Chances are that unless you’re a total financial wonk, you’ve never heard the term “seigniorage.” But you should, because doing the right thing with it could help solve several major, interrelated problems.

Call it Factory Planet: a world in which natural processes are treated as parts of a vast world-machine operated to produce a maximum amount of wealth for humans.

If my friend Ike lived in Britain they’d call him a “one-off.”  An avowed anarchist who thinks that things started going downhill when humans invented agriculture (and thus the need for government), he thinks of Marx as a conservative–“just…