origination (von Hippel 1988) — and the predictive variable is sticky information: users innovate where need information is costly to transfer to the producer, producers innovate where solution information is costly to transfer to the user (von Hippel 1994).

The gap is therefore sector-specific rather than economy-wide. Where need information is sticky, the innovating operator is a participant and the improvement raises the residual they draw on (§10), so the reward channel exists and is direct. The genuine remainder is diffusion: an operator whose improvement benefits other firms captures nothing from it. That is a spillover problem, and the model deliberately maximized spillover at §6 by putting knowledge in the commons.

The opposing account puts innovation in the managerial hierarchy and the in-house laboratory (Chandler 1977, 1990), with the shift away from that model documented by Chesbrough (2003). Teece’s position bites both ways: the innovator frequently fails to capture value while holders of complementary assets do (Teece 1986), so observed user innovation does not by itself demonstrate that an incentive existed. Neither branch rescues the model — if users innovate, the diffusion gap stands; if firms innovate through appropriable in-house research, §6 abolishes the appropriation.

15.4 Scope-3 attribution. The kWh/CO2e ratio is the central administered price in the economy. Measurement capture will concentrate on boundary definition and indirect-emissions attribution. This is where the lobbying goes, and the model relocates rather than removes the problem of who computes the number.

15.5 Provisioning failures are large and slow. Market failures are numerous, small and fast; provisioning failures are few, large and slow, and fail characteristically for want of local feedback (Scott 1998). Under a bounded flux, a decade of throughput into the wrong thing costs more than a thousand cheap terminations. Plurality (§11.4) is the mitigation and it is partial.

15.6 Informal credit. Promises between parties cannot be prohibited. Trade credit, deferred settlement and receivables discounting reconstitute a shadow term structure, as every historical interest prohibition eventually produced. The absence of an issuance franchise bounds it; nothing eliminates it. The design question is whether the shadow layer is registered and visible or driven somewhere unmeasurable.

16. Standing assessment

Structural claim. The model does not require growth. It does not require a measured physical return rate as an input. It does not require an allocator for means of production. It contains no instrument that compounds. Prices allocate what exists; the carbon budget bounds throughput; shares are participatory and decay on departure; the non-produced endowment and the cognitive commons are held in common.

Resolved. The distributional freeze that afflicts any fixed-issuance reform; debt-deflation under a falling price level; the aggregate interest shortfall; lender-of-last-resort dependency; loss allocation on failure; the calculation problem; the legitimacy load of administrative allocation; claim sunset; transferability and inheritance; verification and audit cost; the tension between deflation gains and per-capita distribution.

Open. External boundary; program manager scale; diffusion of user innovation across firms; scope-3 measurement capture; the magnitude profile of provisioning failure.

Open as parameter rather than mechanism. The sufficiency threshold defining basic provision (§13.1).

References

Azoulay, P., Fuchs, E., Goldstein, A. & Kearney, M. (2019). “Funding Breakthrough Research: Promises and Challenges of the ARPA Model.” Innovation Policy and the Economy 19: 69–96.

Azoulay, P., Graff Zivin, J. & Manso, G. (2011). “Incentives and Creativity: Evidence from the Academic Life Sciences.” RAND Journal of Economics 42(3): 527–554.

Barnes, P. (2006). Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons. Berrett-Koehler.

Chandler, A. (1977). The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Harvard University Press.

Chandler, A. (1990). Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. Harvard University Press.

Chesbrough, H. (2003). Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology. Harvard Business School Press.

George, H. (1879). Progress and Poverty.

Georgescu-Roegen, N. (1971). The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. Harvard University Press.

Gesell, S. (1916). The Natural Economic Order.

Gompers, P. (1995). “Optimal Investment, Monitoring, and the Staging of Venture Capital.” Journal of Finance 50(5): 1461–1489.

Hayek, F.A. (1945). “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” American Economic Review 35(4): 519–530.

Innes, A.M. (1914). “The Credit Theory of Money.” Banking Law Journal 31: 151–168.

Kerr, W., Nanda, R. & Rhodes-Kropf, M. (2014). “Entrepreneurship as Experimentation.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 28(3): 25–48.

Keynes, J.M. (1933). “A Monetary Theory of Production.” In Der Stand und die nächste Zukunft der Konjunkturforschung.

Keynes, J.M. (1936). The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Chs. 16, 23, 24.

Kline, S. & Rosenberg, N. (1986). “An Overview of Innovation.” In Landau & Rosenberg (eds.), The Positive Sum Strategy. National Academy Press.

Macleod, H.D. (1856). The Theory and Practice of Banking.

Mansfield, E. (1986). “Patents and Innovation: An Empirical Study.” Management Science 32(2): 173–181.

Mansfield, E. (1991). “Academic Research and Industrial Innovation.” Research Policy 20(1): 1–12.

Mansfield, E. (1998). “Academic Research and Industrial Innovation: An Update of Empirical Findings.” Research Policy 26(7–8): 773–776.

Mazzucato, M. (2013). The Entrepreneurial State. Anthem Press.

McKenzie, D. & Sansone, D. (2019). “Predicting Entrepreneurial Success is Hard: Evidence from a Business Plan Competition in Nigeria.” Journal of Development Economics 141.

Mill, J.S. (1848). Principles of Political Economy. Bk IV, ch. 6 — the stationary state.

Minsky, H. (1986). Stabilizing an Unstable Economy. Yale University Press.

Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons. Cambridge University Press.

Samuelson, P. (1954). “The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure.” Review of Economics and Statistics 36(4): 387–389.

Scott, E., Shu, P. & Lubynsky, R. (2020). “Entrepreneurial Uncertainty and Expert Evaluation.” Management Science 66(3): 1278–1299.

Scott, J.C. (1998). Seeing Like a State. Yale University Press.

Soddy, F. (1926). Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt. Allen & Unwin.

Teece, D. (1986). “Profiting from Technological Innovation.” Research Policy 15(6): 285–305.

Veblen, T. (1904). The Theory of Business Enterprise. Scribner.

von Hippel, E. (1988). The Sources of Innovation. Oxford University Press.

von Hippel, E. (1994). “‘Sticky Information’ and the Locus of Problem Solving.” Management Science 40(4): 429–439.

On the Coming Financial Crisis

It should be obvious to everyone above the upper‑middle‑income poverty line that we must make a drastic and immediate change. There isn’t time for debate or argument; your petty ideological protectionism couched as philosophical protestation this moment won’t abide. We need action based on real data and hard science, and there is no time to wait.

No manufacturer is allowed to make another car that isn’t a hybrid. A car is transportation, not a status symbol, and the fact that you want it to be is shameful. Texas, California, and Florida – you don’t get another single all-wheel-drive passenger vehicle. Despite your imaginings, the return on investment doesn’t warrant it, and the perceived sense of increased safety is not merely unfounded, it is antithetical.

This is but an example of the sweeping changes required. But the first one is money.

Money is out. Sure, we’re going to use it as the medium of exchange, but it is no longer going to drive decision making. Outcomes and material constraints are.

There is about to be a huge, tragic, and entirely avoidable financial crisis. It will be largely manufactured by elites attempting to maintain their privilege (average Americans, this includes you), and it will have an outsized affect on the middle class (you again, average Americans). It won’t have legitimate root causes, but it will have real effects. Like almost every financial crisis, it will be induced by people seeking to preserve the disparity between rich and poor.

There is nothing in economics that demands this occur. The only thing that demands it is the desire to have more than your share, or at least more than the next person. Continued pursuit of that is ideological, and will result in your having less, I assure you.

I understand if you are dubious of these claims. My closest relations don’t believe me. When I say we have to cease almost all economic activity, they tell me that will lead to chaos and ruin. You probably agree, but you are mistaken.

The people who taught you to believe that are the very same people leading you to crisis. They claim that the economy must keep growing, but they are purposely vague about precisely why. It is because if it doesn’t they won’t be able to pay back the loans they made to one another, the returns on which they use to enrich themselves. This is why Elon Musk has very few personal possessions and is perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy; he deploys his wealth almost entirely in doing things. The vast majority of his peers (and the bulk of you, average Americans) don’t want to work; they want to walk around talking about working while others do the work. They certainly don’t want to labor. Egad! I might be too exhausted to CrossFit.

The economy doesn’t have to keep growing; in fact, it very much should not. But the financial system insists it must, and this is leading us into crisis.

Not that there isn’t a material crisis; there very much is. And it owes itself to two facts.

A single human produces approximately 6 tons CO₂e per year, while an elephant produces significantly less than one. And humans outnumber any other mammal on the planet by an order of magnitude. Except for rats.

This is not to say that the solution is to reduce the human population. It is to say that 6 tons CO₂e per person per year isn’t gonna fly (pun intended).

As E.F. Schumacher noted some time ago, it is critical that we adopt appropriate technology, not only in the so-called developing world, but indeed rolling back the use of excessive technology in already advanced economies. The story I like to tell to exemplify the inanity of capitalism is that when I was a kid all you needed to watch television was the hardware, electricity, and a tolerance for ads. Then came cable, which required the laying of cable, a set top box, and a subscription, on top of the aforementioned hardware and electricity, and you still got ads. Now we watch TV over the internet, which required the laying of another cable in the same location as the first, a router in addition to the set top box, paying a raft of streaming services on top of an internet service provider, and, somehow, after a brief hiatus, we’re still watching ads. Crazy, and yet the liberal economist describes this as rational.

Rational is also how they describe another of their delusionary hustles, comparative advantage, which is merely elite-speak for taking advantage of poor people. As theory would have it, comparative advantage is the mechanism by which China, by making stuff for Americans at a lower cost than Americans can make it themselves, becomes wealthy enough that they can turn to the Vietnamese to make stuff. This works for a while, but who does the last group of poor people turn to? Such is the infinite regression at which we have now arrived.

Our current economic system is driven by two things, both of which are anti-social. One is capital accumulation and the other is individual preference. Neither is beneficial.

I find it astounding that the average person accepts the premise that some people should have capital while others do not. Where did they get the capital, one might reasonably ask, and why don’t I have any? To quote Dave Mustaine, “I go to work every day, why do you think I’m broke?”

Similarly, why should someone get to choose to drive a giant Suburban rather than a small hybrid, when that choice is literally determining the fate of millions of people? Just because you want to and comparative advantage allows it? The tax levied on that horribly inefficient vehicle should make it financially unworkable to even buy it, if we priced in the pollution that the current system allows the individual to externalize to society at large.

All this to say – we must cease all superfluous economic activity. All the loans and stocks and bonds are null and void. They must be, so that when we stop making iPhones and flinging Starlink satellites into low earth orbit, the financial shock doesn’t cause people to starve in Africa.

We must redistribute the housing stock so that everyone has an adequate place to live. Adequate is the operative word here. Two people in a 13000 square foot mansion isn’t adequate; it’s ridiculous. And to head off the inevitable complaint, hard work didn’t get you that, taking advantage of people poorer than you did.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. No one is going to listen anyway. They are too busy being terrified of the very thing they themselves are causing, and the last thing they can imagine doing is getting off the amusement ride. Rather, they will march indignantly into a crisis of their own making, shaking their fists angrily at the impoverished scapegoats whose fate they both ensure and share.

Damn

Is this all?
Dark as a hall
Candelabra
sheds drops of light
bright as the tears
of fear so near
the cheeks of peaks
as high as eagles fly
Escaping
Shaping forces
Courses
thru the veins
of claims portrayed
Arrayed
Displayed
Upon the canvas of conceptual deception
Correction
Edifice consists
of grains of rain
Contained
In whispers
Mister
Can you spare the time to find
out something bout yourself
To delve in doubt
depths left unimpressed
By dredges
Wedges
Driven deep
Into the meat
of living tissues
Issues forth
From sources such do not exist
Save on the lips and fingertips
of long road trips
at mother’s hip
As darkness slips and falls again

The Gift

keep in mind that Parliment and I planted Cousin Bone’s piece at Bonnaroo with a full bowl in hope that good things would grow from it.

went to the Shawnee CaveFest on the saturday after four twenty. an incredible venue, this big amphitheater literally cut into the rock by time and water. Kelly K had sent me a care package of ganja treats, so I had that going for me, but no herb. some kind folk were more than happy to share, and I was pretty well set, but head was still wishing for his own stash. the Station was playing totally off the hook and lightning was flashing all across the sky when this big bearded bear that could only have been Savage’s long lost cousin sidles up to me. how’s it going, he sez.  the only way it could be better is if I had a pocket full of chronic, I reply. he grins a big bear grin and sez, I got some killer pot but I just burned one so I’ll load one here after a minute. sweet, I say. its raining a little so I put on my windbreaker. haven’t broke this thing out since the ‘Roo. man, the Station is rocking this cave and my old ears are falling apart. wonder if I have any ear plugs leftover from…hey, what’s this in my pocket? could it be? nah it couldn’t. yes it is.

a fatty nug of that uberchron Bone brought down with him to the ‘Roo, patiently waiting in my pocket for an entire year just to be there with me at CaveFest. the world is indeed a mysterious and wonderful place.

Nationalism Is Not a Catalyst for Human Rights

“Most people, given the choice, will pick order. But order alone doesn’t deliver rights. That depends on the character of the community behind the state—its sense of “we,” its willingness to restrain itself, its capacity to act together rather than fracture into tribes. That civic cohesion is the essence of nationhood, with a shared story and reciprocal obligations strong enough to hold a diverse democracy together.” (Sharp, 2026)

However, cohesion and reciprocal obligation does not require a nation-state, and existence of a nation-state does not guarantee them. The nation-state – “A project meant to speak for people” – increasingly struggles not only to “speak to them”, as Sharp’s comment continues, but now presumes to overtly dictate the terms of the relationship, an inversion of the liberal ideal to which Sharp’s ideology aspires.

Importantly, what the Sharps of the world fail to incorporate into their idealistic distortion of liberalism, a construction that bears more resemblance to conservatism than the program of progress that Sharp’s article openly castigates, is physical reality. As Michael Crichton’s Dr. Ian Malcolm explains in Jurassic Park (Crichton, 1990), and James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis demonstrate (Lovelock & Margulis, 1974), the entire world is a singular system. Activity in any given quarter affects the whole. As fans of the 1993 movie will recall, “A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking, and in Central Park, you get rain instead of sunshine”. (Spielberg, 1993)

In the face of such understanding, the nation-state, along with its necessary precursor and product – nationalism, is obviously insufficient to the task. Retrenchment of national sovereignty and its attendant nationalism, fashionable as those terms are among every commentator to the right of progress, are a non-starter for anyone who has listened to the report from every single astronaut who ever returned to Earth. Put best by Ron Garan, astronaut on the International Space Station, “From space, I saw Earth not as a collection of nations, but as a single entity with one destiny.” (Perring, 2023)

The problem lies not with cosmopolitism or universalism, but with elite capture. As Sharp notes, “What began as the modest, civilizational minimum of the 1948 Universal Declaration has grown into an intricate thicket of hundreds of treaty rights—rules drafted far from the publics expected to live under them.” This owes not to a technocratic project aimed at subsuming individual liberties, minimizing the United States’ place in the world order, or realizing some global utopia. It is rooted directly in the neoliberal incursion of elite interests on the rights and resources rightfully belonging to the rest of the world. 

The political philosophies of the 18th Century are incompatible with the 21st. For the demos, they are not alignments, they are ideologies, in the Marxian sense of the term. That is to say, they are systems of thought used to rationalize material class relations. There remains, of course, a place for both liberal and conservative policies: tariffs and monopoly objectively run counter to the public good; the accumulated wisdom embedded in institutions and traditional practices contains demonstrable value. But any clarion call espousing a return to liberal or conservative ideals as the cure-all for what ails the world screams “watch out”. Progress and universality hold the only path forward.

Sharp claims that “What the moment requires is not another round of international invention”. In this, he is not incorrect. His observation that progress requires “a recalibration that protects the essential floor of rights while recognizing that the work of building moral and political order happens closer to the ground” is both accurate and useful. Where his logic goes awry, however, is in founding this recalibration in a retrenchment of neoliberalism and the sovereign nation-state.

According to Sharp, “the nation remains the largest form of belonging capable of sustaining the loyalty required to deliver social services, enforce laws, and preserve basic order”. As any observer of history can attest, this is decidedly untrue. The Persian, Roman, and British empires held sway over much greater domains than any nation-state in history. Forms of social organization have evolved throughout history, with the nation-state merely being the most current, and by no means preeminent, example.

It is not known what “the largest form of belonging capable of sustaining the loyalty required to deliver social services, enforce laws, and preserve basic order” might be. Humanity is likely the conceptual limit. What is known is that the nation-state is neither the ideal nor the most effectual formulation. And this current wave of nationalism espoused by the likes of Sharp will no better serve the cause of humanity or progress than any of those that came before it.

References

Sharp, D. (2026, January 16). Why Human Rights Depend on the Nation State. Persuasion. Retrieved February 19, 2026, from https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-human-rights-depend-on-the-nation

Crichton, M. (1990). Jurassic Park. Knopf.

Spielberg, S. (Director). (1993). Jurassic Park [Film]. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/.

Lovelock, J., & Margulis, L. (1974). Atmospheric homeostasis by and for the biosphere: the gaia hypothesis. Tellus. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.2153-3490.1974.tb01946.xPerring, C. (2023, March 27). 10 Astronaut Quotes on the Overview Effect. EarthscapeVR.com. https://www.earthscapevr.com/10-astronaut-quotes-on-the-overview-effect

The Unholy Alliance

Never would I presume to deny an immiserated person in South Sudan or the slums of Karachi the opportunity to attain the lifestyle that I enjoy (even though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it). Rather, I am addressing this largely to the non-propertied of the developed world, who have the liberty of a position in Maslow’s hierarchy where their physiologic and security needs are fulfilled. To these individuals I say, you are confused.

I would go so far as to include the petit bourgeoisie or, in the United States, the independent contractors and small business owners who, while not technically wage earners, must rely entirely on the propertied class to provide the direct materials that allow for their existence. Indeed, this group, along with the professional and managerial class (PMC), is the most problematic for the pursuit of progress. For while they have little to gain, they have, arguably, the most to lose.

A rough GPT-5.1 estimate places the number of petit bourgeoisie and PMC at 650 million-1.1 billion, or 8-14% of the world population. Compare this with the 4.5-5.5 billion members of the working class (55-70%) and the 50-100 million propertied citizens (0.6-1.2%) around the globe. 

While the propertied class clearly has the most to lose, their minute numbers mean their privileged position is wholly enabled by the other classes. Even if, in a moment of altruistic mania, they sought to redress the inequity in the world, they do not exist in great enough numbers to mobilize change (The ‘3.5% Rule’: How a Small Minority Can Change the World, n.d.). And it would be the petit bourgeoisie and PMC who would oppose them.

Together, the petit bourgeoisie and PMC hold roughly as much wealth as the global capitalist class, only spread across 8–14% of the world population, rather than 1–2%. It is this global upper-middle class that finds itself in the ethically challenging position of holding the world population’s economic fate in its hands. It is ethically challenging because, in order to create equity in the world, this relatively large swath of the world population would have to give up approximately 75% of its current wealth.

To put it another way, the petit bourgeoisie and PMC is holding the working class hostage for the propertied class.

This is not an ideological indictment; it is an empirical fact. While they have the requisite numbers to force change, the working class does not have the economic headroom to do so. The vast majority is locked into a daily struggle for survival. As stated previously, they are trapped in the lowest strata of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, spending the bulk of any given day securing the basic necessities to survive to the next. Likewise, the capitalist class, while endowed with massive financial resources and, therefore, political and economic sway, maintains no advantage in wealth or numbers over the petit bourgeoisie and PMC. Any attempt by the propertied class to affect systemic change would be met by substantial resistance from an equally well funded and numerically superior global upper-middle class.

Humorously, for a progressive embedded in a largely neoliberal circle, it is precisely this repressive professional and managerial class who are most loudly outraged by the current populist upheaval of the working class. That a preponderance of its class ally, the petit bourgeoisie, has aligned itself with these nationalist and theocratic movements that so antagonize the PMC only adds to the satirical quality of the moment. Wholly ignorant to their common alignment and shared complicity, these two groups assume antipodal interclass alliances that, in the view of any objective observer, demonstrate their absurdity. The professional and managerial class claim moral high ground over the propertied class, presenting themselves as champions of the downtrodden masses they implicitly oppress. Concurrently, the petit bourgeoisie worship the elites they aspire to be, while actively debasing the working poor who enable their privilege.

How this contradiction is to be resolved embodies the crux of Hegelian dialectical theory. It is verbatim et litteratim the contradiction Marx denotes as inherent to, and resulting from, capitalism. And it can only be resolved through the active rejection by the non-propertied of its own class interest.

Is the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy Progressive?

“Life without a functioning state isn’t a human rights paradise; it’s Hobbes made flesh. Of course, the state is both monster and midwife. It is the one force that can strangle rights and the only force that can uphold them.” (Sharp, 2026)

“The purpose of the American government is to secure the God-given natural rights of American citizens. To this end, departments and agencies of the United States Government have been granted fearsome powers. Those powers must never be abused…” (National Security Strategy, 2025)

In many ways, the Trump Administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy can be viewed as progressive. In this essay, I will show where the Strategy makes sense, or indeed leads, and where it falls short. Of course, whether this Strategy proves a net benefit to the world depends on how its strategy is implemented.

The foundation of the United States of America’s National Security Strategy is made explicit in its title. The Trump Administration’s Strategy states this overtly:

The world’s fundamental political unit is and will remain the nation-state. It is natural and just that all nations put their interests first and guard their sovereignty. The world works best when nations prioritize their interests. (National Security Strategy, p. 9)

However, the above statement is false. It is false because the two premises, that the nation-state is the world’s fundamental political unit and that nation-states will indefinitely remain, are not true. The second claim in the passage is also false. It is false because this statement is based clearly on rational choice theory, which has not proven to be true. (Sen, 1977, 317–344)

What the Administration is actually communicating with this statement is that it intends to continue to promote and defend the nation-state as the fundamental political unit in the world. This owes obviously to the Administration’s stated opinion that the United States of America is the greatest nation in the world and the Administration’s associated desire for it to remain so. This position is ahistorical, with history demonstrating that hegemony waxes and wanes, with powers growing more belligerent, particularly toward their own citizens, as their period of dominance and influence declines. (Karatzogianni, 2021) While this requires that we take a longer and more progressive view of both the situation and the nation-state, it does not necessarily mean that the Strategy lacks merit.

Following the imagined end of the Cold War, many in the academic, foreign policy, and human rights community felt “the nation-state was a relic of history to be left behind by the enlightened citizens of a rising global order” (Sharp, 2026). While this view of the nation-state is indeed correct, few were able to abandon their customary ties to the nation-states that had long predominated their lives. Only a thin stratum of truly global elite, leaders of transnational corporations and extra-governmental bodies, were able to make the leap.

These elites have become the whipping post and scapegoats of the Trump Administration. The November 2025 National Security Strategy calls them out explicitly:

Our elites badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens to which the American people saw no connection to the national interest. (National Security Strategy, p. 1)

Viewed charitably, it is clear that the Trump Administration agrees with Dustin Sharp when he says, “Sovereignty and nationalism are not antagonists to the human rights project; they are its unacknowledged foundations.” (Sharp, 2026) The 2025 National Security Strategy aligns with the opinion that “the nation remains the largest form of belonging capable of sustaining the loyalty required to deliver social services, enforce laws, and preserve basic order.” (Sharp, 2026) As such, the Strategy affirms that “The United States will unapologetically protect our own sovereignty. This includes preventing its erosion by transnational and international organizations” (National Security Strategy, p. 10).

Up to this point, nothing about the Strategy runs counter to progress. Echoing Sharp’s assessment, in the Trump Administration’s view, the nation-state and its sovereignty are foundational, the building blocks from which human rights are derived and maintained. Thus, it is not surprising that “We stand for the sovereign rights of nations, against the sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organizations, and for reforming those institutions so that they assist rather than hinder individual sovereignty” (National Security Strategy, p. 9). From this perspective, it also stands to reason that “The United States cannot allow any nation to become so dominant that it could threaten our interests.” (National Security Strategy, p. 10) The pursuit of progress even admits that “As the United States rejects the ill-fated concept of global domination for itself, we must prevent the global, and in some cases even regional, domination of others.” (National Security Strategy, p. 10) However, it is with the following statement that the Strategy becomes problematic:

“In our every principle and action, America and Americans must always come first.” (National Security Strategy, p. 11)

This position is exceedingly problematic for the cause of progress. The equitable mediation of US interests and the sovereign rights of nations, particularly in cases where pursuit of US interest infringes upon the sovereign right of a foreign nation, is not possible if “America and Americans must always come first.” Its case for the nation-state as the necessary foundation for the provision of human rights is eroded by its rhetoric of unilateral nationalism and sovereignty. “American policy will be pro-worker, not merely pro-growth” sounds progressive, until one grasps that said policy will solely “prioritize our own workers” (National Security Strategy, p. 10).

This prioritization of American interests runs counter to the progressive elements of the Administration’s Strategy. In the Strategy, the Trump Administration lays claim to a “predisposition to non-intervention” (National Security Strategy, p. 9). This position aligns with progress, generally speaking. Historically, the United States, like all imperialistic empires before it, has pursued a policy of intervention. A predisposition to non-intervention is, therefore, progressive.

Furthermore, the Strategy states that the Trump Administration will “oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties (the rights of free speech, freedom of religion and of conscience, and the right to choose and steer our common government).” (National Security Strategy, p. 12) While not necessarily progressive, this position at least preserves the liberal status quo. However, how the Administration intends to remain non-interventionist while opposing restrictions on core liberties “in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies” (National Security Strategy, p. 12) is decidedly unclear.

It is difficult to argue that “In the long term, maintaining American economic and technological preeminence” is not “the surest way to deter and prevent a large-scale military conflict.” (National Security Strategy, p. 23) US hegemony has indeed produced The Long Peace, the longest absence of direct, open conflict between world powers since the Pax Romana. However, the evolving global landscape – the rise of the BRICS nations in particular – demands that the United States of America adopt a conciliatory posture of restraint if open international warfare is to be avoided. In an era of increasing tension and power symmetry, it is incumbent upon us to lead by example, to abandon the notion of competition between nations most notably, if progress is expected to continue.

We should “build a military capable of denying aggression anywhere”, not only in the First Island Chain (National Security Strategy, p. 24). However, progress insists that aggression include our own. Progress would preclude a “vigilant posture in the Indo-Pacific, a renewed defense industrial base, greater military investment from ourselves and from allies and partners” with the aim of “winning the economic and technological competition over the long term.” (National Security Strategy, p. 24) While it is true that “Strong measures must be developed along with the deterrence necessary to keep those [sea] lanes open, free of “tolls,” and not subject to arbitrary closure by one country” it does not necessarily require “further investment in our military—especially naval—capabilities”, but rather “strong cooperation with every nation that stands to suffer, from India to Japan and beyond.” (National Security Strategy, p. 24)

Unfortunately, the Trump Administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy is not of this bent.

Instead, the Strategy aims to “re-secure our own independent and reliable access to the goods we need to defend ourselves and preserve our way of life.” (National Security Strategy, p. 13) To do this, “We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.” (National Security Strategy, p. 15)

It is here that the paradoxical nature of the Administration’s Strategy becomes apparent. With the preceding pronouncements, the Strategy admits that the US simply does not contain the goods it needs to preserve its way of life. These goods, raw materials mostly but technological produce as well, come from other countries, and their procurement cannot be assured except by threat of force. As such, we are not able to “ensure that our country is never again reliant on any adversary, present or potential, for critical products or components” (National Security Strategy, p. 14) while maintaining the sanctity of national sovereignty to which the Strategy aspires.

It is unclear how this intention can be reconciled with a predisposition to non-intervention and, thus, the project of progress. Intervention appears to be foundational to the Strategy. The purportedly sovereign nations of the world on whom we rely can expect that we will exert undue influence upon them. The Strategy advises them of this.

“The United States boasts the world’s leading financial and capital markets, which are pillars of American influence that afford policymakers significant leverage and tools to advance America’s national security priorities.” (National Security Strategy, p 13-14.)

Within this statement is found the Strategy’s means for subverting the limitation it places on itself with its “predisposition to non-intervention”. Its position of non-intervention refers to physical military intervention only, and even that seems suspect. The Strategy deems financial coercion and other forms of economic intervention in the interest of national supremacy legitimate. In fact, it calls for their employment explicitly. In doing so, any claims to progress are abandoned.

While the statement “American diplomacy should continue to stand up for genuine democracy”  (National Security Strategy, p. 26) is an admirable assertion, the National Security Strategy fails to uphold it. Instead it undermines the concept of national sovereignty that gives rise to the nation-state, the purported necessary precursor to human rights, in the pursuit of American preeminence.

In the end, you cannot call the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy progressive. It is at best reactionary and quite possibly regressive. In all probability, it will only accelerate the United States’ hegemonic decline. If it doesn’t lead to total nuclear annihilation first.

References

National Security Strategy. (2025, Nov). The White House. Retrieved January 12, 2026, from https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf

Sharp, D. N. (2026, Jan 16). Why Human Rights Depend on the Nation State. American Purpose. https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-human-rights-depend-on-the-nation

Sen, A. (1977). Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 6(4), 317–344.

Karatzogianni, A. (2021). From Innovative Democracy to Warfare State: Ancient Athens as a Model of Hegemonic Decline. (Vol. Ancient Athens as a Model of Hegemonic Decline: Innovation, Democracy and War). Palgrave Macmillan.

The Unassailable Right of Privilege

When we think about America today, it is almost impossible to imagine that at the time of our nation’s founding our forefathers endured a tyranny no less malevolent than that of even the most Orwellian of examples. It isn’t until one reads the Bill of Rights, and truly considers the conditions that would give rise to the need for a group to stand forth and claim such inalienable rights as to be secure in their persons, houses, and effects, to be not deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, to enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury, that one begins to fathom the extent of their oppression. Even upon such mental exercise, it is difficult to imagine such conditions could ever exist here, for this is America, the freest nation in the world, and such immutable rights are simply assumed, as they are the very definition of freedom.

It seems unlikely then that any American would sacrifice these rights, for which so much has already been sacrificed, or that anything could ever infringe upon them, but unfortunately that is not the case. The comfortable mind has a short memory, and the sacrifices of others do not long affect its workings nor weigh heavily upon it. Contentment transcends conviction; temporal security supersedes some lofty ideal. At least such was the demonstration by our Senate when in 2012, under the inauspicious aegis that without these rights there exists some nation worth defending, it imbued the National Defense Authorization Act with language that allows for the indefinite detainment of any individual considered a threat to the very rights they have thereby suspended.

What is the purpose of a national defense that fails to defend the very precept of freedom that has historically distinguished the United States from the rest of the world? It can only be the defense of elite interest and the privilege that attends it.