Self-Financing Heresthetics: Endogenous Political Resources and Structural Lock-In

This paper studies heresthetic installation when the instruments must be paid for out of accounts that the installed outcomes themselves replenish. For a finite separable heresthetic game with outcome-dependent resource receipts, pure-policy coalitional security is characterized exactly by a maximum-prefix capital price: an installation program is secure if and only if every hostile coalition's initial account is strictly below the least working capital required by any spoiling response. This price differs from total expenditure because actions must be financed before their associated receipts arrive. In a regenerative response system, permanent coalitional lock-in has a closed form: at the blocking boundary the installer must finance one maintenance bundle and the installed outcome must regenerate at least the bundle's price. An exact two-player Markov benchmark separates technological lock-in from equilibrium deterrence through a financing ceiling, a continuation-value ceiling, and the cheapest equilibrium-effective re-entry price. Equality at an affordability cutoff permits attack, while equality at an incentive cutoff separates possible from universal persistence. A hysteretic basin-crossing option capitalizes an infinite maintenance flow into a one-time price and can sustain lock-in even when recurrent maintenance cannot be financed. Numeric counterexamples show that local prices cease to characterize security without Cartesian compatibility and that the same dynamic prices do not characterize ordinary equilibrium. The general finite-state problem remains a multidimensional controlled-kernel fixed point once actors can save, invest, transfer, confiscate, and manufacture one another's future resources.