Times are frustrating for those of us in the political centre. The political arena is drowning in a sea of rhetoric being spewed from right and left, little of which can be trusted to represent the true opinions and beliefs of the those doing the spouting. The rate at which new crises appear—both real and imagined—is accelerating. And with each new crisis, the less attention seems available to consider the underlying problems. Not that those problems were getting much attention, anyway.

Granted, the problems haven’t changed for millennia; perhaps they are too straightforward to bother with. I say “problems”, but they all boil down to one general challenge: how to manage wealth. Wealth is like energy: it’s neither created, nor destroyed, but simply re-organized. It’s useful (to human beings) in some forms, and not in others. The analogy is disingenuous in at least one way. As I like to keep reminding people, wealth isn’t simply like energy; it is energy. Or in the case of most material goods, it is the product of processes which rely on and transform energy.

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