Burning hydrogen today deprives the market of 5 billion years from now. I'm not trying to be pedantic. Nothing throws off good things for free. I think what we

Burning hydrogen today deprives the market of 5 billion years from now. I'm not trying to be pedantic. Nothing throws off good things for free. I think what we're both touching on here, and what the article touches on as well, is the question of what happens when the accumulation of wealth becomes so great, that it's utility becomes almost incomprehensible. We know the sun consumes matter, but to speak of the markets 5 billion years from now is so incomprehensible, that the energy produced today might as well be 'free'. The discussion stops being an economic one and turns into a religious one. To bring it back to the article, what I understand you to be saying is, what if the Congolese Trading Window had opened into the living room of someone who could throw off good things for 'free'. They won't purchase goods that deprive someone else of having them. So basically, a never-ending flow of rice comes out of this window. This person, or even just the window if there's no person attached, literally becomes a god. It's why the sun has been worshiped. It's why feudal lords had the honorific 'lord'. The disparity in wealth between a parent and child is so great that religions have used the terms 'mother' and 'father' to describe nature and deities. A King's Divine Right. The Emperor's Mandate of Heaven. We could find others I think. In all of these cases, there is still consumption of resources to produce something, just that the scale at which this happens is beyond the realm of understanding for the end-user. We have a decent idea that the sun will be burning in however many billion years, but will markets exist? No clue, so yeah, it's 'free'. Before we knew these facts, it was grounds for worship, but now, we just know it as physics. You asked if I thought if to produce without consuming was the worst possible thing, and then mentioned that the need to consume was missing the core insight. What is your answer to your question?