A market will monetize anything it can place within its purview into capital, properly or improperly, while simply pursuing profit and in so doing producing either negentropy or entropy haphazardly. It must be bounded from this mindlessness by civilized intellectual culture and sophisticated wisdom in order to be reasonable and profitable in negentropy as judged by Multiple Capital Accounting. That is the essential balancing act of any civilization, defining the limits of an appropriate economics while maintaining fiscal responsibility. Intellectual culture and wisdom are not capital, unlike natural, human, social, and produced capital, which includes intellectual property, the rare case where the products of culture are themselves monetized. They are not economic entities, but they nonetheless, straddling the boundary, yield important economic products. They are what legitimately bound the process of capital formation. The resulting sustainable negentropy of a functioning economy is as incidental to the business of being a civilized human as pollination is to the business of being bees. That business of human civilization is the generation and proper employment of surplus food. Philosophy, not economics, is the highest virtue in Plato’s view. Philosophy sets the bounds, and Multiple Capital Accounting states them in the economist's own terms.
Do Well and Be Well.
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