People fantasize too much about capitalism. The definition of capitalism is: capital and income are expressed under the same monetary unit (like mass and energy could be):<p>income = capital x interest rate<p>The former alternatives was to put capital in a separate &quot;namespace&quot;. In Middle Ages, only nobles could have land and land was the only capital that could exist (&quot;usury&quot; was forbidden, you know). Then came mercantilism, that defined wealth as a quantity of gold that one had; and so on.<p>Capitalism will certainly pass, but hopefully not going back to restricting access to capital. I imagined something like a &quot;complex&quot; interest rate, with the imaginary part representing natural resources, while the real part is the human effort that is the only think currently measured by monetary unit. But bimetalism failed everywhere it has been adopted, I think that the imaginary part of a price would become dominant since natural resources are becoming the limit of economic output.