Thanks, ER, that synopsis of "The Space Merchants" in Tech's thread about "an orgy of fuel consumption" forms a nexus that dovetails with something I've been thinking about recently.

If you look at free-market capitalism from a systems engineering point of view, you see it as a "resource allocation algorithm". For the benefit of Tom, whose head historically explodes at the second word with visions of Commie central planners doing the allocating, it's the third word that's the key. An "algorithm" is a process, a formula, a recipe. Adam Smith described an algorithm in the misnamed "law" of supply-n-demand.

Free-market capitalism (FMC) is a free-running algorithm that automatically seeks out extremes. A quantity such as supply expands until it's not possible to extract or produce more of whatever is being supplied; or conversely, demand expands until it exhausts supply.

An "orgy of consumption" of anything is a fundamental characteristic of the FMC algorithm. The orgy doesn't stop until the participants have exhausted themselves and the supplies they're consuming.

The algorithm worked well for the first several thousand years of human history, when we were small and the world was large. But now that we're large and the world and its resources are relatively small, it's a sure formula for disaster. That fact is being driven home to us right now by the exploding cost of petroleum energy.

We've know for more than three decades that we couldn't sustain the petroleum orgy indefinitely. But we put our faith in the free-market to fix the problem...the very same algorithm that created the problem in the first place. Should we be surprised at where we are now?

FMC, by its nature, cannot address problems like this until they reach the level of a crisis. There's nothing in the algorithm's code to stop it before we hit the wall. There are no brakes on this vehicle, and the edge of the cliff is approaching rapidly.

Despite the allegations by those on the Right that because I'm not a RightWinger I must be a Commie, I don't think that draconian government intervention in the economy is the optimum solution. The problem is, we lost the opportunity to pursue an optimum a long time ago, through lack of foresight and economic self-discipline. We loved the orgy too much. At this late date, we have an emergency on our hands, and the blunt instrument of government intervention may be our last chance to stop the bus before the edge of the cliff.