Introduction to Technocracy:

How the Price System Destroys Itself, and the Scientific Solution.

Introduction Technocracy is fundamentally founded in science and on scientific principles. Some of you may have scientific backgrounds, others not, but in both cases understanding technocracy and more importantly, being able to spread its ideas, argue its points and simply understand its goals requires study, and it means just that study; and much of it will not be very much fun. The current activity of technocracy directs itself toward two ends. First is inquiry into the fundamental relations among the various parts of the price system, and which discloses the reasons for the collapse of such a system in any civilization that converts energy at a high rate. The second is the design of a control which will successfully operate such a high-energy civilization. This paper is a most basic introduction, and for those who are interested, you should read the full Technocracy Study Guide, which is a more complete and proper introduction to Technocracy. The study guide covers the necessary background and foundation of Technocracy, that is science, and it's role in helping us design a system of governance that will be efficient, robust, supportive of individual liberty and devoid of the vulnerabilities of the current price system. It does this in greater detail than I'll be able to cover here. Much of what I cover here is derived from the study guide, but I encourage everyone who hasn't read it to read it afterward, or to re-read it to get yourself on a solid footing for understanding what we are discussing here, and also to have a better idea of where we are to go over the months and years ahead. This paper is almost entirely dependent on the works and writings of M. King Hubbard and Howard Scott.

Science Now, Technocracy is founded on science, but I don't want to get into too many details regarding science itself. It's best to come at technocracy with a background of at least some college level courses in a field of science, such as physics, chemistry or mechanical engineering. I'm going to assume some level of scientific understanding among my audience, but just in case, I'm going to cover a few of the more important aspects of science which apply to our discussion. We must understand what science is. Science is not a field of study. Science is a method for investigating an area of knowledge by methodically testing its ideas. Fields of study, like physics, chemistry and biology have no real boundaries between them, but are mere conveniences arbitrarily set up to make focusing ones studies a bit easier. Biology can not be understood without the chemistry that controls biological processes. Chemistry can not be understood without understanding the physics of molecular and atomic interactions. What makes these fields scientific is not the nature of WHAT they study, but the approach taken in studying them. The ideas of these fields can all be tested and those tests can be repeated. Anyone can repeat the experiments if they have the inclination to do so, and see the results for themselves. Anything that can not be tested, or whose supposed tests can not be repeated is not scientific. That doesn't mean they can't be real, but it does mean that they are useless for our purposes. The goal of technocracy after all is to apply scientific principles to the design of a system of control capable of operating the functions of, ultimately, the North American continent, and to insure, through proof demonstrated in practice, that the methods used are the best possible. Like any scientific field, it is then necessary to always be investigating the precepts and methods in use, and when they are found to be less than ideal, to modify them or replace them. Operating by Design Now I mentioned that technocracy is about designing a system of governance. Any system can be thought of much like a machine. Take a car for instance. If you want to accelerate you must press the accelerator pedal. No abstract considerations enter into this problem, such as: is it ethical to accelerate, or is this the best way to do so. The machine is simply built to respond to this operation by accelerating. This is a useful lesson no machine, nor group of machines may be operated except as specified by its design. America's idle factories and wanton destruction of food supplies while her citizens remain undernourished are the result of trying to operate a system by other criteria.

Definition of Technocracy The reason we are outlining all of this is that Technocracy is built upon science. It is the use of science in observing, measuring and testing our existing price system, its successes and its failures to see objectively what strengths and what weaknesses it has, as well as using these techniques to determine more effective courses of action, that like a scientific theory, must be in agreement with observation, and must be modified or replaced when we learn something better. Thus it is not about a specific way of running a government, but the application of the scientific method to insure we use the best course of action in pursuing the goals of society. Some might think that technocracy is about imposing one specific approach to a problem, which couldn't be further from the truth. As in engineering, the solution to any problem depends on the nature and scale of that problem, as well as the environment in which it must be solved. It also must be flexible enough to deal with changes to the environment it operates in, and changes to the nature of the problem itself over time. Price System A couple times already, I've mentioned the phrase price system and those of you who have read the study guide will know what it means. For those of you who don't, you're probably wondering what I'm talking about. You might think for example that you know what price means, but do you? Ask any economists and you're likely to get a very different answer from each of them. Some would call it the ratio of the scarcity of money to the scarcity of any commodity. Others would mention psychological and social factors. The simplest definition you might hear would be value expressed in terms of money but then we're left with this term value. Someone of an inquisitive nature would then start looking for a definition of value, since price is expressed in terms of it and again never find a single precise meaning. You'd have to find explanations of how value might be determined. You'd learn that value is not determined independently, but that there is some sort of exchange, after which values appear in the guise of prices expressed in terms of money. To get past this I'm going to give you our definition of price system. A price system is any system in which exchange or distribution are managed by the creation of debt claims or the exchange of property rights on the basis of commodity valuation hence any social system whose distribution of goods and services by means of a system of trade or commerce based on commodity valuation and employing any form of debt tokens, or money, constitutes a Price System, and it may be added that except - possibly remote and primitive communities, nothing but Price Systems exist at the current time.

Weaknesses of the Price System One of the key tenets of a price system is a fallacy that is held to quite strongly, almost dogmatically in our current nation, which we will later see is in fact impossible. It is the idea of unlimited, accelerating growth. Our short period of history since the industrial revolution has led us to cling to certain parts of our development, and to ignore other parts. ( For more details, see lesson 12 of the study guide, titled: Industrial Growth Curves.) We see that in the use of any resource, or development of any industry, its growth follows an S curve. A slow beginning, followed by increasingly fast advancement, eventually flattening out where little or no further growth is possible. During the middle period, growth tends to occur at the rate of compound interest. It is the succession of such industries, or products, from the steam engine, to the internal combustion engine, from communication industries, to the computer industries, each one beginning, growing more and more quickly, and then reaching the second phase of the S curve: the flattening out, where each unit of growth requires significantly more input to obtain, and at which point it has been overtaken by the next industry beginning the fast growth portion of the curve thus giving the illusion that such growth is a constant factor of advancement. The cause of this flattening at the end of the curve is rather plain. Either you reach supply side limits: that is, limits on the availability of resources or the physical ability to extract and use those resources, or you reach the limit of what is useful to humanity and what we are physically capable of consuming. Contrary to what's become common belief, the amount an individual is capable of consuming, is, in fact, limited and this is an important limitation as we shall see a little further on. When it comes to motive power, or the power to run equipment, we first had nothing but human labor. When that was no longer sufficient we turned to animals. The number of horses needed to supply the necessary power grew until they too became unreasonable to manage and so were replaced by steam engines, which were then replaced by more powerful and more efficient engines. You can see in each stage of this progression the flattening out of the curve due to supply side restrictions the ability to create the needed energy by one means, replaced only by the advancement of technology to provide better conversion of energy sources into useful work. In technology we saw the second limitation that of the ability to consume - in the tech boom, where the availability of high tech companies greatly exceeded humanities ability to make use of them at the time and their nebulous promises, though usually backed by men with some skill, found no market for their wares and thus collapsed. All of this is an oversimplification, but you get the point. Any economy based on the price system depends entirely on its eternal growth, which any analysis of any industry or resource can show you can simply not be maintained. The limits of the laws of physics themselves prevent it, and thus any system depending on it for its survival, like our market economy, are ultimately doomed to failure. It's just a matter of when. It gets held off by the ingenuity of men the limits of the steam engine were overcome by the development of the internal combustion engine, but any course of physics, which discusses efficiencies can show that we can, in fact determine the maximal efficiency that can be obtained by an IDEAL system, which is by definition superior to any real system we can actually create which has inefficiencies of heat loss, friction and so on, and thus we can determine the maximum output we can achieve per unit energy of input and thus place an

upper limit on growth determined by physical laws. What happens to a price system where there is no more growth? At best, earnings flat line, and new entrants to any field can only catch up, never surpass, the established companies. They will not be creating better products or surpassing past accomplishments, but only mimicking them. We will see shortly that this, too, is a situation which is impossible to maintain. The next weakness of the price system are the perverse incentives it necessarily creates. As we can see, in a price system the pursuit of money supersedes any other goals in importance. In our quite flawed medical system for example, it is nearly impossible for most people to afford the cost of any catastrophic illness or injury, therefore requiring that they purchase insurance. But the institutions of insurance were not established to maximize health, or access to healthcare. They were instituted to make a profit. To maximize such profits, you need to increase income as much as possible, which comes from the monthly fees that individuals pay, and minimize payouts the coverage that is actually payed out in the event of illness to provide treatment. Thus we see the entirely predictable results of health insurance companies taking in money from a customer for years, only to drop them on any technicality they can get away with the moment an expensive outlay presents itself. This is only prevented by the forceful intervention of government. This necessarily creates a system of rising costs, and falling quality of care. Precisely the opposite of the desired goal of providing the best possible health care to all individuals. This same perverse incentive, of course, exists in all industries. Every single company wants to maximize its income the price it charges for its goods or services while minimizing what they actually give back. While in the growth stage of the S curve, and where there is competition, this can, temporarily, create diverse and high-quality products at a low cost for consumers. However that clearly changes in any field where there is either a monopoly, insufficient competition, collusion between competitors, or where the industry has reached the top of the S curve and the end of growth. To maximize profits at this point there are no alternatives but to charge more and spend less, and rather than maximizing quality and quantity of production, we are maximizing for profits. Free market supporters would say that if this went too far, a new competitor would enter, but that completely ignores barriers to entry, like high start-up costs (depending on the industry), interference from established players, who might buy out the competitor, who might temporarily change production to keep them out of the market, or who might use their wealth to manipulate or even create government institutions to interfere with the new competitor, by creating regulations they can easily follow, but which greatly increase the costs of entering the field. On the opposite end - where you might have a planned economy there are additional problems. Where the free market at least makes use of people who understand their fields, a planned economy tries to centralize all control to a single purpose, or to a small set of goals determined by a few, and to organize productive capacity to that end. Those few, however, can never understand all the important aspects of the fields of endeavor they wish to control. We see this in our own government also, where politicians uneducated in anything regarding agriculture, industry or science, nevertheless attempt to create laws to control, regulate and govern these fields.

It is seen to a much greater extent in socialist countries, like China, or rather as it was before they started moving to a greater degree of freedom in their markets, when a central council, skilled perhaps in giving speeches and winning the cooperation of the people (or scaring them into cooperation through the use of violence), had no idea how to simultaneously maximize industrial production and maintain agricultural production to insure that people remain fed while competing with other industrialized nations. This great failure of making people work in fields they are not trained for, and keeping them out of the fields they are long experienced in is quite obvious in the tragedy that was China's 5-year-plans. An estimated 20 million people starved to death by policies that had no basis in fact moving agricultural workers to factories, a system of punishment that encouraged lying on quotas leading to an overestimation of the amount of grain produced, the extermination of swallows, leading to a plague of locusts which destroyed what crops WERE grown and so on. Back to my previous point our economy depends on the continual growth and continual arrival of new industries. Our economic soothsayers would like to interject that newer industries ALWAYS arise to replace the older ones as they reach the top of their growth curves, because in the short history of our nation that has been the case, but we've seen nations in the past that reached their peak, and faced the consequences before new industry could be developed. We also see what happens when that peak is reached in a price system that tries to compensate. When industrial growth peaked, the market turned to an industry that seemed to offer unlimited new growth, over-funding it and creating a bubble, (the tech bubble) which burst until it returned to its actual growth rate. When this happened new securities and rules were created in another field that was believed to have eternal growth, which was over-funded and created another bubble (the real estate market) which led to a crash. What we're seeing is that the combined growth we once had as a result of multiple industries advancing, and new industries carrying the weight when old ones peter out, can no longer be matched. New industries aren't replacing old ones at an increasing rate, but at a relatively steady rate, flattening growth in a market that expects and even requires that growth increases. We saw a similar occurrence leading into the great depression with the boom and bust cycle that preceded it, that was overcome largely by the immense industrial expansion resulting from World War II and the destruction of all foreign competitors, and the need to provide industrial products to essentially the entire world. As one of the only countries untouched by the destruction of the war, the U.S. had no real competitors, and thus growth in the industry was completely assured, because we took over all the consumers, temporarily ending the boom and bust cycle. Growth further came about by ending the gold standard, allowing the U.S. along side its new found superpower status to dictate financial policies supporting our growth often at the expense of third world nations, and through limiting competition even in first world nations. Rather than technologically, our production has been growing geographically, much like the Roman Empire, by spreading out to the rest of the world, and we are seeing now the effects of that on the American worker. This growth lasts, of course, only as long as recovery and growth elsewhere can supplement the profits of this system which we are again reaching the end of. Now that we're on the much more destructive path of the rich draining the wealth of everyone else, rather than supporting the growth and advancement of the rest of the world as their predecessors did, we've put an even tighter cap on our

economic growth and greater limits on what the price system can deliver. Specifically with wealth in fewer hands, fewer people can participate in the economy and each individual, however rich, can only consume so much in a day, thus total consumption must drop, total income must therefore drop, and finally production must decrease. At root, compound growth can not be maintained because it depends on limited resources on the production end, and limited consumers at the consumption end. Eventually the earth will reach its maximum supportable population of humans, at which point we can grow no further without dying off, and thus can consume no more goods than will be in production at that time already. Growth in any contained system must end, and thus there is a definitive end point to any price system. The price system further institutes constraints like not providing food without pay forcing people to starve, and further limiting growth from what would otherwise be possible, undermining its own efforts at growth. All these factors combined lead to an inherent instability, with inevitable boom and bust cycles that destroy wealth, impact real people and lead to unnecessary suffering, and ultimately the demise of the price system itself. To show why technology can not eternally supplement this system, we need only look at one of the most significant conclusions reached by a member of technocracy inc.: peak oil and the work of M. King Hubbert in the 1950s. As our society requires increasing amounts of energy, we use more of our primary fuel source, oil. As technology advances, we can extract more oil more quickly, increasing the available energy. Eventually though we will have used up the easily available oil and must switch to harder to get oil. We see this now in that we are pursuing oil sands and deep ocean drilling, both difficult and expensive endeavors compared to the land based oil fields. Once you've used enough of the existing oil, however, no increase in technology can overcome the decreasing amount of oil available and the output per-day decreases. The energy available decreases and growth in any field is thus capped by the energy we can extract. Thus even an exponential and eternal advancement of technology can not overcome the limits of energy that exist. I'm going to provide an example to illustrate a final failure of the price system before we move on. Lets say consumers spend $1,000,000 on goods. The retailer takes their share to cover expenses and profit, paying their employees, the electric bill, the rent and so on, and some gets used to buy the products they sell from the manufacturers. The manufacturers likewise, pay their workers, the rent etc. and use the rest to buy the raw materials they need to produce. Eventually it is the farmers and miners growing and pulling the resources from the earth are getting paid. Each stop along the way might also pay some money to the owners of these companies as dividends. In every case a person or company gets paid so that goods move in the opposite direction from farmers and miners etc. to manufacturers, to retailers to the consumer. All the money gets paid to someone who is, themselves a consumer, so the money is essentially paid by the consumers to other consumers so they can keep up the cycle. Now imagine instead of returning all the money into the system, companies and individuals put some of that money away. Say $100,000 as savings for their retirement, for potential healthcare costs etc. That means that in the next cycle only $900,000 is available to pass back to retailers. Less money means less production, and the whole system must slow down. How is this overcome? First rather than socking money away, it can be invested. By giving that savings toward the expansion of a factory or the establishment of a new company which results in the

money going back to the workers building that factory it is re-entered into the market in exchange for a promise to pay it back later (or a gamble that it might be lost). The value can then be maintained, only if growth continues indefinitely, which as we've established earlier does not and can not happen for any system, do to the limits of resources on one side, or the limits on our ability to consume on the other. This is again compensated for by banks creating new debt (printing money) out of nowhere allowing continued growth based on still more promises to pay later. Keep in mind money isn't and never was, a store of value. It is a debt instrument that represents societies debt to the holder of that debt a promise to deliver goods or services later. You can see how this is working out in our current economy. When you realize that the national debt, some 14 trillion dollars is essentially held in government bonds, and dollars represent a debt to later be payed in goods, with a GDP of some 14 trillion dollars a year at current the real debt on actual goods is at more like 28 trillion dollars, not counting corporate bonds, municipal bonds, state bonds and individually held debt. All of which represents promises to provide goods in the future. Giving the limits on production as already discussed how much of this can ever actually be paid, rather than just transferring that promise of future payment to someone else? You can see that that is actually impossible. Money is never destroyed, nor debt canceled out due to the delivery of goods, it is only transferred to someone else. Therefore debt can only increase, and in fact MUST increase with no end. Thus it is readily seen that if we save by hoarding we shut the system down, and if we save by building new plants, it can be maintained only as long as the plants can be continuously expanded and at an accelerating rate, which we've already shown is not forever. In the case of factories it should be obvious why we can't keep expanding them forever. This is barely the surface of the problems of the price system but we have two more areas to address in its failings. Its dependence on scarcity the backbone of supply and demand, and its inability to deal with abundance. Dependence on Scarcity I just want to touch on this subject briefly, the foundation of capitalism on scarcity. What do I mean by scarcity? Simply the state of being where the supply of goods available is less than the demand for those goods. Capitalism depends on this to maintain prices at profitable levels. When supply drops, or demand increases, price goes up. The materials required in construction don't change and so profit per unit increases. When supply increases or demand goes down price decreases. What happens when supply becomes infinite, or at least so far beyond demand it might as well be? Well all we have to do is look at the abundant non-controllable supply of air. Air is free precisely because it is abundant and no one has figured out how to control all of it, or I'm sure someone would be trying to sell it to us. Compare this to water. In a place with high rainfall and abundant water, water is essentially, if not actually, free. You might pay for its transportation into your home, but that will be at very low rates. Comparatively, a place that is very dry, say in the middle of the desert, water can be very expensive, and in fact wars can be fought over it.

So here we quickly see that price is heavily dependent on scarcity. We also see it in the commoditization of previously scarce goods. When cell phones came out, they were extremely expensive. They were scarce and the costs in making them were high. Now, cell phones are extremely common, and as such prices on some models are negligible while only newer models remain expensive. Attempts to deal with Abundance So how does a system dependent on scarcity react when something previously scarce becomes abundant? The answer in this day and age should be obvious. Artificial scarcity. It creates controls that make what is available in quantities greater than all of humanity can possible consume harder to get, and my example here is, of course, music. With the advent of the digital age the cost of making a copy is essentially zero. The number of copies that can be made is so large that it might as well be considered infinite. So how do you still make a profit on something that has infinite supply, limited demand and therefore whose price ought to have dropped to zero? The answer is artificial controls, using law, or technology (in the form of DRM) to prevent access. Of course we've seen that such controls never work. Quite simply the record industry could not survive if its product were allowed to be traded at the value abundance implies. Thus as our ability to produce exceeds our ability to consume, industries must artificially hold themselves back, producing less, to prevent themselves and society from facing collapse. So rather than producing as much as people can consume so that everyone could have very nearly everything they want, we must produce less. No amount of investment can therefore be used to expand factories further or be reinvested into expanding production, and therefore less and less money can be cycled back into a system that has already hit its peak of production. Now individual companies may continue to thrive with new products, but society as a whole can not produce more than it can consume. In order to maintain a good profit, indeed it must produce less and here we see the very top, the end, of the S curves we discussed earlier. To make matters worse, not only does production flatten out, but the means by which things are produced are increasingly automated and made cheaper. Labor requirements continually decrease, and since we are already maxing out what can be consumed, no new jobs can be created. More people must be put out of work, further increasing poverty in the vast majority, and concentrating wealth in the hands of the few. This like we mentioned earlier results in fewer participants in the economy, decreasing income, thus decreasing production, resulting in still fewer jobs in a self reinforcing downward spiral. Keep in mind that even if we, as many propose increase the size of the whole pie which as we already demonstrated, has an upper limit, ultimately based on the laws of physics it is increased proportionately based on current wealth. If everyone increases their wealth by 10% someone with a million dollars ends up with 1.1 million dollars, and someone with 1000 dollars ends up with 1100. The richer person increases their wealth by 100 times the amount that the poor person started with. The rich poor divide further increases. When all these things are taken together we see that the divide between rich and poor, the problems of unemployment and poverty and in fact all the economic issues of capitalism are not the result of some law, some economic policy or some tax policy, but rather they are

caused by the fundamental nature of capitalism, of the price system, itself. These things can not be separated from the price system, because they are the means by which it functions. Capitalism therefore, does not, and can not provide for the wealth of everyone, or even a majority. Because physics prevents eternal infinite growth the system must stop, and when it does it can not continue to provide its illusion of wealth the poor enter poverty and starve, while a very few get rich until society either shrinks or revolts, destroys and starts over again. The price system destroys itself. Technocracy as a Solution So enough of this doom and gloom. With the fundamental flaws we see, the question now is what solution does technocracy offer? First, technocracy does not require unlimited growth. Since it can deal with abundance, production can be maintained at the required level to provide for everyone without concern for loss of profit. Since income is determined by participation, not by what people pay for a specific product, there is never the issue of high supply causing a low price that can't support a profit. I'll explain why this works shortly when I get to Energy Accounting. Production under technocracy is operated to maximize the productivity of facilities rather than 1 shift a day for example, which uses only a third of a plants productive capacity, it is run constantly, or as close to it as possible. Thus the same output is achieved with roughly one third of the required facilities though with some breathing room included for downtime, maintenance, upgrades etc. Further when you realize, little more then the current productive capacity is really required, that with a real unemployment rate of nearly 20%, and with the removal of industries that do not produce anything themselves, such as finance and banking, we have an extremely large labor source, that when properly organized means that everyone can continue to receive not only what the average American has now, but significantly more while requiring each individual to work far LESS. It's easy to see that by moving everyone into industries that produce, maintain and develop infrastructure, or handle services (such as education) the average work day can be reduced to 6 or even 4 hours a day while still providing the productive output necessary for a high standard of living for every single person. Our biggest limitation becomes our ability to convert sufficient energy to our needs, but even that is being worked on already. The development of new energy sources from more efficient solar power, renewable sources like wind, geothermal energy and tidal harnessing and still somewhat out of reach technologies like sustained hydrogen fusion all address the issue. Our greatest asset is one we've already mentioned: The real limitation on the ability to consume. One person may be able to buy a grocery store worth of food, but he could never actually eat it. The amount of food you CAN consume is limited. The number of cars you can drive in a year is large, but likewise limited (though in a finished technate it is unlikely automobiles would continue to exist out side of museums or private collections we'd be using much more efficient transportation) Unlike a price system, where money as a symbol of debt is created, but can never be destroyed (think about that - the federal reserve never destroys money it replaces damaged money and prints

still more and MUST do so) in a technate there is both creation and destruction. Value is in that which can be used alone. Value is created when we create a product. It is destroyed when that product is no longer useful, is discarded or recycled to be made into something else of value. It is this creation of real value as the bearer of wealth, rather than the use of debt certificates that creates one of the greatest divides between a technate and a price system. A technate avoids the perverse incentives of a price system. If your goal is to provide health care, success or failure are determined by how successfully that care is provided, and by nothing else. Those who provide such care are rewarded solely on the basis of their success. Those who are most skilled get promoted, while those that do not deliver are demoted or moved to find a position that better suits them. We'll cover how this is done later in more detail as well. Since technocracy does not operate by exchange of debt certificates, but operates by the distribution of items of actual value, it does not need the continual creation of new debt to support its existence it is capable of providing for its existence that is the needs of all individuals, without it. We've touched on technocracy a bit, so now we need to describe the form it will take. As I suggested with my example of medicine, technocracy is at its core a meritocracy. Those with demonstrated ability rise to the top. In business, as well as in government service we currently have numerous methods of trying to determine whether someone is good for a job. All of these fail, because however impressive someone's resume or education is you don't know how well they'll do the job until they try. This wastes considerable time and resources locating the right candidate. In a technate this isn't an issue, because education can more easily be integrated with what are called the functional sequences and the service sequences, creating a natural progression from education to employment that doesn't exist in our current society. This is more than just job placement, but more like a map of the steps you would take to get the job you want. Each educational path would have jobs it qualifies you for. Students would participate in hands-on learning in one or more of these jobs as mandatory internships, both so they can decide if its the right work for them, and to demonstrate their competency providing actual evidence that they can do the job well before they have the responsibility of that job. From here, as vacancies appear, the replacement to fill that vacancy must be a person with the demonstrated ability to do that job. The best people to decide this are the people who have expertise in that field, and who also know the level of expertise and abilities of the people who can be considered for that job thus candidates are elected from within the grade immediately below the opening by their peers, and from those candidates, the person to get the job will be appointed by the holder of the position above. This holds for every position, except the highest the continental director since there is no one above, thus he is elected by those immediately below the continental director position, and can be recalled by a 2/3rds vote. Now this sounds very left wing to some people, or very much like central control, but there are enormous differences. First, decisions must be made only by experts in the field being addressed. No one else, regardless of position or rank has the knowledge to make those decisions, and therefore they do not have the authority to do so. Secondly, this hierarchy exists to manage the operation of the infrastructure NOT for the

purpose of ruling over people. While there still will be police and judicial services, the particular laws they uphold are NOT determined by this hierarchical directorate who has no say. Their jobs are determined by the physical requirements of operating the machinery of the nation, and thus only by the laws of physics. The laws that govern men can be determined democratically, and need not be determined on a continental scale, but often can be determined on a local level, allowing a greater freedom in choosing what kind of system one wishes to live under. Keep in mind, the nature of technocracy means that many types of laws we have now become completely obsolete. Since goods are distributed (and it is the job of the manufacturing sequences to maintain an abundance of goods quantities sufficient to meet all demand) theft becomes meaningless. There is no gain to stealing, when you can get what you want at any time. And if you got robbed anyway, you can quickly replace the loss. Money is also often a motivator for violent crimes. People commit murder for it, and those murders would no longer occur, although crimes of passion say someone attacking and maybe killing a cheating spouse could still not be prevented. Crimes of forgery would also become either non-existent or meaningless, since it would provide no gain. Non-destructive activities, like drug usage, may be controlled in some areas but there is no inherent need for it to be illegal. The related crimes of theft again become meaningless or non-existent, and thus the violence in such theft will no longer occur. Likewise the violence of drug enforcement can be done away with, while treatment for those wishing to escape addiction would be provided for by the health service sequence. Energy Accounting The final important topic to cover is the economic system that makes this all possible: Energy Accounting. Things still need to be tracked and accounted for. You need to know how much of a good people are using so you can continue to meet demand. The foundation of production itself, gives us the answer for doing this. In every process of manufacture or service there is the constant of expenditure of energy. Energy can both represent the materials used in creating a product, and in a much more straight forward manner can represent the very real costs of the act of production. When machines are used to build the product we already have that value from our energy meters. We know how much energy we used to build that item, and thus the cost, in real physical quantities of creating that item. Therefore when I say energy accounting, I mean that precisely accounting for the actual energy used in the creation and transportation of goods, and in providing services. For every movement of goods on earth, a unidirectional degradation of energy takes place. Whether measured in kilowatts, calories, or BTUs we can measure with a high degree of precision the energy cost of any given industrial process, or for that matter, the energy cost of operating a human being.

This energy cost is not only the common denominator of all goods and services but a physical measure as well, and it has no value connotations, nor any ethical nor psychological considerations whatsoever. The energy cost of producing an item can be changed only by changing the process by which it is created or the materials of which it is made. Now assume that continental control, after taking into due account the amount of equipment on hand, the amount of new construction that is required for the needs of the population, and the availability of energy resources, decides that for the next year, the social mechanism can afford to expend a certain maximum amount of energy. This energy can be allocated according to the uses to which it is to be put building new plants, new roads, new hospitals etc. and can be deducted from the total as a sort of overhead and not chargeable to individuals. After all these deductions are made, including that required for education and care of children and maintenance generally, the remaining will be devoted to production of goods and services to be consumed by the population-at-large. Suppose then a system of record keeping is devised whereby consuming power is granted to this population-at-large in an amount exactly equal to this net remaining energy available for the producing of goods and services to be consumed by this group. This equality can only be accomplished by stating the consuming power itself in denominations of energy. Thus if there were available the means of producing goods and services at an expenditure of 100,000 kcals per person per day, each person would be granted an income, or consuming power, at that rate of 100,000 kcals per day. Now we can go back to our discussion of the limits on human consumption. We must bear in mind that a person only lives 24 hours a day, one third of which he sleeps and for a considerable portion of the rest he works, loafs, plays or indulges in other pursuits many of which do not involve a great deal of physical consumption of goods. Let us recall that every individual must be supplied, old and young alike. Since it is possible to set the rate of production arbitrarily at a rather high figure, it is entirely likely that the average potential consuming power per adult can be set higher than the adult's rate of actual physical consumption. Since this is so there is no need for the differentiation of adult incomes characteristic in systems of scarcity. From the point of record keeping, enormous simplification can be effected by making all adult incomes, male and female alike, equal (resulting in the first ever gender equality of income). Keep in mind this is not money distributed as in a communist society (which is still a debt instrument.) It is a record-keeping and accounting tool that, while important, most people need never be concerned about. The potential consumption power will be so much greater than what most people can use, they'll never have any notice of the system. Further properties that must be incorporated into this income are that it must be non-negotiable and non-saveable. That is, it must be valid only in the hands of the person to whom issued and in no circumstances transferable to any other individual. Likewise it must be void after the period of its issuance, otherwise it would become at least theoretically possible to hoard large quantities not using available energy and attempt to use it later all at once, overwhelming the ability of power plants to produce sufficient power. Since it is issued until death, there is no need for saving anyway, and again there is no balance for individuals to track, as it is handled automatically as a record-keeping task.

At the end of each period, the books are balanced, the ledger closed for that period and a permanent end is made to the practice of mortgaging the future to pay for the present. If, as is likely, people find they can not spend their allotment, then at the end of the period it is canceled. The savings then is realized by society, not the individual. Production will always be geared to the rate of consumption NOT to the energy allotment. Therefore if the allotment is for the energy equivalent of 4 billion tons of coal, and people consume the equivalent of only 3 billion tons of coal, that extra 1 billion tons of coal stays in the ground. And it is consumption this definitive expression of demand that determines increase in productive capacity (thus increasing the allotment) not a centrally determined value. This is one of the most important points to remember, that it is not like a communist nation, determining the ration of bread or of shoes that each person ought to get it is what the people decide they need that determines the productive capacity that will be created limited only by what the physical laws of the universe and our current level of technological development permit, and that is a barrier no society, however organized can possibly surpass. The end product of technocracy then is a high physical standard of living, a high standard of public health, a minimum of unnecessary labor, minimum possible waste of nonrenewable resources, a completely indiscriminate educational system with each school fully funded and staffed, and ample free time (much more than most people have now) in which individuals can pursue whatever invention or diversion strikes their fancy. How to make it all happen So what can we do to make this all happen? Most technocratic organizations, including technocracy inc. itself, are focused on education, not on bringing about a technocracy. I believe that waiting for people to grab onto a system that few even know about is wishful thinking at best. The benefits it can bring, and the problems it can fix can not be ignored and I feel it is irresponsible to just wait and hope when so many people are unnecessarily going hungry. To that end, I'm beginning to organize those interested with the intention of forming a political party to gain representation for these views, and change peacefully our system of government by our direct action. I do not believe any current congressmen or senator would support these immense changes, nor do most (or possibly any of them) even understand that this exists, what it means or why it is necessary when they are blind to the harm inherent in our current system. The initial approach will be to take a few offices. To block as much as possible harmful legislation. To get as many current laws as possible thrown out (much unnecessary regulation and limitations of personal freedom) and begin creating the organizations and processes that will be necessary to operate a technate. To this end I am reaching out to you today, to other people already involved in technocracy in various ways and levels and to those I know to educate yourselves about technocracy, how it works and why we need it. I am acting, and I am doing, but I will get nowhere alone. It is only by convincing sufficient people to support us as we move forward in votes when we have our own candidates, and in action by participating in their own governance by fully joining us that we will be able to

accomplish real change. If you had doubts about technocracy, I hope I've answered them and convinced you it is worth supporting. Anyone interested in doing more can send me a PM through reddit (user: random_dent) for now and let me know what you'd be willing to do, what skills do you have, and what kind of time that you'd be willing to use to further the cause of technocracy. Feel free to send me your questions, comments or criticisms, or post them to r/technocracy and I'll be happy to reply.