Perpetual Motion Machines

What a wonderful machine it would be – once you input energy, the machine runs forever. Think of a generator that, once started, generates additional energy forever. Think of a motorcycle engine – once you kickstart it, it runs forever.

It’s called a perpetual motion machine, and everyone knows it doesn’t exist. If nothing else, there always will be friction in any machine, and that represents a loss of energy that has to be replaced. No perpetual motion, in other words. In fact, the only thing you need to know about perpetual motion machines (other than the fact that they don’t exist) is that you can repudiate any engineering model or theory of physics that legitimates perpetual motion machines. The moment you see, hear or even smell “perpetual motion machine,” you are dealing with a fraud, pure and simple.

An economist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis once taught me what was wrong with lots of economic models, such as extreme versions of Keynesian economics that suggest you can create wealth and full employment by simply creating jobs, whatever the job may be. They’re “perfection models,” he told me, systems that allegedly produce wealth (unlimited, or just enough, I don’t remember) indefinitely. You just need to plant the seed money, or start the enterprise somehow, then the economy takes care of itself. Wow – that’s a lot better than capitalism.

But perfection models don’t work, he explained. If they did, you could pay half the population to dig ditches, and the other half to fill them in. That is full employment, friends. But it’s no way to create wealth. It also shows an utter lack of understanding as to what “value” really means in any economic system – value goes beyond mere “labor” or mere “capital,” though this lack of understanding of value is more a characteristic of Marx than Keynes.

The economist said the way to expose any economic system or model as a fraud is simply to identify it as a perfection model. If someone is espousing a perfection model, it’s a fraud. It’s just like exposing a perpetual motion machine. If someone is selling something that good, it’s a fraud, because things that good don’t exist.

Think of this in the context of competing universalisms. I don’t think heaven exists, and I don’t think Paradise exists. I don’t think utopia exists. I don't think you can live forever, without additional inputs. Life, like a machine, once started, that can go on forever? It may be a moral value, but it has nothing to do with reality. Ditto for any utopian models - a society, once established, that can continue forever? They're perpetual motion machines. These models all are literally too good to be true. I think Christianity, Islam and Marxism are promising more than they can deliver, no matter how valid parts of their critiques of others may be, and irrespective of how valid other aspects of these belief systems may be. Liberalism, curiously, doesn’t promise as much as the other competing universalisms. It just promises a chance; with fair rules, there may even be equal opportunity. But you may lose and, of course, you will die one day.

Abraham Aamidor is the author of “Real Feature Writing” (Erlbaum, 1999) and Editor, “Real Sports Reporting” (Indiana University Press, 2003), both college-level journalism texts. He has taught journalism at Indiana University-Bloomington, Butler University, Georgia Southern University and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. He works in daily journalism in Indianapolis.