RULES WITHOUT RULERS

About the book

A Nobel laureate in chemistry who spent the last thirty years of his life arguing that the banking system violated the second law of thermodynamics. A Ukrainian physician who tried to put Marxism on a thermodynamic footing and was rejected by Friedrich Engels in a single letter. The most famous industrialist in America proposing to pay for a dam with a currency denominated in kilowatt hours, with Thomas Edison standing beside him saying the present system was a swindle. An entire movement of engineers who wanted to abolish money and hand the economy to a technical council. Buckminster Fuller trying to wire the planet's electrical grids into one system so that no nation could hold the switch. Two academics building the field of ecological economics on the observation that the economy is a one way street. And Hayek, at the end of his career, arguing that we would never get good money until we took the power to issue it away from the state. Nine serious attempts across roughly a century. Every one of them saw something true. Every one of them failed.