A New Liberalism
respect for all by all throughout society — including the economy
[This essay is the three ‘Segments’ of “Shoring the Foundation of Liberal Society” put together in one place (with a tad of minor editing for textual coherence). The section on the economy expanded (by ‘7 mins’) 1/22/25.]
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 — ironically, perhaps, by locating justice in the temporal plane: material existence. (It is not to be confused in any way with ‘neoliberalism’.)]
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. We’ll address in turn the implications of this approach to Liberal justice for individuals, then the political process, then the economy.
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 common no 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
[This section thoroughly revised 3/19/25.]
I developed a monetary paradigm to make the existing economy more just in accordance with this New Liberalism. The details of the paradigm are (now) available in “My Final Answer” here in Medium. At present I want to focus on the issue of justice as it pertains to that paradigm.
First, though, when I say “existing economy” I refer specifically to that of the U.S., where I have always lived. Yet, 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, 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 “My Final Answer.”
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 linked article, 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).
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 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.
So 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. That suggests that this proposed paradigm is indeed revolutionary, but it is not radical. Whatever it may be, it is less than a Utopia, but far better that any economy has ever been.