Fred,

I think a useful analogy to educate people to this relationship, is blood and blood pressure, in the body. It has to be carefully regulated, as well as circulate through the extremities and not build up in the primary organs.

As government, the executive and regulatory function, is analogous to the central nervous system.

Though we don't want the entire world to assume it has to be one organism, or it will just go through the life cycle of a single organism. More of a fairly stable ecosystem, where the various organisms do rise and fall, compete, cooperate and negotiate. We are not going to beat mother nature, so we might as well join her.

Another conceptual aspect of this goes to what I see as the dichotomy of energy and the forms manifested.

Energy is conserved, because it is the present. Its changing configuration creates the effect of time, as change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

So the energy goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. As consciousness goes past to future, while thoughts and emotions go future to past.

The energy drives the wave, while the undulations and fluctuations, the frequencies and amplitudes, rise and fall.

We have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing and distributing the energy, while the central nervous system sorts through the information, seeking signals in the noise.

What this has to do with economics is that money does function as a representation of energy. So that in our math driven, abstracted interpretation of reality, we easily mistake the representation for what it represents. Consequntly we think that if we simply print up the money, it is the energy, as well as the evolved cultural structure, but it quickly becomes just so much noise, without much focus.

So if we want to really get this relationship in perspective, there are a fair number of conceptual issues to be ironed out.

Though using the analogies we have at hand is still the best way to start.