Your musing poses an interesting question. But I'm writing just against the bit where you say we should default to accepting the zero-sum perspective given a lack of understanding of physics.

The evidence against the zero-sum perspective of wealth is overwhelming.

You can go and harvest the wheat. Or, you can let the wheat rot, and spend your day digging a hole and filling it in. Same energy spent. One creates value, the other doesn't.

You can light the gas under your stove, or you can set your curtains on fire. One destroys value at speed, the other doesn't.

You can sew something with a needle and thread. Or you can use a hand-wound sewing machine you inherited from a relative. Same outcome, one is far more energy-expensive than the other.

Indeed. This is the essential difference between capitalism and corporatism (sometimes called crony capitalism). Corporatism is insidious. It enables established players to control markets by manipulating regulations through political favors and disabling competitors through predatory positioning or pricing. It's very unfortunate that many people (including myself in the past) throw out the entire history of prosperity building that capitalism has enabled by conflating it with corporatism. Much of the sentiment driving the distaste for disruptive innovation thinking it will cause a race to the bottom directly supports incumbent large corporations and corporatism. It's easy to fall prey to this, because the narrative can easily have compelling stories of the human harm caused by technical innovation.

IMHO this corporatism thing is just 'No true scotsman' for capitalism. If the right is able to do that, then the left should be allowed to get back talking about communism and socialism again, since none of the problems that happened were in the original thing thought. Also, no true scotsman is too a compelling narrative. I mean, I'm not here to bash you, but since I started looking into this topics more closely, this type of argument doesn't seem much coherent anymore, without state intervention 'the system' would have crumbled a long time ago. IDK it just sounds like ideology.

Slavery, colonization and wars enabled a lot of prosperity building too, and also a lot of technological innovation.

Right - there's a tendency to see bad things that are done in crony capitalism, and then - in reaction to that - to entrench at the zero-sum fallacy.

I'm interested in this topic - what to do about corporations. Something I think about: if we don't have corporations what replaces them? How do you implement business that require commitments that are larger than family?

For example. Consider a digital social network that was oriented around commercial arrangements. You could form complex contracts in a group, and produce a reputation system formed from sets of people. There would be a deposit system, and an opt-in judiciary for dispute resolution. Could this - a digital upgrade of the icelandic commonwealth - be a more powerful mechanism than The Corporation?

There's a big difficulty in wanting to get rid of corporations, and that is that they emerged from a process of true evolution. The Dutch and then English East-India companies allowed humans to do things that had just not been viable previously. In fact, they were so successful that they could have obsoleted nation states. Certainly the East India company could have, and was reined in only because its shareholders and employees continued to show deference to the crown. Nation-states got scared at that point, and imposed significant political controls - corporations are not allowed to maintain standing armies. So I think it's important to appreciate what powerful tools they are. Any discussion about getting rid of them needs to consider - how do you implement large-scale projects in a hypothetical world without corporations?

Well, I'm not really against corporations per se. I work for one I quite enjoy and whose aims I think are good and in the general interest.

The challenge, as I see it, is to have governments with a spine, but governments not so big that they stifle freedom or crowd out opportunities. Governments need to be powerful enough to overrule the biggest corporations so that corporations can exist without the cronyism. Power alone is insufficient though because even a powerful government is peopled by individuals who can sometimes be bought cheaply.

The East India Company is a somewhat terrifying example of what is possible with unbound power for corporations. It's an equally bad and unsubtle endpoint as an all government central economy. Diversity of thought and composition, as in many places, yields better results than homogeneity.

I think corporations are necessary for large-scale, long-term commercial endeavours. Certain classes of services to both individuals and businesses need continuity and corporations are well-suited to providing that kind of continuity.

Where we are today forgives incumbent large corporations too much and (certainly in Canada) makes it far too difficult for entrepreneurs to start small businesses.

but both actions require energy. in one case value was created in the other case no value was created.

there is no case where value is created and no energy was spent.

thus wealth is limited by energy.

Yes, it is free and it comes from the sun. It provides our fuel and thereby our operating temperature (37 degrees C) that gets us up in the morning to do things and create value (wealth/profit) that can very often be transferred via money to and from other wealth creators. And that means all of us on Earth. The earth is so productive that we can afford to trade value residing in abstract forms as in the arts, caring professions and the bureaucracies (government).

Natural resources don't run out. The quantity of elements on earth has and will remain the same for a few billion years. Application of energy and information permits inter-conversion of their combined forms as we wish, if we're smart enough. Not a given, I admit.

The creation of global wealth over the last 20-30 years has brought millions out of poverty. This is unprecedented. And it hasn't been wealth taken from others.

if you consider the sun to be an unlimited source of energy ( which technically speaking it is not) then energy is still limited. it is limited by the amount of light we receive and our technological ability to extract energy from said light.

our technological ability to extract power from the sun is so limited we are forced to mine the earth to extract solar energy from the past (aka oil).

natural resources do run out. they are frequently converted into forms that are unuseable. in the rare event that a natural resource can be converted back to a usable form (recycling) we must further tax our energy reservoirs to perform such feat.

the wealth that was taken from the earth was not taken from anyone you know now. Perhaps your great great great grandchildren will live in a society where oil is more expensive then gold.

However even when we remove all the factors I describe above there is still wealth 'theft' taking place in our society right now. The issue is that some forms of wealth need to be extracted by many people working together. when you have these creatures called billionaires that own wealth they in no way produced all by themselves you know that wealth among these collaberative groups was distributed unevenly. This is known as wealth inequality and it happens as a direct result of extracting wealth from other humans.

Out of poverty and into what? Remember, poverty is man-made. From where I'm looking, 3 billion+ pairs of eye are staring back at me from poverty, that too is unprecedented.

You say natural resources don't run out, how about clean air and clean water? Species diversity?

Poverty is not man-made, it's what happens when wealth is not produced. Wealth is man-made. Do you suppose cavemen were wealthy by our standards? If not, was their poverty man-made then?