A Humane Future
a Medium ‘pamphlet’ (composed of three extant articles)
This ‘pamphlet’ is a compilation of three essays previously published here in Medium by this author. It was constructed by copying-and-pasting those essays in whole, including titles/subtitles (with a bit of very minor editing, in tying them together). They are: (1) “Towards the Star Trek Economy,” (2) “My Final Answer,” and (3) “A New Liberalism.” In the first one I use Star Trek to relate a familiar picture of a (very distant) humane future, focusing on the economy and a possible first step towards such a future, one that could be taken immediately. In the second essay I present the details of that economic proposal. In the third one I present a whole new approach to justice, as being an advance in justice from ‘old’ Liberalism.
Towards the “Star Trek” Economy
Seriously.
[Medium has it as a “6 min read” (at a max. of 250 words/min.).]
From Google (“what kind of economy does Earth have in the Star Trek franchise”):
AI Overview
In the Star Trek universe, Earth operates on a post-scarcity, moneyless economy, where basic needs are met through advanced technology and a focus on self-improvement and the betterment of humanity, rather than material wealth.
Here’s a more detailed explanation:
- Post-Scarcity:
- Earth has achieved a state where basic necessities like food, shelter, and clothing are readily available to all through advanced technology like replicators, effectively eliminating poverty and hunger.
- Moneyless Society:
- Money and the concept of wealth accumulation are obsolete, as the focus is on personal growth and the collective good.
- Federation Credits:
- While the Federation itself doesn’t use money, it does utilize a system of credits for trade and commerce with non-Federation entities.
- Socialist leanings:
- Some commentators on YouTube suggest that the Earth’s economy leans towards a socialist model, with a strong emphasis on collective ownership and resource distribution.
- Examples in the series
- In “Star Trek: First Contact”, Picard explains to Lily Sloane that “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of Humanity.”
- Examples in the series
- In “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”, Jake Sisko explains to Nog that “I’m Human, I don’t have any money”
The reference to “socialist leanings” is, I think, misleading, at the least. It would be more accurate to say that the economy of Earth in Star Trek is ‘post-ideological’. There is an economy — goods/services are produced/acquired — but its structure and functioning are not determined by any belief-based notion of what an economy ‘should be’. Rather, as technology developed the role of people in producing goods and services approached zero. An economy that does not employ people in producing goods and services has transcended any possibility of ‘exploiting people’ — thus ‘what is to be done’ to eliminate it.
In Star Trek the ‘means of production’ are a fact of material existence that are outside any concept of ‘ownership’. They are set on ‘autopilot’ to respond to demand. The entire retail economy (including food) works on the same principle as ‘publish-on-demand’ does with books: an order comes in and the desired item is selected or produced, packaged, and shipped. The ‘back end’ of the economy — producing what is needed to sustain retail production — is governed by what is happening in the retail economy (with ‘natural resources’ coming from uninhabited planets, asteroids, etc.). Since there is no part of the production of goods/services that is any longer a source of income/wealth for individuals, there is no ‘drive’ to produce in any part of the economy independently — ‘ahead of’ — what is desired: in economic terms, ‘demand’.
In short, Earth has gone from a supply-driven economy to a pure ‘demand economy’. In the economy we now have demand must be constantly ‘stimulated’ (using marketing as well as public and private debt) to try to ensure the ‘consumption’ of total output, which is always being maximized for multifarious reasons — though including the ‘good’ goal of maximizing employment. In the Star Trek economy supply is nothing but a response to demand.
That brings us to the other part of the economy: acquisition. Google’s AI overview stresses that in Star Trek the economy of Earth functions with no money. It isn’t that hard to imagine how production can proceed without money: it’s simply that there are no people involved in production. No one must be compensated for one’s time and effort (or incentivized for effort). How a process of acquisition could proceed without money is not as easy to fathom.
Apparently, people just order what they need. I suppose that’s where the part about “as the focus is on personal growth and the collective good” comes in. People have moved their focus away from material wants. They only order what they need because they have no interest in material things beyond what they need to sustain themselves materially while they pursue their loftier attainments.
Here’s the thing: there is an actual proposal ‘out there’ that would set us on a course towards the Star Trek economy. To be clear, this proposal could be adopted tomorrow by any nation on the planet — without having to change the institutional structure of its economy (or its system of government, for that matter).
To be sure, this would not be, immediately, in any way close to that ultra-advanced economy. There would still be money, and people employed in the production of goods and services, and (to get a tad ahead of ourselves) taxes — initially. Still, it would be a start.
While this proposal does not get rid of money, it does fundamentally alter the approach to money. At the same time — and more importantly, really — it changes the relationship between income and employment. In it money would be created as needed to fund a guaranteed minimum income — one that would be sufficient for a materially comfortable life.
[Money can be created as needed at present, but all creation of money always involves debt — usually newly created debt. That money in this paradigm would not involve debt in any way.]
People who were not of retirement age and who were able to work would have to have a job to be paid that income, but a job of some kind would be assured for every (adult) citizen. That income could, however, become the pay for every employee of any business or government — to include CEO’s and heads of state. At that point there would be a divide between the revenue of a business or government and the income of any employee, which would be a first step towards divorcing income from employment. At first we could retain varying benefits for different positions in the economy (for purposes of traditional material incentives), but eventually (as people evolved?) those might be eliminated. In the absence of benefits the amount of the income could be significantly increased. At that point an impermeable barrier would exist between the revenue of a business or government and any compensation of any employee — a step towards decoupling not just income from employment, but material well-being holistically. Moreover, from the start it would be as easy as not to pay that income to households — perhaps, as a start, paying it to one parent (or legal guardian) in a household with at least one (legally recognized) dependent living there (the same income, regardless of the number of dependents), as pay for that job. Star Trek aside, if we are on the verge of a robotics/AI revolution in production, an income that can be paid to households rather than employees will become an important component of the economy. [To prevent inflation, in this proposal that guaranteed income would have to start at something close to the current minimum income and be increased gradually.]
In Star Trek there are no nation-states but there is still government. With no money, though, there are no taxes. (Apparently the only people ‘employed’ in government are unpaid people deciding which choices for the community to effect, leaving the details to AI.) In this proposal taxes would be reduced to zero. That’s because money would also be created as needed to fund government — all government, from local to national — forevermore at the current per capita rate of total government spending. [Taxes would have to be reduced gradually in order to prevent inflation, since doing away with taxes would increase the money people had to spend — hugely, in total.]
Those two streams of money, one funding demand in the private sector and the other funding demand in the public sector, would effectively govern total output (though passively). That would already be a ‘demand economy’ of a kind.
Even better, the total of each stream of money would be determined by demographics, meaning demographics would govern total output. That would increase sustainability systemically.
As noted, this paradigm could be implemented in our present reality by any nation. It could also be implemented by a group of nations sharing a currency (with no nation’s sovereignty being compromised in any way). Eventually, it could become a single currency shared by every nation on the planet. Over time, along with the whole nation-state apparatus, money could also just (to borrow a phrase from the most famous socialist) “wither away.”
To borrow some more famous words, for any nation to make the “small step” of implementing this proposal would be a “giant leap” for humankind; it would lead the way for us “to boldly go where no” economy “has gone before” — an economy so wonderful that human beings living at the end of this Age can scarcely imagine such a thing.
My Final Answer
(I promise) to, ‘What should we do about the economy’?
[Medium has it as a “20 min read.”]
Introduction (6 paragraphs)
[For any reader who hasn’t read my profile blurb, I did earn an M.A. in economics along the way, with a (published) Thesis in political economy (where philosophy and economics intersect): Atlanta (now Clark Atlanta) University, 1988.]
I began the quest for my own answer to that question by wondering how it might be possible to make the existing economy more just. I hit upon the idea of a (‘livable’) “democratically distributed income” (DDI), i.e., one for which any adult citizen could become eligible (that a person could actually live on). Further, I wanted to see if I could find a way to accomplish that without involving taxes/public debt in any way — for reasons of political feasibility and Occam-esque simplicity. Such simplicity included the matter of justice: if, as John Locke famously said (and with which I do agree), arbitrariness in human relations is injustice, then any kind of taxation is necessarily rife with injustice because it cannot avoid arbitrariness in distributing the tax burden within society. Beyond that, I’ll leave the issue of justice for the third essay.
The paradigm I ended up developing included astonishing outcomes that I could have never predicted: absolutely, positively no unemployment or poverty for any adult citizen and the possibility of no taxes, together with increased environmental sustainability. Also, the economy would become self-regulating, meaning neither the central bank nor the central government (nor ‘politics-as-usual’) could interfere with those outcomes. It could be adopted by any nation without having to change any of its existing economic system — or its political system, for that matter. (I do use the U.S., where I have always lived, as an example for illustrative purposes).
To be clear, all of those outcomes (except for the elimination of poverty, which a DDI was intended to do) are purely ‘accidental’: wholly unanticipated. Those outcomes are not what make the economy more just; the establishment of a DDI does that, making those outcomes products of a more just economy.
In the previous essay I suggested that the Star Trek economy is “‘post-ideological’.” It must be said that trying to pigeonhole this paradigm ideologically would be a waste of time that could only hamper ‘getting it’. For instance, as things stand, it is undeniably the case that to prevent the collapse of the global economy — and therefore civilization itself — there really is a ‘need’ for constant, unending economic growth, an imperative to produce and consume ever more stuff. More technically, as things stand in each nation output/total income must be maximized in order to maximize employment and the collection of taxes (at whatever rates exist). It has now become obvious to many people, however, that for civilization to survive humanity must find a way to transcend that ‘imperative’. The paradigm I developed to make the economy more just would also, it so happens, put an end to that ultimately self-defeating societal “imperative:” neither employment nor the funding of government would be dependent in any way on output/total income. Even better, it would accomplish that while producing only positive effects: it would involve no trade-offs or burdens to be apportioned within society.
On the subject of leaving ideology out of it, one part of the paradigm that is off-putting for many people is that the absence of “trade-offs” and “burdens” would extend to even the richest people and the largest corporations: there would be no redistribution of anything nor any cost imposed on any employer. Yet, there would be no unemployment or poverty for any (adult) citizen at any level of total output and the level of total output would be governed, passively but effectively, by demographics — and only that.
So if we could all set aside our ideological lenses and focus on what is accomplished by the paradigm, that would be great. What follows is a comprehensive sketch of the paradigm.
Similar to MMT (2 paragraphs)
Though I developed this paradigm before I had ever heard of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), this is somewhat similar to that — in MMT’s normative aspect, i.e., its potential as an instrument of public policy. In both paradigms money is created as needed and there is a mechanism for withdrawing money from the economy. Unlike MMT, though, in this paradigm the uses for such money and the amount of it that could be created at any time are strictly limited. Also, this paradigm does not involve in any way ‘debt’ (in MMT, interest-bearing ‘assets’ created to be ‘swapped’ for money). Finally — again, unlike MMT — this paradigm does not use taxes to withdraw money from the economy. Public debt/taxation might even be permanently eliminated (see below).
In this paradigm no person, committee, or organization would have any means, much less the authority to determine how much money would be created or how much money would be withdrawn from the economy. The supply of money would be fully self-regulating (and would thereby make the economy — the process of producing/acquiring goods/services — self-regulating, with more on that below). Withdrawing money from the economy will be addressed below. The money created to fund the DDI and government would be currency. [Money created when banks issue loans, which is credit-money (credit used to make purchases of goods and services), would carry on as it does at present]. Since creating that money and withdrawing money from the economy are at the same time the most important parts of this paradigm and the ones that people seem to be the most difficult for people to ‘get their brains around’, they will be the focus of this attempt at relating the paradigm.
About the DDI (17 paragraphs)
So the DDI would form a guaranteed — bulletproof, actually — minimum income (GMI). Money (as currency) would be created as needed to fund it. The total amount of the income would simply be the amount of it multiplied by the number of people eligible for it. To avoid inflation, the income would have to start at something close to the current minimum and be increased gradually, but the point is that its final amount would definitely be enough for a materially sufficient life. Whatever its final amount, after its introduction it would be replacing existing incomes as it increased over time (more on all that below).
A democratic distribution of that income (again: any adult citizen — and any number of adult citizens — could become eligible for it) would be achieved by paying the DDI to three groups of people. Heretofore I have routinely written that everyone paid that income would be paid the same amount. It finally dawned on me recently that such a thing need not be the case: the people in the different groups would be paid the same income — whether paid monthly, weekly, or as hourly wages — but there is no reason why it must be the same income for all of those categories of people.
[I must have unconsciously been under the influence of an income being “democratically” distributed. As I have been fully aware, that only means that eligibility for it cannot be arbitrarily restricted: the existence of an income for which any (adult) citizen (and any number of adult citizens) could become eligible makes its distribution ‘democratic’. Still, that word sort of pushes us towards ‘the same for all’ if we’re not mentally alert enough. (Of course, any of the people who have read about this paradigm could have also had that thought about different incomes for different categories of people being paid the DDI and relayed it to me; one benefit of sharing this idea publicly could be other people thinking about it in ways that had not occurred to me.)]
Least shockingly, the DDI would be paid to retirees and adults unable to work. It would replace, in the U.S., Social Security, solving that whole problem. (No conceivable amount of individuals successfully claiming a fraudulent income for being ‘unable to work’ could possibly offset the benefits of this paradigm.) [The Social Security Administration (and its equivalent in any other nation) could be extracted from government to become the Administrator of the Currency — and thus be independent of both government and the banking system (though a nation’s central bank or its central government could administer the currency).]
The third group being paid the DDI would be people employed in ‘minimum pay positions’. That is to say, for people employed in such positions their pay would not come from their employers — a business or government — but would be the DDI (accruing as weekly pay or as hourly wages). [No one in any not-for-profit would be paid the DDI; all their pay(/benefits) come from contributions to those organizations.]
Whatever the amount of the income might be at any time, employers could designate any position to be a ‘minimum pay position’. However, an individual could choose to remain in/accept such a position or not based on negotiated total compensation: in a free market for labor employers would find themselves using benefits (as well as general working conditions) to compete for people to fill those positions. So for those minimum-pay positions the ‘arrow of competition’ (who’s in competition for what) — a neglected but hugely significant aspect of a market-based economy — would clearly favor the workers. It is important that benefits could only be ‘in-kind’ (e.g., insurance, education, transportation, clothing, housing — though that does get tricky — etc.). That is, the money would go directly from the employer to the provider of the good or service: not even ‘designated’ monetary allowances would be allowed (which, even if designated for particular purchases, would still be a supplemental income).
Let’s say that here in the U.S. the GMI (as I tend to refer to the DDI as pay for employees) started tomorrow at $10/hr.; $400/wk. So all employees being paid that amount or less would immediately be paid that amount. At the same time, though, employers would immediately have the amount of money that they had been paying to those employees available to finance benefits (which all people would know full well — and in the future would be publicly published, by law). An employer that had been paying an employee the current federal minimum wage ($7.25/hr.; $290/wk.) would have that amount of money available to finance benefits: $15,080/yr.; $1,256.67/mo. So with a GMI of $10/hr.; 400/wk. an employee who had been making $15,080/yr. could now have a total compensation of $35,880/yr.: $20,800 in pay plus $15,080 in benefits (plus any benefits the employee had already been receiving — if any). That suggests that the GMI could start even lower, at, say $8/hr.; $320/wk.: total compensation = (at least) $31,720/yr. To repeat, the lower the level at which the GMI started, the closer to the existing minimum pay, the better for preventing inflation.
For all that the cost to employers would be zero. So they would have no valid reason to object to the paradigm. (Businesses could be exempted from taxation immediately, since they would have to negotiate individualized benefits among their employees to a much greater extent.)
Taxation of every kind would be going down (see below) — gradually, to prevent inflation, of course, but all the way to zero (potentially). So the discretionary income of people being paid the DDI would be increasing. The DDI could be immediately exempt from income taxes.
[It must be at least noted that the DDI could be the pay for all employees of any business or government, with or without benefits, whether differentiated or not. In the absence of benefits the amount of the income could be increased. In any version of this paradigm people could still earn unlimited incomes without being employed in any business or government, such as work in a not-for-profit entity, being in sales (commissions), being in business for oneself with no employees, or earning royalties from intellectual properties (whether patents or copyrights from artistic works such as books, songs, film, etc.) — and there could also be enterprises of all kinds as partnerships with no employees.]
To ensure that there would be no unemployment or poverty, government would be an ‘employer of last resort’, offering jobs paying the DDI without benefits. That would make such jobs essentially free to government (while giving anyone employed in one that incentive to seek a job that included benefits of any kind). Still, even those make-work jobs would need to pay ‘enough’.
It could be the amount of the GMI plus some (decreasing?) percentage of it — (for example, starting out at 125% of the GMI and decreasing to 110% of it when the GMI reached a certain level). Obviously, the lower the initial GMI the higher that initial percentage would be.
Finally, people who had lost a job for some reason could receive that pay for a certain amount of time without having to work for it, to make seeking another job easier. For that matter, a person who had lost a job could continue to receive the same income that person had been being paid (again, without any benefits) for a certain amount of time.
The object is to ensure a materially sufficient life for all, especially among those who have been less well-off. Isn’t that the most important thing for society to accomplish as far as the economy — the production/acquisition of goods/services — is concerned?
Again, since retirees and adults unable to work would not be receiving benefits in addition to pay, logic suggests that they would need a bigger income. Still, it, too, would have to start lower and gradually increase. It might start in the U.S. at, say, $2,000/mo. (very slightly more than the current average Social Security payment).
Like the DDI for minimum-pay positions, the level to which the DDI for retirees and adults unable to work might rise would be a matter to be decided. Also like the minimum pay for employees, after its initial implementation this income for retirees and adults unable to work would only be replacing existing incomes — until the DDI paid to retirees and adults unable to work reached (in the U.S.) the current maximum Social Security income ($4,000/mo.). So those increases in it could not cause inflation. In the case of the employees being paid the DDI, however, with benefits also increasing discretionary income would be increasing, which could contribute to inflation. So increases in the DDI for employees would have to proceed more slowly than increases in the income paid to retirees and adults who were unable to work would have to proceed.
Again, the DDI could be adopted by any nation, though it is obviously most compatible, as presented above, with the most fully developed national economies, given its emphasis on employment and its reliance on benefits as compensation. Other nations (or any nation) could eliminate poverty by paying the income to households rather than employees, however that might be accomplished. For instance, it could be paid to one parent (or legal guardian) of a household with at least one (legally recognized) dependent living there — the same income, regardless of the number of dependents). It could also be paid to a household (with or without at least one dependent living there) as an entity, rather than a specific person within a household. Any form of such an income would have a huge impact on the labor market, but opportunities for employment are supposedly soon to be drastically reduced, making that a serious option.
Funding government (3 paragraphs)
Money (as currency) would also be created as needed to fund government — all government, from local to national — forevermore at the current per capita rate of total government spending: that rate multiplied by the population of the nation each year (including non-citizens who were residents). [I have devised one approach to apportioning that money for the U.S.] That would ensure that demographics would govern output.
That would also put an end to using taxes/public debt for that purpose — unless spending exceeded somewhere the allotted amount, due to a public emergency or whatever. Both could at least be reset at zero.
That would provide a significant increase in disposable income for everyone. Given how regressive the total tax bill is in many nations (including the U.S.), in a relative way the people in such nations with the lowest incomes would benefit the most from ending taxation. To prevent inflation, however, taxes would have to be gradually reduced to zero, with the amount collected in the meantime reducing concomitantly the amount that would be created for funding government.
Withdrawing money from the economy (19 paragraphs)
That brings us to the mechanism for withdrawing money from the economy. A sufficient amount of money would be withdrawn from the economy by collecting it from the ‘excess’ profits of corporations. That is not being ‘anti-business’. It is simply the one place from which the money can come without taking it from any person.
single-paragraph overview (followed by 15 paragraphs of explication)
Corporations would be paying no taxes and no limit would be imposed on revenue, investment in the business itself (plant, equipment and integral intellectual properties), or the compensation of any/all employees (though sans bonuses of any kind, which would be disallowed as compensation for anyone). A limit (based on profits) would be imposed on the accumulation of cash and extraneous assets (i.e., beyond plant, equipment, or integral intellectual properties: so stocks, bonds, real estate, etc.). Say, accumulated cash could equal the annualized amount of the most profitable quarter in the history of the company and extraneous assets would be some multiple of that amount (based on the price paid for them, disregarding any changes in their monetary value over time). Other outlays would be restricted to legitimate business expenses (however those might be defined). In the U.S., the I.R.S., with nothing else to do, would enforce compliance.
With this paradigm in place rates of profit would not be increasing (at least not due to the structure and functioning of the paradigm itself), but money would still be flowing to producers/sellers of goods and services. With no taxes to pay and a steady flow money being constantly created as needed to fund a DDI and all government, corporations would be accumulating huge amounts of profits over time, even though their rates of profit had not changed.
It is important to understand that their revenue would not be increasing, either, as a result of this paradigm (once the transition to the paradigm was complete). A corporation might increase its revenue by traditional means — increasing market share, greater efficiencies, etc. — but those are microeconomic concerns. This macroeconomic paradigm would not in itself lead to increased revenue for any corporation because it would not be increasing the incomes of potential consumers (once the transition to the paradigm was complete).
Still, it is easy to understand the effect that a constant flood of money coming into the economy would have on the prices of assets — things that are purchased that (it is expected) will be worth at any point in the future at least as much money as was paid for them in the present. It’s not just that those prices would be going higher. They would be going up like rockets: they would obtain ‘values’ that put them in economic outer space. Imagine a single share of stock with a price in the millions. And even that wouldn’t be the limit — for the simple reason that there would be no limit. Keep in mind, also, that with this paradigm in place there would be no periodic recessions to ‘correct’ (knock down) the prices of stocks (and other assets, too, for that matter).
Karl Marx saw accumulation as the ‘Achilles heel’ of capitalism. For him, it is the driving force of capitalism while at the same time the accumulation of capital is also capitalism’s greatest internal threat. According to Marx, such ‘overaccumulation’ destabilizes the economy by creating a ‘necessity’ for periodic downturns that destroy capital, so that it might have room to grow (at desirable rates) once again. More prosaically, the accumulation of capital as ‘means of production’ leads to an oversupply of goods/services, when demand has been satiated yet more supply — and yet more potential supply — is still available, meaning production must decrease, if not stop altogether. (One particularly unfortunate effect of that aspect of the economy has been the advent of ‘planned obsolescence’, which has morphed into ‘not repairable’ and just plain poor quality, with all ensuring that replacement will soon be necessary.)
To repeat: in the context of this paradigm stability is not an issue. The goal is simply, again, to keep the prices of assets in some relation to whatever rates of profit might exist among corporations.
We can say, for present purposes, that there are two kinds of businesses in this world. In one type of business the profits of those enterprises become income for the owners of the businesses, i.e., ‘proprietorships’ (which can include partnerships). As is now the case, in this paradigm the profits of proprietorships would be the income of the owners of those enterprises. Here, “corporations” refers to enterprises in which the profits belong only to the businesses. Those are publicly traded corporations, the stocks of which are available for purchase by the general public.
No individual on the planet can have any claim on the profits of any such corporation. Even someone who might own 99% of the stock of such a business could not make any such claim. (Of course, corporations of the kind we are talking about have vastly more dispersed stockholders: it is rare enough for any one person to own more than 50% of the stock of such an enterprise.)
Some corporations do have ‘voting shares’ that are much more limited in number — and possibly access, with only non-voting shares available for sale to the general public. Even then, though, holders of voting shares still have no claim on any of the profits of the business.
Keep in mind that ‘profits’ are ‘revenue minus costs’. Those costs include all disbursements, to include paying for internal investments (including payments on loans from banks or bonds sold to finance internal investments), paying all remuneration — including benefits and bonuses — for all employees, including the ‘senior executive officers’ (e.g., COO, CFO, and CEO) as well as paying out dividends paid on stocks (if any). So “profits” are what’s left over after all of the legitimate claimants to any of the revenue of the corporation have been satisfied.
The brain trust of the corporation decides what to do with those profits on behalf of the business. Most broadly, there is only one thing to do: accumulate; hold some of it in cash and buy ‘extraneous’ assets (assets having nothing to do with the functioning of the business) with the rest.
So, in this paradigm corporations would be limited in the amount of cash and extraneous assets that they could accumulate. At the end of each quarter, profits still there after all other claims on revenue had been met and the limits on the accumulation of cash and extraneous assets had been reached would be collected, to be withdrawn from the economy (to be recirculated, actually, towards funding the DDI and government, reducing the amount of money that would have to be created.)
It is important that no money would be collected from any corporation before it could be used for the business — to include more remuneration of any employees or further investment in plant and equipment. Also, the collection of money would not reduce future revenue or profits: the amount of revenue/profits a corporation might earn following any collection of money from it would not be affected by that collection of money.
How much cash or extraneous assets could be accumulated are details to be worked out if this paradigm were to be adopted by any nation, but both would (presumably) be multiples of the profit in the most profitable quarter in the history of the business. That in turn would mean that there would ultimately be no limit on the ‘wealth’ a corporation could acquire, since making more profit would always be a possibility, which would enable the accumulation of more cash and extraneous assets.
There is one further point that must be made regarding profits. As noted above, the outlays that currently come out of a corporation’s revenue before arriving at ‘profit’ include “bonuses.” In this paradigm bonuses would not be allowed as a form of remuneration for any employee. Again, there would be no limit on how much an employee could be paid, but that pay would have to be in the form of a regular income. The reason for that is economic, not ideological: the functioning of an economy with this paradigm in place would require it. If bonuses were allowed, corporations could simply direct unlimited amounts of money to individuals, raising the distinct possibility that sufficient money might not be withdrawn from the economy, making a hash of this beautiful paradigm, with all of its benefits for both individuals and society as a whole — potentially, for humanity, for that matter.
For the same reason — making sure enough money got withdrawn from the economy(/recirculated) — corporations would also have to be banned from making contributions to any nor-for-profit entity. That would have to include political parties or other political organizations (or individuals), as well as foundations, private schools, etc. One more time: none of that is ideological, but only doing what is necessary for this paradigm to function as designed.
what about people? (2 paragraphs)
There could be a limit as well on accumulation for individuals, with the accumulation of cash based on income and assets as some multiple of that amount. Regarding people, though, delineating “legitimate expenses” to which any person could be restricted would be problematical, to say the least. So individuals who had maxed-out their accumulation of cash and assets could still spend money rather than have it collected.
Even distinguishing between purchases of assets and consumption might require resurrecting Solomon. Still, a limit on accumulating cash and assets, however generous, would establish a benchmark of some kind for ‘enough’. In the end, individuals, however rich or not, would have to be indifferent to have any money collected. (Hopefully that would become a ‘badge of honor’ in nations that adopted the paradigm — though, unlike corporations, individuals could also contribute to not-for-profit entities.)
Prevention of inflation
It has been noted in places above that in the transition to this paradigm inflation could be a concern. As noted, though, the DDI itself could only cause inflation to the extent that it raised incomes. It would only raise incomes to the extent that its initial level exceeded the current minimum income. Beyond that, it would only be replacing existing incomes. To reiterate: the presence of significant benefits would, however, free income for other expenditures, which, again, is why the DDI would have to be raised gradually, to allow supply to adjust to increasing overall demand over time. Domestically, once the paradigm was in place consumption would be stabilized by the size and form of the supply of currency. If ‘exogenous’ inflation of a general kind did occur, as with a significant disruption of supply, the DDI could be increased to account for it with no danger of an ‘inflationary spiral’, due to the decoupling of the DDI as compensation for employees from employers’ costs. If a global economic deflation occurred the number of people being paid the DDI might increase, but there would still be no unemployment or poverty. Its presence (along with the funding of government in the paradigm) would also prevent any possibility of an economic depression. Indeed, falling prices (which could also result domestically from increases in productivity) would be a boon for people being paid the DDI.
Economy being self-regulating
To get a tad more technical, there has been a long-running debate among economists as to whether the supply of money in the now-ubiquitous central government/central bank monetary paradigm is ‘exogenous’ or ‘endogenous’, i.e., (sufficiently) independent of other economic variables or not. This paradigm makes the supply of currency indisputably exogenous, as it would be solely determined by a variable completely outside the economy (demographics). Given, also, the amount of currency and how it would enter the economy (as income for people and funding for government), the economy as a whole would be passively but effectively governed by that variable. Since that variable would be self-regulating, the economy would become self-regulating, with total output governed by demographics. (Regulation within the economy, i.e., relating to the environment, workers, and consumers, would still be a matter of concern in the political process).
Possible scope
The paradigm could be adopted by a group of nations agreeing to share a common currency — without compromising the sovereignty of any nation. It could even one day form a single currency shared by every nation on the planet, with all peoples eventually enjoying the material well-being of the most materially well-off in a global economy about as stable as the surface of the Moon, where mere footprints in the dust can last forever.
Eminently actionable
Here on Earth, the paradigm is eminently actionable: there are plenty of details that would have to be worked out for any nation to adopt it, but it could be implemented anywhere with a single legislative Act. Even if working out the details (perhaps in an ‘economic convention’ composed of elected and/or designated persons) and getting it implemented took a whole year, that would be as nothing. The result would be a sustainable, self-regulating economy with no unemployment or poverty at any level of total output and possibly no taxes or public debt for funding government.
Finish: surprisingly ‘conservative’?
While this paradigm is non-ideological, it could perhaps help politically with its possible implementation that accomplishing all those positive outcomes for society would not require any redistribution of anything, imposing any cost on any employer, imposing any limit on income/wealth, or for people to act altruistically in any way. Also, it does not require tearing down any of the existing institutional structure of the economy. That is to say, the paradigm turns out to be surprisingly ‘conservative’. All in all, this paradigm is revolutionary — it would transform the outcomes for society of the existing economic system — but it is not, actually, radical.
A New Liberalism
respect for all by all throughout society — including the economy
[Medium has it as a “24 min read.”]
Introduction
[The subject here is Liberalism. The other liberalism (with a lower-case ‘l’) is one of several political ideologies that exist within Liberalism, each preferring certain policies and programs — or the absence of such things. This New Liberalism transcends all that mess. (It is not to be confused in any way with ‘neoliberalism’.) Ironically, perhaps, it accomplishes that by locating justice in its entirety in the temporal plane: material existence.]
Liberalism can be credited with a great many accomplishments. It has also been beset with limitations, however, both conceptual and practical, that have in turn limited the benefits of Liberal societies/nations to people. As time goes on, those limitations are overshadowing the accomplishments of Liberalism. As a result, people are beginning to question its value as an approach to governing society.
A Liberal society is one in which justice is the goal of society and equality and liberty are understood to be the ‘twin pillars of justice’ upon which a just society must rest. Those two concepts are its foundation.
Since Liberalism was brought into the world we have learned that equality and liberty are not the ‘universal values’ the early Liberals claimed them to be. Indeed, there are no such things as universal values. As postmodernists have emphasized, the very notion of ‘foundationalism’, i.e., the existence of any universally accepted conceptual premise, is a nonstarter.
We humans do, however, have a universal propensity to form into groups. Groups are individuals who organize around premises they all accept (at least to a sufficient degree). Thus, Liberals are a group of humans organized (however loosely) around the premise that equality and liberty should underlie the governance of society.
So: a Liberal society/nation is one in which governance is itself governed by equality and liberty. That is, those two concepts determine in a general way — prior to any laws or even a constitution — how people should treat one another as they live their separate lives together in society and those two concepts inform the way the political process and the economy should be structured and how they should function.
Those are three universal aspects of all communities of human beings. Other people might name other universal aspects of communities, but there can be no such thing as a community of human beings that exists without personal interactions, a political process (the process of effecting choices for the community as a whole), and an economy (the process of producing/acquiring goods/services). Even a book club has all three of those elements of a community. Within Liberalism, then, those three aspects of social existence therefore comprise at the same time the minimum and the maximum of the reach of justice, in its most practical sense: how societal relations among human beings ought to be governed.
The purpose of this essay is to relate a way to fix Liberalism’s flaws. It would still be familiar Liberal society, yet it would be transformed.
Individuals
[The first few paragraphs of this section of the essay (formerly “Personal Relations”) revised 4/4/25.]
First we’ll address how this approach to justice would affect individuals. Most succinctly, it would apply to actions undertaken to effect any choice (i.e., choose among perceived alternatives and take action to bring that choice to fruition). Such actions can, of course, involve ‘speech acts’ (oral or ‘written’ — which certainly can include utterances and images that are not words). We’ll see that this approach to justice leads to an other-centered individualism that would replace the self-centered individualism of ‘old’ Liberalism.
Our actions in effecting choices are a portion of our personal conduct. Personal conduct can go beyond actions affecting other people, as things we do in private that do not involve other people in any way. Those can be matters of concern morally, but they are outside the scope of this approach to justice. Also unlike morality, this approach to justice is unconcerned with strictly ‘interior’ phenomena, such as thoughts and feelings. Those can lead to actions, but, yet again, it is only actions that are of concern for justice.
To reiterate: what is at issue is anything we do in effecting any choice that has some affect on any other person(s). Sometimes the doing is itself the choice; other times, it is in furtherance of bringing a choice to fruition.
As will also be reiterated herein, this aspect of governance most certainly extends to people’s actions within the political process and the economy. Moreover, the same concept of justice has implications for the structure and functioning of the political process and the economy as societal processes. Both of those are still, after all, relations among people, only in particular contexts.
Of course, actions of individuals in a society are governed by laws, which are products of the political process. The governance of society also includes, however, governing the actions of individuals without enacting specific laws. That requires the existence of a rule of some kind. Indeed, such a rule will largely determine what laws will be enacted.
Such a rule will certainly be an organizing principle for a society, but, as will be seen, it can follow from some ‘prior’ principle or concept. It serves to ‘fill the gaps’ between laws for governing relations among people in a society without the necessary force — not to mention the myriad costs — associated with formal laws and their enforcement.
No rule can keep people from acting contrarily to it: no mere abstraction can be enough to prevent people from violating it. Moreover, in a Liberal society, where vague, general ’catch-all’ laws are not allowed, any such rule is unenforceable in the way that laws are. Yet, a rule is needed for people to know ‘what’s what’ ethically; without some rule there is no line that is not to be crossed that is known to all.
One problem within Liberalism is that neither equality nor liberty is a rule for governing interactions among people. Equality is not a rule of any kind. Liberty is the antithesis of a rule to govern conduct. Liberals who believe liberty to be the predicate of justice (‘justice is liberty’) insist that liberty is somehow imbued with some self-limiting constraint on conduct, but that is not the case. In Liberalism, equality limits liberty: the familiar phrase, ‘every person’s liberty ends at the person and property of any other person’ is a direct statement about the intrinsic equality of all people, regardless of status, standing, relations of power, etc.
That is a rule of a kind, but it is much too vague to govern people’s relations with one another effectively. It is also much too incomplete: there is far too much of human interactions that it fails to address at all. Besides, that sentence does not exist formally as part of the governance of any Liberal nation, but is more of an aphorism to describe the ‘proper’ interpretation of ‘justice is liberty’.
Rather, Liberalism has based the governance of personal interactions on rights and laws. The citizens of Liberal nations enjoy political and legal rights that come into play in particular instances. In our day-to-day lives we have one right: the right to do or say anything that has not been rendered illegal (with freedom of speech — stretched to mean ‘expression’ — perhaps the most jealously guarded component of that right).
Since in a Liberal society everyone has the right to do and say whatever is not illegal, within the infinite forms of legal actions that people can take that involve other people (including ‘speech acts’), there is nothing in a Liberal society to regulate any of those interactions. Even worse, everyone is not only acting how they want to act, doing what they want to do, saying what they want to say, but at the same time they are ‘exercising their right’ to do/say/act that way. If challenged, on top of simply wanting to have their way, they feel self-righteously empowered to ‘defend their right’ to do whatever they’re doing. If no one in a conflict is intent on doing anything illegal, there is no common rule to which to refer for an informal, person-to-person adjudication of any dispute.
Since a ‘right’ is, after all, the formal recognition of a capacity to exercise power, that is a fail-proof recipe for incessant, irresolvable “contests of power” (Michel Foucault). It invites constant friction and worse: outright clashes that are primed to turn violent at the drop of a hat.
The concept underlying all of that within Liberalism is ‘individualism’. It is all about recognizing people as separate and independent beings. Even though we live together in formally organized groups, Liberalism emphasizes that we are still each of us our own being. Like the concepts of liberty and equality themselves, individualism is loaded with different implications for governance among Liberals. Even so, for all Liberals it is a necessary concept within Liberalism. Most emphatically, this renovation of Liberal society would not involve removing it.
There is a spectrum of interpretations of individualism ranging from more to less self-centered. As things now stand, though, ‘individualism’ exists as an enabler of self-centeredness in all Liberal nations. I submit that the more self-centered the interpretation of individualism in a Liberal nation, the more violence in personal relations that land experiences.
One consequence of that societal setup is a need for too many laws. Since, in the absence of any general rule, laws are needed to regulate behavior in order to prevent social friction — and worse — there is a tendency to need a law for every form of interaction that can arise. Thus, under the existing understanding of individualism within Liberalism the goal of maximizing liberty ironically turns upon itself, leading towards a country of stultifying lawmaking for the very excellent reason of minimizing conflict between individuals within society. (One of the U.S. Supreme Court justices recently observed that we have “too many” laws in this nation.) Again, the more self-centered the interpretation of individualism is, the more “too many” laws become necessary.
Maximizing liberty and reducing the need for laws on the books can be achieved with a different approach to individualism. It would still be individualism: the focus would still be on every person as a separate and independent being.
The basic concept could not be simpler: an other-centered individualism. Instead of the focus being on one’s own ‘right’ to do and say anything that is not against the law, the focus would be on refraining from acting unjustly towards any other person(s).
That has nothing to do with altruism. It is not ‘sacrificing’ anything of one’s own to benefit other people. It is self-constraint — self-governance — for the sake of justice.
All of that takes us back to John Locke, the original Liberal. He emphasized that people are separate and independent beings. He famously defined injustice as “being subject to the arbitrary will of” any other person(s). Since the opposite of injustice is justice and the opposite of being subject to anyone’s arbitrary will is liberty, justice must be liberty. [Thomas Jefferson basically plagiarized Locke in the most famous words in the Declaration of Independence of which he was the primary author, even to the point of including “separate and independent” in referring to “all men” in his original draft of that document — as I learned in reading Liberalism Proper and Proper Liberalism, by Gottfried Dietze (1998), a book I do recommend.]
That ‘old, white man’ Locke failed to see back in 1689 (the year his book, Two Treatises of Government, was published) that if injustice is “being subject to the arbitrary will . . .” (and it most assuredly is), then what justice requires most immediately of us humans is to refrain from subjecting any other persons(s) to our own “arbitrary wills.” That is, justice requires all people to respect all others in that basic, fundamental way. [Though I, too, am now an old white man (72 next month) I started on this quest to update justice when I had just turned thirty.]
Instead of ‘justice is liberty’, it would be, ‘justice is mutual respect’: justice is present when people are respecting one another that way — not acting arbitrarily where other people are concerned, but taking one another into account as we live our separate lives together in society. Mutual respect in that form would maximize the liberty in our personal relations that co-existing individuals can share simultaneously .
Yet, while that is an ethically satisfying concept, it is also too vague to be of much practical value. What we need — what Liberalism needs — is a way to locate ‘respect’ in some more specific and less abstract concept and still be broad enough to cover all pertinent interactions among people.
The goal must be a rule that will not just prohibit violating the “person and property” of other people, but will extend into all aspects of their being. People should be free from any unwarranted intrusion into their lives. That is as close to a land of perfect liberty as co-existing human beings can hope to attain in our personal relations.
“Unwarranted” differs from ‘unwanted’ in that the latter can be a legitimate aspect of an experience one has undertaken. Consider ‘pop-up’ ads. We might hate those ads, but we engage with the internet having accepted that that (unless we have taken action to prevent them) they are going to be part of that experience. So they are unwanted but not unwarranted (as they exist for creators of content to be remunerated for producing/posting it).
The distinction between those two words gets us to the crux of the matter at hand. In that context “unwarranted” means ‘arbitrarily imposed without permission’ and “unwanted” means ‘unwelcome but voluntarily accepted’. It comes down to a matter of choosing or not (in that case, to be subjected to ads). Concerning justice, the heart of the matter is the given capacity we all have as human beings to choose for ourselves.
In fact, the only way any person can affect in any way the life of any other person is if one is effecting some choice (i.e., choosing among perceived alternatives and take action to bring that choice to fruition). The choice might or might not be intended to affect any other person(s), but whether intended or not, affecting other people — for that matter, involving other people in any way when anyone is effecting any choice — is the issue. Conflict of the kind described above arises when people do things that involve other people who don’t want to be involved, at least not in the way they are being involved or to the extent to which they are being involved. That suggests that the rule we seek is that everyone must respect the capacity to choose of all other people whenever anyone is effecting any choice. [Warren J. Samuels discussed “effecting choices” in his scholarly contribution to Perspectives of Property, edited by Gene Wunderlich and W. L. Gibson (1972).]
It is a material fact that we humans have no choice but to effect choices. That makes choosing integral to being human. That gives a rule to respect the capacity of other people to choose an impelling ethical force: to act otherwise is to deny in some way or to some extent the very humanness of those other beings.
That takes us to a different place than ‘equality’. We Liberals don’t like it, but the fact is that anyone can legitimately deny ‘equality’, since it is only a belief we Liberals happen to hold. Lots of people insist that their are ‘natural’ hierarchies based on gender, ‘race’, and even nationality, and most religions have a place in them for hierarchies among people.
While we Liberals abhor such beliefs, no one can prove that any belief is more/less true than any other. That is just the nature of beliefs. We must also note that tolerating divergent beliefs has been one of the core tenets of Liberalism. Moreover, a claim to hold any belief sincerely, whether equality or any other (secular/ideological or sacral/theological), and not merely as a means to some other end — such as, say, in the pursuit of some political goal — is a claim that cannot be verified. So an appeal to a belief in equality weakens Liberalism.
Justice requires universality/commonality. For belief-based approaches to justice — as part of a broader morality — they are held to be universal because of their claim to ‘truth’ — or Truth. The approach to justice in this New Liberalism locates universality in a commonly shared experience of (what we perceive as, to be philosophically technical) material existence.
With a rule to govern personal relations that follows from the undeniably valid observation that we humans have no choice but to effect choices, we can strengthen Liberalism by going away from belief, to the simple reality of human being. While anyone can legitimately deny ‘equality’ by simply rejecting the truth of it, for anyone even to try to deny humanness is another matter. Knowledge that all of us human beings can know to be true as a matter of our experience of life on Earth can legitimately overrule — indeed, must overrule — any claim to any personal, immaterial truth (however many people might claim it) when it comes to the governance of society.
Unlike any immaterial truth, a universal experience of life as all humans necessarily live it provides the commonality that justice requires. Without such commonality the only option is for some people to be imposing some ‘truth’ on all others in determining how the governance of society will be governed. That brings arbitrariness, i.e., injustice, into the very core of society, no matter what immaterial truth(s) — belief(s) — might be involved.
To be more specific, then, what we must respect is other people’s capacity to choose — beginning with their capacity to choose whether/how/to what extent to be involved whenever any choice is being effected. So the rule governing people’s personal relations must be something like, ‘no co-opting or otherwise preempting the capacity to choose of any other person(s) in effecting any choice’. That is, in effecting any choice, any other person’s involvement must be sufficiently informed and voluntary. Again, we see how that would only further liberty in our personal relations.
More specifically yet, that boils down to a handful of absolute prohibitions: no killing, harming, coercing, stealing, or manipulating (which includes lying, cheating, etc.) in effecting any choice. Anyone who is refraining from any such actions in effecting any choice is being just enough. In the end, that is all justice requires of us in our personal relations as we live together in society — keeping in mind, though, that those prohibitions are only the enumeration of the absolute minimum of acting justly, taking one another into account, respecting one another’s capacity to choose.
[In one way or another all of those prohibitions relate to “harming.” Sorting out issues related to harm is the (legitimate) purpose of any community’s laws and their system of enforcement/adjudication. So one can see how a rule prohibiting harm while specifying certain forms of harm would enhance the governance of personal relations in society while reducing the need for specific laws.]
Finally, we must note that those prohibitions apply to any choice anyone is effecting. They not only apply to choices anyone is effecting for oneself, but apply as well to any choice anyone is effecting on behalf of any other person, or organization, or cause. In short, there is never a valid excuse, other than oneself acting as the victim of some injustice (such as coercion), for violating any of those prohibitions.
Admittedly, it would take generations for that change in Liberalism to work itself into the culture enough to change the nature of society. Still, as it is said, ‘a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step’. One big step would be to recognize formally, as in a nation’s constitution, that respect for the capacity to choose of all other people is the ethic of justice.
That brings us to the political process. That will be the topic of the next part of this essay.
The Political Process
The topic of this segment of this essay is the political process. A democratic version of that process has been associated historically with Liberalism. Democracy has been taken by Liberals to be ‘just’ because it is associated with ‘equality’. We have seen, in the first part of this essay, the weakness of any position dependent on that belief.
The Life and Death of Democracy, by John Keane (2009) is a history of democracy with the central theme that it is an approach to governance that has evolved in stages over time, with each successive stage representing a distinct understanding of what democracy ‘really is’. One thing that book makes clear — if unintentionally — is how nebulous the case for democracy has always been. This upgrade of the foundation of Liberalism can fix that, too, giving the argument for democracy a rigor it has never had.
Given the familiarity of political democracy and its historical connection with Liberalism, for present purposes it will be sufficient to note the two conditions that govern the just structure of a democratic political process, freedom of political speech and a ‘democratic’ distribution of the rights pursuant to other forms of participation in the process, and their connection to justice. That will leave its functioning for further discussion.
First and foremost, democracy is a just political process because in it all members of society are taken into account. ‘Taking one another into account’ is one way of expressing the basic idea of this reformed approach to justice. That is necessary to avoid arbitrariness, the locus of injustice in relations among people.
More practically, all members of any society are affected by choices that are effected for the community as a whole. Justice therefore requires that all members of the community have the opportunity to participate in that process.
So a democratic political process is the only just form that a political process can take.
Freedom of political speech allows all members of the community to participate in the political process. That means that all are, at least formally, taken into account in that process.
Political speech transcends the political system. The political system is the set of institutions via which the rest of the political process proceeds. The offices of government form its functional core.
The political system includes as ‘institutions’ formally recognized political rights. Those rights are the formal recognition of powers — capacities to act — other than political speech that individuals possess that are relevant to participation in the political process: assembling, petitioning, running for office, voting. Political rights are necessary for participating in the political system, as opposed to acting politically outside it.
In a democratic political process those rights are recognized to accrue to all members of the community, except for legitimate restrictions. To be legitimate, a restriction on any political right must be universally applicable and universally applied (to avoid being arbitrary). A distribution of those rights with only such restrictions can be called a ‘democratic’ distribution. Liberal societies have already learned that the only indisputably valid restriction on political rights is age, as a proxy for sufficient knowledge and maturity; gender, ‘race’, national origin, creed, and property have all been correctly rejected as discriminators.
A democratic political process is a form of procedural justice: any outcome of a just process is legitimate. In the New Liberalism our ethic of justice provides a barrier to unjust outcomes. The only illegitimate outcome would be one that violated the conditions of justice that ethic generates for either personal relations (anywhere in society) or the the political process.
So all Liberal nations, whatever the form of any one’s political system, have a political process that is democratic in its structure. In all of those nations there is more or less discussion of how the make the process more democratic is its functioning. That means in some way or other making ‘regular’ people’s participation in the process more meaningful, significant — impactful. All such proposals go to the renovation of Liberal society, but specifics regarding any of them are beyond the scope of this effort. [I do have a suggestion in that area: “A Proposal for Improving Democracy” (also herein Medium, with, as ever, nothing I publish here behind the paywall).]
Determining the structure and sanctioned functioning of the economy is also a choice to be effected in the political process. That is the subject of the third and final part of this essay.
[For more: “Why I Love Democracy” (a “5 min read”); “Democracy: So Much More Than Majority Rule” (a “13 min read”) both here in Medium (with nothing I publish here behind the paywall).]
The Economy
Having related a paradigm that would make the economy more just (among other good things) in the previous essay, here I want to focus on the issue of justice as it pertains to that paradigm.
First, though, at this point in time the economic system in the U.S. has become common to basically every nation on the planet. Even China, which still calls itself ‘Communist’, has the same basic system that the U.S. has: money, a national government, and a banking system culminating in a central bank. The difference between the two nations economically — and the economic differences among all nations with that basic set of economic institutions — is in the rules that govern participation in the system. I started with the supposition that transforming that system would be far more feasible than attempting to design, much less get implemented, a whole different system would be.
Back then, the alternatives were ‘capitalism’ or ‘Marxism’. At that point in time I had been trying for about ten years to convince myself to be a Marxist. In the end I could not. In part that was because I couldn’t see private property as the source of all of humanity’s material problems, and therefore its elimination as the solution for them. Most importantly, for me, Marx denied that justice is a real thing. I could not accept that.
In thinking about the possibility of making the existing economy more just it occurred to me that democracy has always been considered by people who care about justice to be a just political process. Of course, when we think about “democracy” we think of ‘equality’ and ‘the same for all’. I was certain that any idea of applying any such qualities to the existing economy was not only politically hopeless, but technically impossible, at least over time: it would be easy enough to fashion such an outcome, but how could it be sustained over time? Most importantly, how could it be justly instituted and sustained?
Of course, I didn’t know about justice then what I know about justice now. I did, however, know enough to think a bit more rigorously about democracy to understand more precisely why democracy is a just process.
As related in the preceding section of this essay, I came to understand that it is the approach to political speech and ‘political rights’ (voting, etc.) that makes democracy a just process: those rights are available to all citizens but for universally applicable restrictions that are universally applied (with age being the only indisputably universal discriminator). We can call that the ‘democratic distributive principle’.
It occurred to me that money is to the economy as those rights are to the political process: it is necessary for participation within the system (as opposed to acting politically — or economically — outside the formally established system). So the problem became making money like rights.
Rights are of course abstractions. For that reason any number of people can share a right without lessening what it is. True, more people sharing a right dilutes the power inherent in it, but the right itself is no less as a right because it is shared by millions rather than thousands, or hundreds, etc.
Money, on the other hand, is a material thing. To dilute money by sharing the same amount of it among more people is to lessen what it is, the essence of it.
The amount of money in the economy has always been capable of being expanded, but at any time there is always a fixed amount of it. That implies that money is, immediately, a ‘zero-sum’ thing (made famous in the 1980’s in a couple of books by Lester C. Thurow): in a distribution of anything that exists in a fixed amount, for any participant in the distribution to get more, one or more participants must have some taken from them. Whether a person likes the idea of redistributing money or not, that immediately raises unavoidable issues of justice. If an issue of justice could be avoided, I could only be all for that.
So, technically, the problem became one of establishing a democratically distributed income in a way that avoided in every way and at all times the zero-sum problem. I realized that such a thing could be done by creating money as needed to fund such an income. No money would have to be taken from anyone in the process. Voila: there would be a democratically distributed income without redistributing anything.
Since such an income would not depend on taxes/public debt for its existence, it could be any amount. That would make eliminating poverty a snap — without taking anything from anyone. So the only problem would be establishing such an income without creating price inflation that would either consume the income or induce a hyperinflationary episode in a doomed attempt to escape that fate. All of that goes to the details that are related in the prvious essay.
I have referred several times already to redistribution. Personally, I am not against it. Indeed, I like the idea of it. People who are rich have amassed their riches in the functioning of an economic system that has always been fundamentally unjust.
It also cannot be denied that rich people have devised, historically and contemporarily, to use the power stemming from wealth to bend the system to their favor. Democracy has proven to be tragically susceptible to such power.
Moreover, as noted in the previous section the structure and functioning of the economy are matters to be decided in the political process. Since no alteration of the economy can of itself compromise the justness of the democratic political process, a redistributive paradigm for the economy as a product of a democratic political process would be perfectly legitimate.
Even so, this approach to justice does not require redistributing anything to achieve a more just economy. In an economy in which every (adult) citizen is assured of having enough — not just enough to scrape by, but to have a materially sufficient life — why should it matter how much more any other persons might have?
We must also consider that even in a fundamentally unjust economy it has been possible for people to become rich in completely just ways. Should they also be included in a redistributive process? How could they be exempted? What would count as a ‘just enough’ source of wealth to be exempted?
As noted in the previous essay, it would be possible in the paradigm that I developed to make the pay for every employee of any business or government the same. That means every employee: from dishwashers and janitors (of which in my life I have been both) to CEO’s of the biggest corporations. That would raise other issues, such as incentivization, etc., but the point is that such would be possible — while still allowing for people who were not employees to make unlimited amounts of money. In that scenario a significant redistribution of wealth would ensue, but due only in that case to the functioning of a free market in ‘assets’ (artefacts of wealth).
As also noted in that essay, besides eschewing redistribution there are other things that make this paradigm surprisingly ‘conservative’ (in some sense of that word): in the paradigm I propose, accomplishing those outcomes would also eschew imposing any cost on any employer, imposing any limit on income or wealth, or requiring people to act altruistically in any way. Indeed, in a certain sense it hearkens back to aristocracy. In that paradigm income/wealth, as well as the power that was recognized to attend income/wealth — even political power — emanated from land. Since the amount of land was finite, income/wealth/power was exogenously, if you will, constrained.
The development of Modern capitalism changed all that. Money replaced land as the primary component of the economy, and an economic system was developed that could provide amounts of money that would be limited only by conditions in the economy itself. Corporate stocks became a form of property with no fixed limit on how much of it could be created. Also, those stocks can endlessly absorb money and thereby increase wealth via ‘asset inflation’ without adversely affecting the economy as a whole the way increases in the price of real estate inexorably do (by increasing costs for both businesses and individuals throughout the economy).
The possibility of boundless income/wealth had arrived. While in political democracy such economic power no longer translates directly into political power, it does indirectly. Beyond even sustainability, then, this paradigm happens to entail an exogenous constraint on income/wealth, therefore power, in the form of demographics — without imposing any limit on income or wealth.
As noted above in this essay, Samuels all but defined “social power” as the ability to effect choices. Income/wealth irrefutably have huge affects on that. To use demographics to (passively) constrain such power cannot be unjust. Justice is, after all, valid constraints on power, is it not?
Now, the two most important Liberal philosophers since the utilitarians of the late 1700's/early 1800’s were John Rawls and Robert Nozick. The former made the case for a politically liberal interpretation of Liberalism [in A Theory of Justice (1971)]. The latter answered Rawls with what is usually called a ‘libertarian’ interpretation of Liberalism [in Anarchy, Sate, and Utopia (1974)], largely echoing Locke himself (whom I referred to above as “the original Liberal”).
Both Rawls and Nozick made it clear, if within different approaches, that within Liberalism justice is located in process, not by identifying specific, material outcomes and making their realization ‘what justice is’. That invites ‘the end justifies the means’. Emphasizing process does not guarantee justice, but any kind of, to use Nozick’s term, “end-state” approach to the governance of society — or any part of it — assures that the injustice in arbitrariness will result. To reiterate, in this New Liberalism as well only a just process can produce just outcomes; any outcome of a just process must be accepted as legitimate (as long as . . .). [To be clear, to undertake unjust actions to get a just political process or a just economy implemented is still to act unjustly; even if they are successful, such actions render that outcome illegitimate — which basically leaves us with rational persuasion, which is I why I appeal for advocates for this (set of) idea(s).]
We have seen (in the second segment of this essay) that a democratic political process is a just process because in it all members of a community are taken into account. Since the political process is the process of effecting choices for the community as a whole, all of its members will be affected by choices effected in the political process. Justice therefore requires that all of them must have the opportunity to participate in that process. The ‘conditions of justice’ for the process thus become freedom of political speech for all and a just — democratic — distribution of the rights pertaining to all other forms of participation in that process.
What are the conditions of justice for a just economy, the process of producing/acquiring goods/services? As in the political process, the requirement to respect the capacity of all people to choose for themselves applies directly to all interactions among people in the economy — recall, from the first segment of the essay, whether someone is acting to effect a choice for oneself or on behalf of any other person, organization, or cause: any business is an “organization” (just as political parties — and governments — are organizations). Again, respecting one another’s capacity to choose maximizes liberty among co-existing people. Also, just as there must be a democratic distribution of political rights, there must be a democratically distributed income, i.e., an income for which any (adult) citizen can become eligible.
That’s because, again, money is to the economy as political rights are to the political process: necessary to be able to participate in it. Regarding the (existing) economy, it is simply not possible to participate in it without money. Even homeless people must get their hands on a certain amount of money just to survive. The amount of money a democratically distributed income must be is therefore at a minimum enough for a person receiving it to survive. Other than perhaps some practical limit for the sake of the functioning of the economy itself, which is necessary for society itself to exist, there is no necessary maximum that places a limit on it. It would surely be at a minimum enough for a materially sufficient life. To make the existing economy more just we just have to implement that paradigm.
As related in the preceding essay, making the economy more just via a democratically distributed income would leave the existing structure in place while its functioning, its effects on people, would be transformed. While a society with it would not quite be a Utopia, it have a far ‘better’ economy — most importantly, far more just economy — than any civilized society has ever had.