Drifting off the general flow of this thread, and pursuing one of your comments on growth...

The concept of continuous growth is a fascinating one, and it brings up some disturbing thoughts. To grow, one needs capital, and you raise it by borrowing the money or issuing stock. In either case, the money doesn't really exist, what you are making is a promise to repay that money with interest as your enterprise increases its productivity in the future. In a way, this is part of the genius of capitalism, a means of bootstrapping and marshalling and unleashing resources that do not even exist yet. In economics you DO get something for nothing!

The bank may not have the money it lends you (it just gives you an account and a checkbook) but it will always cash your checks and it will be receiving your notes plus the interest you promised, so as long as everyone doesn't cash in at once, or miss a payment at once, the system functions, on trust and government guarantees. Of course, this can be abused, as it did during the Depression, when everything was leveraged out and on margin, and one day the whole system just collapsed under its own weight and its own intrinsic lack of real value. Today, there are regulations and safeguards and insurance but still, the amount of money available exceeds the amount that exists (whatever THAT means, just what "money" represents is still not clear to me). In other words, banks and companies print money, just as a desperate wartime government sliding into bankruptcy does.

Printing money should lead to inflation, although if this phony money is invested in real productive capacity (factories, farms, shops, mines, offices, etc) the system will have the wealth there when the note comes due. This is why the economy MUST grow. Without the promise of future principal and interest from borrowers, yesterday's loans will never be repaid to serve as collateral for tomorrow's loans. Presumably, the new farms and factories produced from these loans will provide the real wealth that will back up those loans in the future. That, plus foreign investment.

Just think about that.