Chapter 33: Limiting Factors: Real vs. Arbitrary
On the one hand, we humans are almost limitless in our imaginations, creativity, ingenuity, resourcefulness, and problem-solving abilities. Scientists say we have so far barely scratched the surface of our potential. The post-Transition community will likely afford us a fertile environment in which to further explore that potential.
Yet nature does hold some limitations around which we must work. Gravity keeps the air around us so we can breathe, but limits how high we can jump, how far we can throw, and how much we can lift. We age and die. We are susceptible to diseases and injuries. We need to eat, drink, breathe, and sleep. We cannot breathe water or live in vacuum. We are limited by the speed of light and more. These are real limitations that are part of the physical structure of the world that we live in.
Using our ingenuity, we are often able to get around some of these limitations. We have devised machines to fly, to exist and function in space and underwater, to travel faster than we ourselves can move. Medical advances enable us to live longer and healthier in many ways. We can communicate across vast distances. Nature does not give us a ticket, impose a fine, or imprison us if we find ways around its limitations. We may never be able to change these things, but we are able to work around them.
Arbitrary limitations, on the other hand, are not imposed by nature but by humans upon each other. Sometimes these limitations are established for real and practical reasons, such as agreeing which side of the street to drive on. Yet man-made limitations are also often imposed for arbitrary and capricious reasons, such as laws in some places forbidding growing food in one’s yard, working on one’s own car, giving food to homeless people, restricting access and opportunity based on gender, ethnicity, or economic status, forbidding living without paying rent or mortgage, banning specified books, movies or music, specifying who is or is not allowed to marry whom, or dictating how people are to dress or eat.
For any community and the people living in it to function and thrive, there must be some agreed-upon shared realities, guidelines, principles, ground-rules and understandings. As mentioned above, to minimize traffic dangers, everybody must agree which side of the street to drive on. There need to be some protocols in place so drivers know what to expect from each other. Who goes first when two cars reach an intersection at the same time, how fast it is safe to go on what road, etc. We all enjoy a better quality of life if we agree that it is unacceptable to kill each other, attack each other, set buildings, forests or living beings on fire, bully each other, mix sewage with drinking water, and so forth.
There are, however, other classes of rules, limits and norms that not only do not enhance the quality of life for the community and the people in it, they actually create an oppressive human environment incompatible with a free or harmonious community. Communities and the people comprising them will thrive best if these classes of imposed limitations are kept to a minimum or eliminated altogether.
Some issues are inherently difficult or impossible to resolve in a clear-cut and unequivocal manner: the right to smoke vs. the right to not have to breathe smoke; one person's right to grow a garden vs. the rights of a neighbor who is allergic to plants in that garden; noise issues between one neighbor who works first shift and another neighbor who works third shift; the right of a musician to practice their craft versus the right of their neighbor to sleep at the same time. There are many such situations in which the solution depends on the individuals involved, the situation, and the personalities of involved parties. These situations have no absolute path to resolution but rather need to be worked out on a case-by-case basis.
If the participants are reasonable, then such situations can generally be worked out to mutual satisfaction. Where one or both parties are inflexible, unwilling or psychologically and emotionally unable to work out a solution, third parties may need to be engaged to seek a solution that takes all parties' needs and desires into account to the maximum possible degree.
Under Capitalist paradigms, however, there are vast arrays of completely arbitrary limitations, constraints, compulsions and restraints placed upon all but the inhabitants of the upper reaches of the economic Pyramid. These arise out of the strongly-reinforced imperatives of the paradigm: the law of artificially manipulated supply and demand, the maximization of profits, the minimization of expenses, and domination of maximum possible market share and stock prices.
Examples abound. The petroleum industry gives us some of the most severe and frequent examples of these kinds of destructive, artificially-imposed shortages and limitations in the service of profits, and of the manipulation of political processes at the expense of the quality of life of literally billions of people.
As mentioned in more detail in other places in this writing, those who control the world's oil have repeatedly held back supply to raise prices or keep them high. Some of this is done in the open: the OPEC+ alliance of oil-producing states announced a cut of 2 million barrels a day in October 2022, while prices were already high (Quantum Commodity Intelligence). But private companies have done it too, with no international crisis to explain it. In 2001 the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, investigating a Midwest gasoline price spike, found no illegal collusion, but did find firms maximizing their profits by "curtailing production, keeping available supply off the market," and one firm that deliberately limited its sales because more supply would have lowered prices (FTC, 2001). Internal Chevron and Texaco documents from the mid-1990s, made public in 2005, discussed how refiners would never see a substantial increase in their margins unless the industry reduced its refining capacity, and a Mobil memo discussed keeping a closed competitor's California refinery from reopening (Consumer Watchdog). In 2024 the FTC alleged that the former CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources, one of the largest U.S. shale producers, had exchanged hundreds of messages with OPEC and OPEC+ officials in an effort to align American output with OPEC+ cuts and keep prices up (FTC, 2024). He denied it (World Oil), and the order barring him from Exxon's board was set aside in July 2025 on the grounds that the complaint had not pleaded a violation of merger law (MyChesCo). Consumer class actions filed from 2024 onward allege that eight U.S. shale producers coordinated to restrain output and raise prices. The companies deny it, but in 2026 a federal judge ruled that the plaintiffs had plausibly alleged a conspiracy and let the case go forward (Reuters, via BOE Report).
And once prices go up, they are slow to come down. Economists call it "rockets and feathers": a classic study found that most of a rise in crude oil prices reaches the pump within about four weeks, while a fall takes about eight (Borenstein, Cameron and Gilbert, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1997). When a 2015 explosion at a refinery in Torrance sent California prices soaring, they did not come back down. An unexplained "mystery surcharge" of about 48 cents a gallon remained for the rest of that year, and close to 30 cents in the two years after, long after the refinery was back at full production; taxes, environmental rules and the cost of cleaner fuel do not account for it (Severin Borenstein, Energy Institute at Haas). In 2026, after the war in Iran, the Dutch competition authority found that the price of crude oil had returned to its pre-war level, but pump prices had not, because refinery prices stayed high (ACM). Natural disasters, wars and political tensions are reliably followed by higher prices at the pump, and by higher profits: in 2022, the year Russia invaded Ukraine, the five largest Western oil companies made close to $200 billion between them, and ExxonMobil's $59 billion was the largest profit any Western oil company had ever reported (Offshore Technology). The system rewards all of this and does nothing to discourage it.
These same petroleum corporations have also systematically suppressed, hobbled and crippled the development of other alternative energy technology industries by both subtle and brutal means. Petroleum industry lobbyists drive politicians to support continued dependence on petroleum products and technologies, using specious and groundless arguments implying that reducing consumption of petroleum products willf eliminate jobs (livelihoods), in consciously complete and deliberate denial of the fact that the development of alternative technologies will create far more jobs than would be lost. Here we see yet another instance of how manufactured and propagated perception of shortage is used to manipulate the lives of billions of people to their detriment.
These companies have known for nearly half a century about the inevitability of catastrophic climate change that continued use of petroleum fuels would create. Instead of aggressively pursuing and promoting the development of safe alternatives, they spent vast sums of money and went to great lengths to suppress this information in order to maximize profits for as long as possible (Hall, Scientific American, 2015). Once again we see the role that a pattern resembling addiction plays in the behavior of Capitalist entities. A person caught in an addiction will keep pursuing it even when it threatens their own survival.
Yet the petroleum industry is but one very salient example among frighteningly many. It is common practice under Capitalism for businesses to create shortage in order to be able to raise prices.
Pharmaceuticals are another striking example, and here profit logic fails patients both ways. Brand-name drugs are routinely priced beyond the reach of many who need them, some of whom can afford them only by selling their homes, cars, and all other resources. Meanwhile cheap generic drugs go into shortage because making them earns too little: most medicines in shortage in 2023 cost less than $5 (STAT, reporting U.S. Pharmacopeia data, 2024).
In other industries, it is not unheard of for perfectly good food to be destroyed in order to drive prices up (Bolotova, Connor and Miller, International Journal of Industrial Organization, 2008; Lustrin, Pallett-Vasquez and Drescher, "Price Fixing in the Food Industry", National Law Review, 2018), medicines and vaccines to be withheld during disasters or epidemics, vacant houses and apartments to be left vacant when thousands of people are homeless. These and many more examples are perpetrated just to further, sustain and safeguard the obsessive imperatives of Capitalism.
Diamonds, while hardly a necessity, are highly sought after largely because of very effective propaganda over generations (Friedman, The Atlantic, 2015; Goldschein, Business Insider, 2011). In most cultures they have acquired the social perception of being symbols of one's position on the economic Pyramid. They are also almost universally regarded as the ultimate symbol of love between lovers or spouses, with the implication that if you really love your mate you will give them diamonds.
Diamonds are almost entirely controlled by one ultra-wealthy family in South Africa, who have systematically maintained them in much shorter supply than they are in reality. The entire global obsession with diamonds as symbols of love and romance was 100% created by an aggressive advertising (propaganda) campaign.
When the worldwide air travel industry adapted to post 9-11 international dynamics, it became forbidden to bring water through airport security checkpoints. The universal result of this is that prices of bottled water inside the secure areas higher than any other place, because vendors can get away with it. But make no mistake about it: these limitations, shortages and constraints are 100% artificial, arbitrary, and harmful to the quality of life for all but the modern Feudal Lords at the top of the Pyramid.
It is true that the world's supply of physical resources is limited in many ways. There is not an unlimited amount of petroleum under the ground. In a given location there is a finite amount of energy that can be derived from wind, solar, geothermal and other means. In a given year, a certain number of potatoes are grown in a given country. There are only a finite number of inhabitable square miles in a given geographical area. A river has a finite volume of water moving through it.
But these real limitations rarely if ever match the artificial shortages and limitations imposed under Capitalism. How can resources be managed in the most efficient way for the good of all human beings, when almost all resources are controlled by economic entities whose behaviors are shaped not by efficiency, nor by the greatest good, but by the ever-present reinforcers of the Capitalist paradigm: profit, control, dominance, market share and stock prices? As long as these reinforcers are present and operating, they cannot and will not be run with any significant consideration of the good of any but those at the top of the economic pyramid.
In post-Transition paradigms, these practices will cease. Resources will be managed based on actual physical and practical considerations of quantities, capacities, capabilities and needs. Avoidable waste will be designed out; what remains will be only what entropy and other practical physical factors make unavoidable.
Resources will no longer be unnecessarily depleted or overexploited by any constant ongoing runaway self-devouring cycle characteristic of Capitalist paradigms. For this reason as well, most resources will be more abundantly available to everybody. When actual shortages or inefficiencies do occur, they will be resolved among peers in the best way possible, which will be able to be facilitated in the absence of any institutionalized hierarchy that could impose an arbitrary allocation based on the rank or privilege of some over others.
The post-Transition human community will not be free of all limitations or conflicts, but those that do occur will not be arbitrary nor unjust. Their handling will generally proceed in ways leading to greater good for individuals and communities. The process will engender a deepening and fine-tuning of our skills and understanding of how to unite in our diversity for our individual and mutual good.
Under Capitalist paradigms, our position in the economic pyramid plays the most major part in determining, defining and limiting which of our dreams and aspirations we can realistically expect to attain. Ability, determination, hard work and discipline are of course important factors; but in all too many cases these qualities are not enough to offset the disadvantages of being in the lower reaches of the pyramid. And all too often the lack of those qualities is no deterrent to those at the top of the pyramid.
Capitalist apologists believe and claim that these factors (ability, work ethic, discipline, etc.) are the deciding ones. They like to point out rags-to-riches success stories as a way to back up their claim. Typically their analysis concludes that those who do not “succeed,” do not do so because of lacks or deficiencies such as laziness, lack of initiative or intelligence, or expecting a "free ride.” These arguments are specious, circular, and do not hold up to close examination.
As discussed elsewhere in this writing, typical "rags-to-riches" stories are anecdotal. Under Capitalist paradigms they are by far the exception rather than the rule, as are similar stories about individuals who win big in casinos or the lottery. For every such success story, there are hundreds of thousands or millions of individuals possessing the same traits and behaviors in the same degree as those who "make it," but who never succeed in ascending the economic pyramid.
As you consider this, keep in mind that the Capitalist paradigm is structured as a pyramid and cannot function otherwise. There is not room for many people on the upper reaches of the pyramid.
Furthermore, we must consider the difference between an entrepreneurial person from the upper reaches of the pyramid seeking to start a business compared to a similarly inclined person from the lower reaches of the pyramid. The wealthy person has the money (capital) to either fund the undertaking on their own or to get a loan with no difficulty. The person from lower reaches of the pyramid, on the other hand, lacks the financial resources to fund their idea on their own and is unlikely to be able to get a loan or backers. If they do, it will be smaller and the terms debilitatingly harsh, lacking any safety net.
This effectively suppresses initiative for those at the bottom of the pyramid, regardless of the merits of their project or how hardworking and industrious they may be. There are just enough individual exceptions to maintain the illusion of opportunity that keep millions playing the game.
Those at the top of the pyramid are limited only by their ability, discipline and drive when they seek higher education, while those at the lower portions of the pyramid face severe, often insurmountable, limitations imposed by the cost of higher education and their own lack of resources with extremely limited financial aid available.
Consider also the difference between a child of the privileged aristocracy who needs only concern him or herself with their studies, who has strong confidence because of having grown up privileged and free of any financial stress, knowing that even if their chosen major does not lead to employment, they will not be on the street. Contrast this to someone who in addition to their studies must also work part or full time, worry about survival the whole time, knowing that they are incurring crushing loans if they do get financial aid, and do so with the doubts and insecurities that come from a lifetime of living on the margin of existence in a society that constantly forces them to pay to ransom their right to live.
Limitations on medical care are constantly applied to those not at or near the top of the economic pyramid in communities and countries living under Capitalist paradigms. In a system where money is a systematically scarcified but enforced requirement for everything, financial limitations are perceived to be as real as actual technological or physical limitations, and are treated accordingly. Injured and sick people are routinely denied the care they need because they either lack the financial resources to pay the arbitrarily exorbitant price of the medicines and procedures, or because accountants and “adjusters” (not medical professionals) of their insurance decide that the correct care is too expensive.
People die, receive inferior or no care, are sent home untreated, lose limbs that could have been saved, are kept in pain rather than healed, are misled and lied to, and are denied care because of utterly artificial and arbitrary financial limitations. The gap shows up in how long people live. The richest 1 percent of American men live 14.6 years longer than the poorest 1 percent, and the richest women 10.1 years longer (Chetty et al., JAMA 2016). And the gap is widening. For American men, the difference in remaining life expectancy at age 50 between the top and bottom fifth of earners grew from 5.1 years for those born in 1930 to a projected 12.7 years for those born in 1960; for women, from 3.9 years to 13.6 (National Academies, 2015). Older adults in the bottom fifth of wealth die about nine years earlier than those in the top fifth (National Council on Aging, 2025). Deaths before age 65 rose by more than a quarter between 2012 and 2022, so a growing number of people pay into Medicare all their working lives and never live to use it (Papanicolas et al., JAMA Health Forum 2025). Lack of insurance plays a direct part: differences in coverage may account for 5 to 20 percent of the gap in deaths between low- and high-income Americans, and the Medicaid expansions of 2010–2022 saved some 27,400 lives (Wyse and Meyer, University of Chicago, 2025). A 2025 review of the research concludes that the evidence “now unequivocally supports the conclusion that health insurance improves health” (Levy and Buchmueller, Annual Review of Public Health 2025). That is not a sign that insurance is our friend. It shows how tightly survival is bound to money, because how much coverage a person has, and how good it is, depends largely on what they can afford. Insurance is a parasitic industry that exists only because medical care has been priced out of reach for most people, and it is the insurer, not the doctor, who decides what kind of treatment you get and how much of it; if you cannot pay for what they will not cover, you do not get it. Meanwhile workers pay more for less, decade after decade. The average worker’s share of a family premium rose from $3,515 in 2009 to $6,015 in 2019 (KFF, 2019) and $6,850 in 2025 (KFF, 2025), while the average deductible, which must be paid before most coverage even begins, rose 162 percent from 2009 to 2019 alone and has risen another 43 percent over the last ten years (KFF, 2019; KFF, 2025). Uninsured patients with gunshot or stab wounds to the leg have nearly twice the odds of dying in hospital as privately insured patients (Gnaedinger et al., Journal of Surgical Research 2025). Meanwhile more than a quarter of American adults skip or postpone needed care because of the cost, and one in seven cuts back on food, clothing or other basics to pay for it (KFF, 2026). As discussed elsewhere in this writing, under Capitalist paradigms, profit and stock prices are the highest priority (above the well-being of individuals, communities and the environment). The greater the need for anything, the more scarce it is deliberately kept and the higher the cost is driven.
Consider what happens to a foot. Diabetes lies behind most amputations: 71 percent of Medicare patients who lost a limb in 2016 had it (GAO, 2024). A billionaire with diabetes will have every sore on their feet examined and treated early, and the foot will almost always be saved. A sub or barely living wage-earner often cannot get or afford that steady care, so a small sore becomes an infection, then gangrene, and the foot or leg must come off. Researchers describe most of these amputations as avoidable with early diagnosis and wound care, yet in California, people with diabetes in the poorest neighbourhoods were up to ten times more likely to lose a leg or foot than those in the wealthiest (UCLA, Health Affairs 2014). When states expanded Medicaid early, amputations among uninsured adults with diabetic foot ulcers fell by a third, while in states that did not expand they did not fall (Tan et al., JAMA Network Open 2022). And once a limb is lost, the inequality continues. Those who can pay get a microprocessor knee that adjusts to stairs and slopes, or a hand that responds to the muscles of the arm, devices costing $46,000 to $50,000 or more. Everyone else faces insurers that cap prosthetic coverage, restrict which devices they approve, and deny advanced limbs as “not medically necessary” (KFF Health News, 2025). Only 30 percent of Medicare patients who lost a limb in 2016 received a prosthesis by the end of 2019, and 61 percent were dead within four years (GAO, 2024).
I learned this from the inside. When my wife was fighting cancer, we were living in Taiwan, where our national health insurance does not pay for treatment abroad, so we faced the prices any uninsured patient faces. We searched for a clinical trial in the United States that might offer her a chance that standard treatment could not, and contacted some of the most respected cancer centers in the country. In several cases we uploaded her medical records and CT scans and completed their forms, and only well into the process did the costs appear. One center wanted $30,000 for a single remote consultation to tell us whether it had a suitable study. Another required at least ten pathology slides, at $5,000 each to examine. Another quoted $10,000 to $12,000 for each day in its hospital. Another explained that the trial would pay for the experimental drug, but not for treating its side effects or for any other costs, and another said its trial patients’ expenses typically ran from $150,000 to $1 million.
There were no exceptions and no compassionate appeals. When I said that this meant my wife would go without care, and might die, because we did not have the money, the staff defended the policy. No one I spoke with treated it as a moral question; within the system, it was simply how things are done. The only suggestion offered was international health insurance at $1,500 to $2,500 a month, out of reach on our fixed income, and with no guarantee that it would have covered much of anything. Clinical studies in the People’s Republic of China presented the same wall. People who look for a clinical trial have usually exhausted standard treatment, and they accept real risks, including harm, death, or a placebo that does nothing, for a chance at help. A system that prices that chance beyond most people’s reach leaves those who might have been helped to suffer and die because they cannot pay.
The barrier is not only for patients abroad. In the United States, the trial’s sponsor generally pays for the experimental treatment and research tests, while the patient or their insurer pays for routine care, extra visits and treatment of side effects, and the patient pays for travel, lodging and meals (OncoLink, Penn Medicine). Patients paying their own way must first put down a deposit before they are even evaluated (MD Anderson, international patients). In a study of patients in early-phase cancer trials, nearly half were paying $1,000 or more a month out of pocket, half had travelled more than 300 miles, and fewer than a third had any of their travel costs reimbursed (Huey et al., The Oncologist 2021). Only 12 percent of cancer patients with household incomes below $50,000 took part in trials, against 17 percent of those with higher incomes (Unger et al., JAMA Oncology 2016). The treatments of tomorrow are tested mostly on those who can afford to be tested, and the poorest are shut out even of the gamble.
Within the United States, the law has improved: since 2014, most private insurance plans must cover the routine care of patients in trials for cancer and other life-threatening diseases, though not the experimental treatment itself. Yet in a survey of cancer centers, nearly two-thirds reported insurers denying those costs anyway, and centers that needed the insurer’s prior approval saw three times as many denials (OncLive, 2015). Patients are told they can appeal. But a patient sick enough to be searching for a clinical trial is in no condition to fight an insurer, and the family caring for them is usually already stretched past its limits in money and time. An appeal can take many hours on the phone and knowledge that almost no one outside the hospital and insurance systems has, from staff with little inclination to explain it; appeals are thrown out for a missed deadline, or because the insurer does not accept the proof supplied. In effect, such denials are opportunistic: they rely on the fact that most people in that situation cannot realistically fight them. And they are rarely fought. In the federal insurance marketplace in 2021, consumers appealed less than two-tenths of 1 percent of denied in-network claims, and insurers upheld 59 percent of the denials that were appealed (KFF, 2023). Most patients never reach the door at all: for more than half of cancer patients no trial is available, and only about 8 percent ever enroll (Unger et al., JNCI 2019). And what it costs a patient to be evaluated is kept out of view. Leading centers set their deposits privately, case by case, and the American Society of Clinical Oncology has itself named the lack of transparency about these costs as a barrier to treatment (Winkfield et al., Journal of Clinical Oncology 2018).
In the new Paradigm, these artificial limitations will disappear. Every patient will receive the best medical care possible. All medicines and equipment will be kept in sufficient supply to ensure that no patient waits unduly for treatment.
The same principle that will end the compulsive enforced self-devouring cycle endemic under Capitalism, will also end the artificial shortages that plague medical, dental, and other high-demand areas with artificially forced underproduction and enforced scarcity, which are motivated by the maximizing of profit and stock prices as strongly reinforced under Capitalist paradigms.
With these behaviors no longer reinforced in any way whatsoever, the production and distribution of goods and services in every area will be adjusted to meet real needs. In the fields of medicine, dentistry and other related fields, reinforced ethics and behaviors will orient strongly towards both preventative care and the provision of every patient with the best care humanly and technologically possible. This pattern will become the default in every aspect of life.
If situations occur in which there are actual physical real-world shortages or limitations in spite of medical and research professionals' best efforts, then medical triage will determine how the situation is handled in the best way possible, rather than relative wealth, monetary considerations, or socio-economic factors. Medical professionals will make such determinations, not accountants, adjusters, politicians, lobbyists, CEO's or stockholders. The prime motive will be the health and well-being of human beings. Healthcare professionals will at last be free to honor their Hippocratic oath to “do no harm.”
Under Capitalist paradigms, economic pressures often impose implicit limitations on getting married and starting a family. Aspiring families are frequently forced to delay marriage or domestic cohabitation, and especially childbearing, under all Capitalist paradigms. Couples cannot afford to get married or have children until their finances allow them to afford to pay all of the associated expenses. People's lives are effectively put on hold because of these considerations.
Just as painfully, governments under Capitalism tend to charge exorbitant fees for immigration and naturalization as a way of discouraging less affluent people from immigrating while allowing primarily those more well off to enter. When couples marry across national boundaries, this can cause extended periods of separation of families, purely due to lack of sufficient funds to pay the high fees forced upon them in order to be together.
In the new paradigms, where money or currency of any kind are obsolete and all sectors of the Community function with human well-being and happiness in mind, such barriers will be absent. Families will no longer be separated due to economic pressures and exigencies. Money that does not exist cannot become a barrier.
Under Capitalism, access to almost everything is gated by money by default: a place to live, food, transportation, medical care, water, communications, even birth and death. Public schooling, emergency care and food aid soften the gate at its lowest point, but beyond that bare provision people must constantly come up with arbitrary amounts of money determined by the Capitalist Feudal Lords in order to access everything from the most basic survival needs, to the fulfillment of dreams, to making their maximum contribution to the Community. If they are unsuccessful, then by default these things and all else are denied.
Capitalism is a paradigm predicated upon and predisposed to the creation of barriers and the imposition of limitations arbitrarily for the sake of the profits and whims of those at the top of the Pyramid. In the new paradigm, by default all persons will have access to everything, unless there is a real and currently unsolvable reason to the contrary. In that case, the guiding principles will be to seek solutions and make the maximum resources as attainable as possible to the most, preferably all, people. Under capitalism, one succeeds at the expense of others. One person's loss is another person's gain. In the new paradigm, one's success will enhance the success of others. One person's gain will be the gain of all, and one person's loss will be the loss of all.