How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Line)
Quote #4
"Hell, Sax and a lot of others used to talk about doing anything possible to terraform as quick as possible—driving a bunch of asteroids into the planet, using hydrogen bombs to try and start volcanoes—whatever it took! Now all those plans have been scrapped because of you and your supporters. The whole vision of how to terraform and how far to go with it has changed." (5.2.143)
Rules certainly have their advantages in society. They keep us from doing such awful acts as stealing from each other or dropping asteroids into our planets. And we like our planet as giant-asteroid-free as possible. Fancy, we know.
Quote #5
"Anyway, that's a large part of what economics is—people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful." (5.7.8)
We act like the rules of economy are solid, but they're really as solid as vapor. Good luck convincing your bank of this the next time you overdraft your account, though.
Quote #6
"[…] because that's what the replacement set of rules is, the old parasitic greed of the kings and their henchmen, this system we call the transnational world order is just feudalism all over again, a set of rules that is anti-ecologic, it does not give back but rather enriches a floating international elite while impoverishing everything else […]." (5.10.105)
Elsewhere in this section, we suggest that wealth is a source of the transnats' power. But perhaps their ability to create the rules for their personal gain has just as much to do with it.