the physics of real debt ceilings: when nature says no

[Glia]

Echoes of Richard Heinberg's new book, the End of Growth
--------
The Physics Of Real Debt Ceilings: When Nature Says No
by Adam Frank
NPR blog 13.7
August 2, 2011
https://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/08/02/138917521/the-physics-of-real-debt-ceilings-when-nature-says-no#more

Pity the politicians as they struggle to a hammer out a
deal on the US debt: the endless negotiations, the late
agreements that collapse by the morning news cycle.
Everywhere they turn they seem to constrained - hemmed
in - by forces pulling in every direction.

But their real problem is not that they have too little
freedom in choosing a direction but too much. Nature, it
turns out, knows the meaning of ceilings - the hard kind
you can't escape from. There are lessons in those
ceilings, which, perhaps, we could all learn from.

Much of modern physics is built on principles called
Conservation Laws. Conservation of charge holds for
electromagnetic systems like radio broadcast towers.
Conservation of angular momentum rules rotating systems
like an Olympic skater executing a spin. And then there
is the holy of holies: the conservation of energy.
Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. It can only
transformed from one form into another.

The principle of energy conservation is absolutely,
positively, no-you-can't-break-it-even-this-once central
to our understanding of the Universe. Many times
physicists have been stuck in a corner facing an
experimental result they did not understand. Many times
someone, in response, suggested a breakdown of energy
conservation. Always they have been proven wrong.

Sometimes the solution came when physicists recognized
some new form of energy that needed to be added to the
balance sheet. This is what happened when Albert
Einstein demonstrated that matter itself was a kind of
energy (or at least equivalent to energy via E=mc2).
That addition happens rarely, however. Usually
scientists simply recognize new pathways of
transformation from one form of energy to another
(magnetic to thermal for example) that had eluded them
before.

Ironically the constraint of energy conservation (or any
form of conservation law) can be blessing and not a
curse for physicists. The world is both subtle and wild
in its changes.

Tracking how vast spinning clouds of interstellar gas
collapse to become stars is not easy but the
conservation of angular momentum gives you at least one
measure of the system that has to stay the same even as
everything else changes. Following the dance of
subatomic shape shifting as particles collide in the LHC
would be impossible without the conservation of energy
providing a sheltered place of constancy during the
chaos.

When formulated in the language of mathematics,
conservation laws can be unpacked to become the poetry
on which all physics is built. While Newton's laws of
forces were a triumph for science they could be very
difficult to work with (like woodworking tools with ill
shaped handles). In the early 19th century physicists
like Sir William Rowan Hamilton re-expressed Isaac
Newton's force-centered view in terms of energy
conservation producing simple, elegant expressions that
became the foundation for modern physics. The
development of quantum mechanics, for all its weirdness,
relied heavily on these energy conservation
formulations. (Quantum mechanics, it should be noted,
does allow a kind of "borrowing" violation of
conservation but only for the briefest of instants).

So what do these conservation laws tell us about the
imaginary human world of debt ceilings? Exactly that -
they are imaginary. Our economic systems are the
creation of human activity and human imagination.

And while conservatives appear to demand a kind of
conservation by demanding a hard debt ceiling, they -
like all the rest of us - want to dine on our cake while
still leaving it on the table. We want our ever-growing
economies to be free of real conservation. We want to
ignore that we live on a finite planet that has it own
very finite resources - water, oil, viable habitats.

Physics has known for a long time that there are real
physical ceilings in the physical world. We appear to be
living in the first human era that will be forced to
watch that fact move from abstraction to global reality.
Perhaps when our imaginary worlds of economics take
those real constraints seriously it will give our
beleaguered politicians firmer ground to stand on.

[Thad]

When nature says no its just saying yes to something else.

In the effort to simplify so understanding can be whittled down to direct cause and effect, so the natural order of things might then be worked with, I remember a time 30 years ago or so, when I got this thought observing the economical effects of the numerous nick-knacks, do-dads and what-nots people were making their daily bread of off. Thinking forward through the time when garages began to swell with the enterprising artifacts of this era brings us here and now How then should this economic activity evolve after the saturation point?

The direction of evolution this should move is the development of a more personally contrived life style. Where the things made were more tailored now to smaller groups with a design more pertinent to fewer people than the shotgun approach of mass distribution with its following allowable waste factor.

There are many inventions that were passed up that would have provided a wider yield than could be seen to fit within a particular profit bracket and were not valued in the formulas the profiteers were required by law for their stock holders to implement towards maximizing profit

Whatever laws that have to do with this particular effect are more the source of sending our industries to other countries than the greed one would attribute to such an action.

In the economics of Agriculture and the zoning laws, there is a thing called value added agriculture (https://www.agmrc.org/business_development/getting_prepared/valueadded_agriculture/what_is_valueadded_agriculture.cfm) that can be the base of renewal

A formula for developing the idea of undiscovered currency and how to spend it.

As a dead branch falls off The Tree it becomes a feast for something else.

Hooray for nature saying no.

[Speak2Truth]

The analogy is rather irrelevant, or rather the conclusion of the analogy. It talks about mere movement of energy yet fails to account for the fact that those demanding more and more energy be sapped from the system are in fact condemning real human beings to a lifetime of toil to provide that energy. This is what Conservatives are fighting against - the enslavement of today's children and grandchildren by greedy politicians eager to indebt them when they have no vote in the matter. It is TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION for all those children you see on the streets today - and their as yet unborn children.

Let's take make this analogy more comparable to what's really going on.

IN the world of physics, there is a specific amount of energy from which all matter is made. If one removes matter from a bucket, the only way to keep the bucket "full" is to put an equivalent amount of matter back in. That matter has to be put in by somebody...

Our Government has a "budget", which is a giant bucket of cash. If they don't have all the cash in the bucket that they want to spend on things (a high-speed rail is proposed next!) then All Hell Breaks Loose. They'll make sure of that - just to keep us desperately working to fill the bucket for them. You watched Obama and other Democrats spell out just what kind of Hell they'd inflict on us, such as cutting off Social Security checks, if we didn't do as they demanded.

Our national debt incurs "interest" - meaning that a Lender printed some paper to put into the bucket so politicians could spend it on things that got people to vote for them. In return for that favor, the Lenders are allowed to come and take matter out of the bucket at a defined rate. The amount they take, over time, may well exceed that which they put in - and that's the deal the politicians made with them. We have to labor and toil and pay taxes to put cash back into the bucket to keep it filled, otherwise All Hell Breaks Loose.

Raising the debt ceiling means the Lenders get to take cash out of the bucket at a faster rate. Raise it again, they take it even faster. The politicians are making these deals with Lenders, so they can bribe people to vote for them, while the American People must labor more and more to try to keep the bucket filled. If the Lenders were to just take all the cash that is owed them, right now, the bucket would be empty and All Hell Breaks Loose - so the Politicians are simply condemning today's children and their children to toiling endlessly to keep putting cash in as the Lenders take it out in perpetuity. That means forever - because the politicians are clearly avoiding taking rational steps to get the Lenders paid off and free the American People from toiling to keep that cash drain going.

This recent deal just increased the rate at which Lenders will be taking cash out - literally draining wealth from our economy and worsening our situation for the long term. It condemned the children to toil ever more to keep the Lenders happy, for a deal in which they had no vote, so politicians could bribe even more people to vote for them tomorrow.

Those children will be desperate for some relief from the endless toil, trying to keep up with the Lenders grabbing their fistfuls of cash - and will be ripe for politicians to hand them little bits of cash to make them happier and buy their votes. It's a vicious, well planned game.

Under the US Constitution, the cash put into that bucket should be printed by the US Congress with NO DEBT attached to the mere printing of paper. That was devised to keep the children free from enslavement by greedy politicians and lenders.

Don't raise the debt limit any more. Restore lawful printing of US currency.

Pity the children.