REAL JUSTICE: The Next Step Forward?

a Medium ‘booklet’ (composed of nine extant articles)

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

[This ‘booklet’ is a compilation of nine articles previously published by this author — including titles/subtitles, with very minor editing in places for them to fit together in a single piece (and any reader finding a need for any additional editing — of any kind — please leave a “Note’). [It is the ‘pamphlet’, “A Humane Future,” with six more articles added.] There is some redundancy, but theses are new, big ideas: a fair amount of reiteration is not a bad thing. Also, while I am convinced that this approach to justice is the next great step for humanity to take, I do not claim to know everything there is to understand about it or that mine is the only understanding of it that can possibly be valid. With the second and third articles being a few years old, a reader can see how my own understanding of this approach to justice has evolved. Also, every article has conceptual details in it that are not present in any other article. The articles herein are “An Idea That’s Time Has Come?,” “Equality Is All We Need,” “Rethinking Individualism,” “Better Governance Requires Leaving Ideology Behind,” “Logic, Validity, Truth, Verifiability, Rationality,” “A New Liberalism,” “Towards the ‘Star Trek’ Economy,” “My final Answer” (my latest, fullest understanding as far as applying this approach to justice to the economy is concerned), and “A Proposal for Improving Democracy.”]

An Idea That’s Time Has Come?

the place of respect in our human relations

[Medium has it as an “11 min read” (at a maximum of 250 words/min.).]

As a rule, philosophers have used ‘ethics’ to refer to how we should treat one another as individuals in our direct interactions with one another. In general, ‘justice’ refers to that plus the ethically correct structure and functioning of the society as a unit. Basically, that refers to the political process and the economy (separately or together). While that summation could perhaps be challenged, it is definitely how ‘justice’ is used herein.

I am convinced that everybody who gives it any thought understands that justice is mutual respect, i.e., people being mindful of one another, some form of ‘taking one another into account as we live our separate lives together in this world’. People who emphasize liberty understand that each person’s liberty ends at the person and property of anyone else: everyone must respect all other people’s persons and property. For people who emphasize the moral equality of all people, respect for others informs their cultural ethos.

“Everybody” includes, I’m saying, all philosophers who have ever offered a contribution on that subject. Any account of justice anyone has ever proffered boils down to some variation on that theme. They all require every person to respect other persons, to take others into account, one way or another; justice is realized when all involved in any particular episode or event (at whatever scale) are doing that.

Obviously, no single human being, much less any society of human beings, will ever be perfectly just, but to attain as much justice as possible we have to have the best understanding of justice that we can obtain. Ultimately, that does mean going beyond merely asserting that mutual respect is what justice is, to why a requirement for all people to respect all others exists and how respect for one another can be realized in the actual governance of society.

In this essay, though, our sights will not be aimed that high. We’ll only be looking at — without getting lost in a fog of esoteric details — the place of mutual respect in various accounts of justice that have been proffered in history. We’ll be most concerned with philosophers of the Modern era.

Here’s the thing: Modern philosophers ended up emphasizing liberty (and to a lesser extent, equality) rather than mutual respect as being what justice is even though the same people who accepted liberty-as-justice also recognized the need for mutual respect to realize justice. That’s the most telling point I want to make regarding those historical takes on justice.

All of the ancient Greek philosophers arrived at some version of mutual respect in determining what the ethical governance of relations among people should be. (They expressed the broader concerns of ethics with the word ‘politics’: ethics related to the ‘polity’, the geopolitical community). For them, a requirement of mutual respect applied only to citizens. Even in Athens (the most ‘liberal’ city-state of that day by our contemporary standards), full citizenship was restricted to property-owning males. Some schools of philosophy, such as Cynics and Epicureans, did speak to a wider reach of ethics for the people in the community, but they focused on how people should live their lives as individuals and pretty much ignored the structure and functioning of the polity. Interestingly, Sparta, which is generally thought of as the ‘anti-Athens’, had the (very much relatively) most ‘liberal’ attitude as a community towards women, who were recognized there as actual human beings. They could even own property — though they still could not participate in government. [All of that — plus the casual acceptance of slavery — is why I have always considered going back to the Greeks in thinking about justice to be of very limited value; Modern philosophy introduced into the world the idea that all people could matter when it comes to justice.]

A more extensive ethic that was present in ancient times was ‘The Golden Rule’ (along with the negative of it: refrain from doing unto others what you would not want them to do unto you). It also leads to mutual respect. [There apparently used to be a Web site, www.religoustolerance.org (which my computer now says “can’t be reached”), that related how extensive the reach of that Rule has been — and not limited to sacral ethics, either.]

In earlier Modern times, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, and the utilitarians (primarily Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill), all arrived, via disparate routes, at a requirement to respect others, to take all others into account. Locke insisted on respect for other persons and their property as the limit on anyone’s liberty. Rousseau came closest to recognizing respect for others per se as the ethic for a just society because he considered a social — “civilized” — existence as the only ‘truly’ human form of existence; his subsequent rejection of the radical individualism inherent in Locke’s approach to liberty-as-justice necessarily entails a requirement of mutual respect. Kant’s ethic of respect is contained in his famous “Categorical Imperative.” For Hegel, respect among humans, as beings with wills, is “the necessary condition of right” (as Richard Dien Winfield put it in Reason and Justice). In utilitarianism all are respected in that all must be included in its moral calculus.

More contemporarily, mutual respect has come closer to being realized as being what justice is. The ‘discourse (or ‘communicative’) ethics’ of Jurgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, and Bruce Ackerman are clearly mutual respect in action. Alasdair MacIntyre’s moral philosophy, hailing back towards the Greeks, also boils down to mutual respect, if in a malleable, ad hoc form. Here in Medium, Dr. Marcus Giles advocates for “recognition,” which he attributes to (primarily) Axel Honneth and Cillian McBride, as the ethic (or ethical construct) that should govern human relations, but that, too, is essentially ‘respect’. Again, for anyone who believes in the moral equality of all people, that generates a requirement of mutual respect. Even Karl Marx, who rejected the idea that justice actually is a thing (but whom I count as the penultimate equalitarian, despite his self-proclaimed materialism), had a vision of a single, universal society of all people that would realize the ultimate in mutual respect (largely via the expedient of taking property out of the equation). [added 5/23/2024] Finally, mutual respect is surely an ethic any postmodernist can endorse.

It is odd, then, that respect for others has never been put forth, explicitly and overtly, as the ethic for actually governing the governance of society.

In Modern times, I blame Locke for that. He touted liberty as the predicate of justice: justice is liberty. He was led to a limit on liberty by his belief (from the Bible) in the moral equality of all people (the subject of the first of his famous Two Treatises): hence, his injunction that anyone’s liberty “ends at the person and property” of any other person. Still, he emphasized that liberty is what justice is, not mutual respect for one another’s person and property.

Of course, like any person ever, Locke was a product of his times. To be fair, even if he had realized where his logic actually took him, for him to have proclaimed mutual respect as the ethic of justice would have been as foreign to the people of that time and place as talk of aliens from outer space would have been. He lived in England during the long fight for political power (1640’s through the 1680’s) — including outright civil war — between parliamentarians and royalists/monarchists (and between Protestants and Catholics, though thankfully that could be resolved with simple tolerance — ‘live-and-let-live’ — as long as neither had an exclusive claim to political power). He sought to provide a philosophical justification for the parliamentarians. More generally, Europeans were chafing under the yoke of absolute monarchy (and for some, what they thought of as the tyranny of the Catholic Church), and liberty was the obvious antithesis of that. ‘Liberty!’ would be a battle cry of revolutionaries in every land. ‘Equality’ was there, too, but ‘liberty’ is what got people to the barricades.

So roughly a century and more after Locke’s famous book (1689), Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel all found a way to make liberty the ultimate essence of justice. Mill, in On Liberty, sought to relate utilitarianism as the font of (civil) liberty.

Locke had located the primacy of liberty in his “State of Nature,” in which people do not live together in groups, but exist as totally separate and independent beings. For ‘civil’ life to be just, that given (unfettered, supremely individualistic) liberty had to be maintained as much as possible. Some version of some place where liberty is the given state of human existence became de rigueur for those aforementioned philosophers: Rousseau located it in the “General Will;” for Kant it resided in a transcendent, immaterial “noumenal realm;” for Hegel it was inherent in the “Geist” (‘Spirit’) of the “dialectic” of the “Totality” (thereby being transmitted to the ontological condition of humanity within material existence — Kant’s phenomenal realm).* Similar to Rousseau, Mill had civil society as humanity’s given context, but his relation of utilitarianism to liberty then became the ‘highest’ argument for that ethic: philosophically, it became utilitarianism’s prime justification.

[For anyone wondering, I would say Thomas’s Paine and Jefferson were basically popularizers of the ideas of Locke, though both were more explicit about the place of equality in justice (despite Jefferson’s profound hypocrisy) and either eschewed (Paine) or at least questioned (Jefferson) the place Locke had for property (including determining who could participate in governing a society): hence “the pursuit of Happiness,” not ‘property’ as an “endowed” Right in the Declaration of Independence.]

Other than a few scattered individuals — all of whom got their start in life as members of some community — people have never lived as separate and independent beings. We are by our nature as humans separate and independent beings with respect to one another, but just as surely it is part of our nature to live together in communities of some kind.

Hence, coexisting has always been a problem for people touting liberty as the predicate of justice. Living together in groups does require somehow limiting liberty. If liberty is what justice is, then from the outset achieving the most just society possible means limiting justice. That makes no sense.

Mutual respect would maximize liberty, but liberty would be an incidental byproduct of justice. So with mutual respect governing the governance of society no conflict could exist between maximizing justice and maximizing liberty. The more people did respect one another, the more liberty there would be.

Even through the 1900’s, to proclaim mutual respect as the predicate of justice would still have been too much for people to grasp. Today, though, ‘respect’ (or its lack) has become the definitive standard in relations among human beings. Our common, everyday discourse tells us that we are crying out for the overt realization that respect for others is the ethic of justice. At long last we are now ready to recognize — and to realize in the governance of society, i.e., how we treat one another as individuals as well as what the structure and functioning of the political process and the economy will be — that mutual respect is the predicate of justice: justice is mutual respect.

As to the further questions concerning the why and how of mutual respect as the predicate of justice, at this point all of that is up for debate. Anyone can proffer any answers to those questions one thinks are valid.

I have argued that the democratic political process is already governed by mutual respect. With freedom of political speech and only just (non-arbitrary) restrictions on further political rights (i.e., restrictions that are universally applicable and universally applied, such as age), all members of the community are ‘taken into account’ because all are allowed to participate in that process (though any existing democratic political system could surely be improved).

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*I feel compelled to provide a bit more context where Hegel is concerned. From what I wrote it would be easy to get the wrong impression of Hegel’s philosophy, to think that “Geist” is some God-like entity.

First of all, as I understand it, as Hegel uses it “Geist” isn’t what we English-speaking people think of as ‘a Spirit’. It refers more to ‘the spirit of the thing’, that ineffable, much less expressible, ‘something’ something — especially referring to some immaterial thing — has. (‘Zeitgeist’ translates as ‘spirit of the time’.) Hegel capitalized it because it referred to “Being,” which is basically material existence + consciousness.

For him, “dialectical” merely describes the way the process of development in “the becoming of Being,” which unfolds over time, happens to happen. It is of the utmost importance that that process proceeds in an utterly autonomous way. That autonomy is what Hegel sought to convey in using the word “Geist.” For him, the development — the becoming — of Being transpires in a dialectical way of its own as if propelled by a spiritual force, which he, well, christened “Geist.”

He was developing his ideas in the late 1700’s, but that part of his thought can be thought of much like the way scientists have learned the Universe has developed. It started from the ‘Thesis’: essentially, ‘nothing’ (nothing with mass, anyway). It went from there to the ‘Antithesis’: ‘everything’ (when all of what would become material existence was contained in a teeny, tiny cloud of unimaginable energy). [Following sentence reworked 2/15/24] The result was the ‘Synthesis’: the Universe ‘becoming’ — eventually what it is today, including, according to scientists, the development of life on Earth (and possibly elsewhere), with at least some of that life (humans) being conscious of Being, on its way to becoming what the Universe will be in the future: interestingly, according to scientists, to become what Hegel understood would be the final development of a dialectical process, i.e., the ‘Thesis’ in a different form, in this case matter and energy so thoroughly diffused that the Universe will be in essence ‘nothing’ all over again. In that narrow way, “Geist” can be analogous to ‘the laws of nature’: immaterial ‘things’ (equivalent to noumena in Kant) that determine the development of the Universe but are not ‘a spirit’ (and they have been revealed in parts over time to human consciousness, but they exist — in a totality of which we humans may never be completely aware — whether we know about them or not).

Hegel, though, wasn’t concerned with anything as small as the Universe. He was thinking about consciousness — which does transcend material existence, even in our day-to-day lives — as the ultimate aspect of Being.

Kant, whom Hegel had thoroughly studied and agreed with in much, had located the “autonomous” wills of individual human beings in the noumenal realm, where it was free of the contingencies of phenomenal — material — existence. Thus it was imbued with a transcendently unfettered liberty that qualitatively exceeded even what Locke’s State of Nature provided. (David Hume had made the point that the contingencies of life within material existence in any form preclude making ‘liberty’ into ‘justice’: how people ought to act regarding one another). Similar to Kant’s approach, for Hegel we humans, who via our minds share to a degree in the consciousness of Being, also, by being imbued with wills, share to a degree in the autonomy of Being, which we perceive as ‘liberty’.

At the same time, just to get it all as straight as I can manage, Hegel was not a proponent of individualism in the way that Locke and even Kant were. Similar to Rousseau, and followed by Mill, he considered the only ‘true’ human existence to be realized in the context of coexistence with other people. Even (‘true’) liberty can only ‘be’ there.

[My understanding of Hegel’s philosophy comes primarily from Winfield’s book, along with from From Hegel to Existentialism by Robert C. Solomon.]

Equality Is All We Need

[Medium has it as a “15 min read.”]

To paraphrase Tom Paine, these are the times that try people’s brains. When he wrote his words (ending with “try men’s souls”) people were losing heart. The solution they had chosen to attempt — building the world’s first nation-state that would start out in the world with its form of government based on Liberal values — was in danger of failing.

Now the way of life those brave people ultimately succeeded in establishing is facing an unprecedented challenge. It appears to be in very real danger of collapsing. Even the Great Depression did not engender more fear of that kind for our Liberal way of life: liberty for all and democracy.

Today, we are not (yet) experiencing an acute event. We are experiencing, with growing doubt and fear, the results of accumulating stresses.

At bottom, the problem is that the foundation of our nation, our society, our Liberal way of life is crumbling. If we fail to solve that problem, collapse is inevitable.

[Postmodernists have exposed the fallaciousness of ‘foundationalism’ as a claim of universality for any moral value to govern governance. Here our concern is, at most, Liberal society where it already exists.]

To frame the problem in those terms is not mere rhetoric. Nor is it being alarmist. It is cold, hard reality.

It is axiomatic that a solution cannot be smaller than the problem is. Likewise, to render a solution to an unprecedented problem requires unprecedented thinking. A sufficient solution to the challenge we face today can only be a new idea so big and deep that virtually everyone’s first reaction will be to step back from it.

The only sufficient solution for the problem at hand is for us to reconstruct the foundation of our Liberal society. Accomplishing that task would not only preserve our way of life, however. It would allow us to take our nation to new heights of justice and well-being for all. For all of that, equality is all we need.

The foundation of our nation — of Liberal society — is Liberalism, the meta-ideology that has liberty and equality as the ‘twin pillars of justice’ for a just society. The various political ideologies within Liberalism, from libertarianism to conservatism to (political) liberalism to democratic socialism, emphasize one or the other of those values to different degrees. To be within Liberalism, though — to be a Liberal — is to recognize the necessity of both liberty and equality in the just governance of society.

We are learning how unstable as a basis for the governance of society that conceptual construct can be. The spaces between points of emphasis are becoming unbridgeable chasms.

This solution begins with a new understanding of Liberalism: equality, properly understood, creates the maximum possible liberty that co-existing human beings can share. That is why equality is, within Liberalism, all we need.

The economy presents the biggest, if not deepest gap separating Liberals. More equalitarian Liberals see accepting the outcomes of the economy for the sake of liberty as an affront to any notion of human equality. More libertarian Liberals see reconfiguring the outcomes of the economy for the sake of equality as an affront to any notion of human liberty. In this essay we’ll see how equality (properly understood) can be applied to the existing economy — with astonishing results — to close even that divide.

Despite a claim of maximum liberty, more libertarian Liberals will understandably be especially wary of this approach to Liberalism. Being Liberals, however, they most certainly do acknowledge the need for equality in a just society. For starters, equality underlies equal liberty for all. Like all other Liberals, they are in favor of political democracy; after all, liberty for all cannot be assured without it.

Like everyone else, all Liberals take democracy to be based on equality. That point of universal affinity gets us moving in the right direction.

I contend that heretofore we have failed to understand correctly the actual relationship between equality and democracy. To understand that relationship correctly is to see how equality makes liberty as a separate Liberal value superfluous.

Everyone recognizes that there are two parts to Liberal democracy: political speech and (other) political rights. Political speech falls within a broader right of freedom of speech; political rights pertain to participation in the political system per se: the rights to vote, to run for office, to petition the government, and to (peaceably) assemble (which legitimates organizing into political parties, etc.).

Of those narrower political rights, all are not granted to all citizens. Historically, voting and running for office were formally restricted even in Liberal societies on the basis of property, gender, and race at one time or another. Today, the only remaining general restriction is age. While the acceptable age for this or that form of participation in the political system is debatable, no one doubts that age itself is a legitimate restriction. (Being a felon or ‘too out of touch with reality’ are not general restrictions.)

How can discrimination based on age, even among ‘adults’ (as in the age requirements for holding various elected offices), be squared with ‘equality’? Here’s the thing: properly understood as a value for justly governing society, equality does not mean ‘the same for everyone’. It does mean that in all human relations every person’s status as a being worthy of consideration must be taken into account: respect of a basic kind.

The universality of freedom of political speech illustrates even more clearly how equality generates a requirement of respect for all citizens — i.e. all being taken into account — in the democratic political process. All are affected by the outcomes of the political process, so all must be free to participate in it.

To get to Liberal justice most broadly, let’s go from there to John Locke. He was the first Liberal. He literally wrote the book on it: Two Treatises of Government (1689). As related in Chapter One, Locke argued for human equality in the first one; for him it is in effect a precondition for a just society. In his second treatise, however, Locke explicitly has liberty as the predicate of justice: justice is liberty.

Locke famously culminated his more dialectical argument for liberty as the predicate of justice by asserting that injustice is “being subject to the arbitrary will” of another person. Therefore, the opposite of that — not being subject to the arbitrary will of another person — is justice. Since, prima facie, that is also a state of liberty, Locke concluded that liberty must be the predicate of justice.

Really, though, justice is more immediate than that. If injustice is being subject to the arbitrary will of another person, the most immediate inference for justice is that everyone is required to refrain from subjecting any other person to one’s own arbitrary will.

That is mutual respect (of a basic kind). It maximizes liberty as a practical matter. To act otherwise is to violate the precondition of a just society: equality.

Properly understood, then, liberty is the product of Liberal justice — mutual respect — not its predicate. Therefore, liberty does not have to be a separate value within Liberalism. Equality is all we need. Through its requirement of mutual respect, equality generates of itself an equal liberty for all.

The obverse does not hold. Liberty cannot of itself generate the value of equality.

Unlike equality per se, mutual respect can be positively applied to the existing economy. In short, I have discovered how, by extending mutual respect to our existing economy, we can make our nation more just, with more liberty, while making life materially better in this nation for everyone — and especially for those who have been living in poverty.

To be clear, I’m not talking about any kind of socialism. Socialism would use redistribution to achieve its goals. This proposal does not involve redistributing anything.

With this proposal we could, however, absolutely eliminate unemployment and poverty (at no cost to anyone), as well as all taxes and public debt, while making the economy self-regulating (with built-in safeguards against inflation) and increasing sustainability (even without additional regulations or any changes in behavior) — with, to be clear, still no limit on income or wealth. We could still choose to forego any of those benefits, but if we could achieve all of them without cost, why wouldn’t we?

[I do have an M.A. in economics. My Thesis was in political economy, where economics and philosophy intersect. It included an extensive “Review of the Literature” of the academic debate concerning ‘distributive justice’ that was initiated by the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. I have spent my adult life reading and studying, within academia and outside it, history, philosophy, and economics.]

How did I come up with such a startling proposal? I got there by wondering how we could have a really just economy. I looked to political democracy for a possible template.

Many people have considered, more or less rigorously, an analogous relationship between the market-based economy and democracy, money and political rights: people ‘vote’ with their money for this or that good or service over others like it. It occurred to me that political rights are necessary to participate in the political system. In the same way, money is necessary to participate in our existing economic system. [People in non-democratic nations who are arbitrarily denied political rights can still act politically, but with the potential for consequences that can be dire.]

Moreover, just as all citizens are affected by outcomes of the political process, no citizen has any choice but to participate in the economy. Even panhandling is, after all, an economic act.

Political rights (like all rights) are abstractions. That means they are absolutely free and can be shared by an unlimited number of people. To ‘distribute’ them is to place restrictions on eligibility for them. Even though the right to run for this or that office is not universally granted even to all adults, equality-based democracy is still a just process.

In pondering all that I arrived at what I call the “democratic distributive principle:” whatever is being formally distributed among its members by society must be subject to universal criteria, universally applied. To be a just criterion it must be universally applicable; to be applied justly it must be applied universally.

Age is such a criterion. That is why age is a just restriction on political rights while other historical restrictions, such as property, ‘race’ (color of skin), and gender are not. That age is a proxy for maturity (emotional stability, accumulated knowledge, etc.) is a good reason for using it as a discriminator, but the justness of age as a restriction rests on its universality. (Also, any of us can become felons or lose our fingernail hold on reality, but those are still less obvious,, more debatable restrictions than age is.)

Could that distributive principle be applied to money? For that to be possible money would have to be, like rights, available for an unlimited number of people and free.

This is where I boldly went where no one had gone before in economics. I came up with the idea of a “democratically distributed income” (DDI). It would be available for an unlimited number of people, without cost. That could be achieved by making the total of that income the supply of money (as currency) for the economy. (A DDI could be instituted, in the U.S., with a single Act of Congress.)

I realized right away that I had stumbled upon what could be a truly great idea. With much effort, I have fully developed my understanding of that idea and its implications for the economy — and for justice.

It would be possible to have a DDI that would be based solely on age. Every citizen that age or older would be eligible for the income, no matter what.

(Limiting the DDI to citizens is equivalent to limiting political rights to citizens. A legal minimum wage for non-citizens would be a separate issue. At the same time, any nation could institute a DDI, with the same results for every nation that did.)

Paying the DDI to every (adult) citizen would not solve the problem of poverty. Poverty is having an income that is insufficient relative to prices. If every adult citizen received the DDI, prices would adjust upward accordingly (absent some kind of generalized controls on prices — which the DDI most emphatically does not have — with all the issues and likelihood of ultimate failure that would entail). Relative to prices, everyone would be in the same position one was in before the DDI was established. [A tax-based universal basic income (UBI), which all such proposals in circulation today are, would have a different set of issues — with paying for it at the top of the list.]

On the subject of eliminating poverty, the amount of the DDI is something to be determined. In relating this idea, however, to eliminate poverty yet maximize its accord with existing prices I base the amount of the DDI on the current median income. Here in the U.S., for everyone being paid the DDI that would translate to, say, $15/hr.; $600/wk.; $2,600/mo. (or $2,400/mo. plus an additional annual payment of $2,400 — included with the December payment, which would be fun — to make it equal to $600/wk. for 52 weeks). That would be a tad more than the current median income for an individual in this country. If we also eliminated taxes, $600/wk. would be more like $750 or so /wk. in income, on average, today.

Again, we could continue to have poverty if we wanted it, but if we could eliminate it without cost or redistribution — or injustice — why not do that? Eliminating poverty would require restricting the distribution of the DDI, limiting eligibility for the DDI to particular categories of citizens.

Restricting the DDI to certain categories of citizens would be the equivalent of restricting the right to run for particular offices to adult citizens of particular ages. To eliminate poverty those requirements for eligibility must allow for the DDI to be available for every citizen who is at least old enough to have a job, even though all would not be paid it. (Also, it must be possible for anyone who might so choose to forego it, as anyone can forego exercising political rights). [Some democratic nations do require citizens to vote, but none require all eligible citizens to exercise every political right.]

I eventually realized that we could have a DDI that would meet all of those requirements if we had three categories of eligibility for it. The first two categories are perfectly straightforward. The third requires a bit of explaining.

The first two categories of citizens who would be eligible for the DDI would be retirees and people of working age who were too incapacitated to work any job. In short, this income would replace, in the U.S., Social Security (eliminating that whole problem).

The third category of people eligible for the DDI would be people employed in minimum-pay positions. In other words, the DDI would be the minimum income for employed citizens. It could be paid as an hourly wage or a salary, for full-time or part-time work. (Everyone being paid more than the minimum pay would continue to be paid in full by one’s employer, as at present.)

To be clear, the monetary remuneration of citizens employed in minimum-pay positions would not come from their employers. Their pay would be the DDI. (The administrator of the DDI is taken up below.)

Employers could designate any position to be a minimum-pay position, but in a free labor market they would be compelled to offer benefits to compete for minimum-pay employees. (Only in-kind benefits could be allowed, not monetary allowances). While the DDI would be the same for everyone being paid it, the value of benefits offered would reflect conditions in local labor markets.

In order to make the DDI universally available it would be necessary to guarantee a job for every citizen of working age who was able and willing to work for that income. People could choose not to work, but the only money available for them would be private charity. Also, people could be employed but poor, such as the proverbial ‘starving artist’ who labors at one’s art for (so far) meager monetary returns. More broadly, people could be ‘singularly self-employed’, i.e. anyone providing any good or service who was neither the employee nor the employer of any other person, or members of bona fide partnerships, in which shares of the profits were negotiated among the members. All of the above would earn whatever their efforts and the market would allow. Still, every person old enough and able to work who wanted a ‘regular’ job would have to be guaranteed to have a job.

That could be achieved by having government (ideally local government) as an employer of last resort. In a market-based economy, to be guaranteed a job that job must be cost-free. That means the last-resort jobs offered by government could have the DDI as pay, but could not require any additional investment or include benefits. Within those parameters, there are no particular requirements for or limitations on such jobs. Without benefits, those jobs would not increase competition for minimum-pay jobs in the rest of the labor market (though their existence would reinforce the need for employers to use benefits to compete for minimum-pay employees).

Finally, it would be as easy as not to pay the DDI to one parent or legal guardian in a home with at least one dependent child living there. The income would be the same no matter how many children were present.

Implementing that home-employment option would have a huge impact on the labor market in general, but then raising children is the second-most important job there is in civilization. (Producing food is the most important.) Anyone who has ever championed ‘family values’ would presumably be in favor of that option. [It can also be noted that, for people who are wondering how people will get paid an income in an economy so technologically advanced that the need for human beings in the production of goods and services will be greatly limited, the DDI could (eventually) be extended to two parents/guardians.]

The same process as the DDI could be used to fund government (at all levels, at the current per capita level of total government spending, forever) without taxes or public debt. It would be funded as part of the operation of the monetary system. Again, we could keep paying taxes and incurring public debt if we wanted, but we could eliminate both.

The DDI could be implemented by any central bank with a legal mandate to “minimize” unemployment commensurate with “acceptable” inflation, such as the one included in the charter of our central bank (the Federal Reserve System — the ‘Fed’). With this system in place there would be none of either. [To eliminate taxes/public debt in any nation with a central bank the law would have to be changed to allow the central bank to fund government directly.]

Another option would be to establish a new Monetary Agency. It would have no discretionary authority, but would merely administer the DDI. It would be separate from and independent of both government and the banking system. Given that in the U.S. the Social Security Administration already makes monthly payments to retirees and disabled people, it could be extracted from government to become the Monetary Agency.

So, by virtue of a better understanding of Liberal justice we can not only save, but improve our Liberal way of life. Some more equalitarian Liberals won’t like that it fails to take anything from even the ‘one percent’, but this proposal would improve all citizens’ lives materially, and the poorer one is now the greater one’s relative benefit would be. At the same time, eliminating taxes (thus reducing the presence of government in people’s lives) would increase liberty. The economy would be the one we have now, but, with a different way of supplying it with money, self-regulating and more sustainable. To that end, this monetary proposal can be considered in strictly economic terms, with no reference at all to justice. (The DDI can be called, more neutrally, an “allotted income.”) Still, whether justice were an explicit goal or not, to implement a democratically distributed income (by whatever name) would make the distribution of money in the Liberal economy as just in its structure as the distribution of political rights in Liberalism’s democratic political process has become.

Final note: My studies have taught me that the postmodernists are correct: ultimately even equality is invalid as the foundation for a just society. Unlike postmodernists, for me that is because it is a belief. It is a belief some people do not share. For those people to live in a society founded upon a belief in equality is to have that belief imposed upon them by others. That in itself violates the value of equality for all. Fortunately for equalitarians, there is a form of mutual respect for governing governance that follows from observation within material existence, not any belief. For that reason, I have come to call it ‘real justice’. That validates favoring and advocating for mutual respect as the ethic of justice and its implications for society based on a belief in equality.

Rethinking Individualism

to avert the worst disaster in the history of civilization

[Medium has it as an “8 min read.”]

In the history of civilization, Liberal society is the best humanity has ever done in culture’s most important aspect: justice. The principle of maximizing liberty for all and the existence of a democratic political process (which is necessary for liberty for all) make it so. A market-based economy will always be the inevitable result of co-existing human beings sharing liberty.

Individualism is universally acknowledged as being intrinsic to Liberalism. In “Pragmatism Against the American Grain” here in Medium, however, Laura Nelson referred to two different strains of individualism. Both are deeply embedded in Liberalism, but one has dominated culturally, especially in the U.S.

Adherents of both forms of individualism would insist that they are committed to Liberal justice. Yet, the ‘two individualisms’ define the Great Divide in our contemporary politics.

According to Nelson, C.B. McPherson referred to the form of individualism that has dominated in the U.S. as “possessive” individualism. In it the focus is on one’s own being as an individual. For its adherents justice means maximizing the independence of individuals in society.

In the other form of individualism the focus is on relations among individuals. Here I’ll call it ‘socialized’ individualism. Its adherents have (so far) failed to realize that in it justice means mutual respect (of a basic kind).

I’ll be arguing that, rationally, our political divide must be resolved in favor of socialized individualism. For that very reason, the negative consequences of its adherents’ failure to understand it correctly cannot be overstated.

That failure has led people to react negatively to socialized individualism because they have disagreed with the incorrect political-economic implications its adherents have claimed for it. In brief, proponents of socialized individualism, which coalesced politically in the U.S. as a result of the Great Depression, have favored using government to provide for individuals who are lacking ‘sufficient’ material resources. For proponents of possessive individualism that is an attack on independence that necessarily involves all members of the community (or at least all taxpayers).

That lack of understanding has thus contributed to a completely unnecessary Divide, but one that threatens to rend Liberal society asunder. That would be the most profound tragedy in the history of civilization.

I submit that when it comes to the just governance of society both sides of our Great Divide are about equally wrong. Properly understanding individualism would be real progress — an advance in justice that would transform society. We’ll see how, by re-thinking individualism, the ultimate goals that both sides of our Divide have for society can be actually achieved.

Any adherent of possessive individualism would respond that it already requires mutual respect — for persons and property. The problem there is that the case for mutual respect within the argument for possessive individualism is in fact an argument for socialized individualism.

Please give me a chance to explain.

It all goes back (way back) to John Locke. He literally wrote the book on what would become Liberalism. More than a hundred years before Adam Smith, he conceptualized that which McPherson would dub possessive individualism. [Two Treatises of Government (1689)]

For Locke, individualism starts with the “State of Nature” (whether as a hypothetical construct or as something he thought actually existed at one time he doesn’t make exactly clear). That is a state of human existence in which people live as utterly independent individuals. They could interact with one another as individuals (peacefully or not) and could engage in trade, but in the State of Nature people would not live together in groups.

Some people think of the State of Nature as merely non-civilized existence. That is incorrect. Non-civilized human beings have co-existed together in societies. People living as utterly independent individuals, in the complete absence of any formal society whatsoever, is the definitive condition of Locke’s State of Nature.

That is the source of Locke’s individualism. According to him, in forming a society of any kind people ‘surrender’ that radically individualized status; in forming societies people’s ultimate goal should therefore be to approximate as closely as possible the radically independent individualism of the State of Nature.

Although there is no society in his State of Nature, there is, Locke insists, law: the “Natural Law” (not to be confused with the ‘Law of Nature’, i.e. ‘survival of the fittest’). In one sense the Natural Law is the rules of conduct ‘written on the hearts of men by their Creator’. For Locke the Natural Law also follows, secularly, from the “Natural Rights” people would possess in the State of Nature.

Those Rights are, for Locke, life, liberty, and property. According to him, people would have those Rights, not by decree or by mutual agreement or by the Word of God, but by the conditions of existence in the State of Nature: to live as an utterly independent being would be to have life, absolute maximum liberty, and (legitimately) whatever property one could acquire through one’s own efforts and (voluntary) trade.

Locke does accept that in the State of Nature those Natural Rights, as conditions of existence, cannot successfully translate into enforceable constraints on conduct. In the end, in that situation each person could only be a law unto oneself, choosing to obey the Natural Law, to respect others’ life, liberty, and property, or not.

Locke therefore acknowledges that that in the State of Nature a person could have any of those Natural Rights only insofar as one could defend them against any other who might seek to take any of them. For Locke that is the reason humans have ‘surrendered’ the maximal liberty of the State of Nature to form societies: to make life, liberty, and property more secure.

It’s easy to see how society makes those more secure. It is also easy to see how living in a society must necessarily limit liberty compared to life in the State of Nature. So the central problem for society, in Locke’s thinking, is to maximize individuals’ independence by maximizing liberty.

First of all, for Locke liberty is a Natural Right. Within society, rather than being a condition of existence, liberty is a Right according to ‘reason’: since it would be a condition of existence for human beings in the Sate of Nature, it must be recognized as a Right people have by virtue of being human.

The plausibility of that argument, though, is dependent on Locke’s State of Nature. The fact is that we humans are social beings who have always lived together in societies (but for rare individuals who have left society, having acquired sufficient knowledge and equipment to survive outside it). So Natural Rights cannot follow, rationally, from a State of Nature in which humans did exist as radically independent beings.

Locke, though, has another argument for liberty as the condition of justice for co-existing human beings. He began by asserting that injustice is being “subject to the arbitrary will” of another person (and anyone who believes in equality, such as adherents of socialized individualism, must agree that it is). The opposite of injustice — justice — is the opposite of that condition of subordination — liberty.

So even without Natural Rights, liberty is for Locke the predicate of justice for human beings co-existing in society. Justice is liberty.

One can see how that approach to justice could be described as “possessive.” It’s all about ‘me’ and ‘mine’: my life, my property, my liberty.

Accepting the ‘rightness’ of that position can only be a matter of belief. Rationally, the problem for that radically individualistic approach to justice is that there is no place in it for constraints on liberty (people doing whatever they want) in the interest of justice.

One can assert that everyone’s liberty ‘ends at the person and property of any other human’, but that is problematic. Stated most broadly, whatever the constraints on liberty that might be formulated, the true source of justice would become, not liberty, but the constraints that would limit liberty in the interest of justice (or the source of those constraints).

It is in the second of his Treatises that Locke takes up all that has been considered to this point. The whole of the first of his Treatises is concerned with his belief in equality (which he gets from the Bible, but is a belief that can also be strictly secular).

For Locke, the recognition of human equality is in effect a precondition for justice. It is what makes justice possible. It is of course equality that, for Locke, requires all people to respect all other people’s persons and property.

Given his belief in equality, however, Locke’s own (second) argument for liberty as the predicate of justice should have instead recognized mutual respect as the predicate of justice. If injustice is being subject to the arbitrary will of any other person (because it directly violates the precondition of equality), then the most immediate inference for justice is that everyone must refrain from subjecting any other person to one’s own “arbitrary will.”

That is mutual respect. Mutual respect is the ethic of the socialized form of individualism. It is all about recognizing one’s fellow human beings and taking them into account in the course of living life in coexistence with other human beings.

Although there is no limit there on how justly one might act, i.e. how much one might take others into account, at a minimum mutual respect means refraining from, in Locke’s terms, subjecting any other person to one’s own arbitrary will. As the minimum condition of justice, that maximizes liberty in society as a practical matter. Properly understood, then, liberty is the product of justice, not its predicate.

Adherents of the socialized form of individualism have invariably appealed to a belief in equality to advocate for achieving (or at least ‘moving towards’) ‘social justice’ — most broadly, under the rubric of ‘democratic socialism’. Traditionally, they have focused on unemployment and, especially, poverty. Of late they seem to have settled on ‘inequalities in income/wealth’ for their focus.

All of that is incorrect. In making their case, they point, explicitly or implicitly, to the justness of political democracy based on equality.

Political democracy is a just social process. Yet, they are wrong.

The justness of democracy does not come directly from equality, but from the mutual respect implied by equality — the same mutual respect that would maximize liberty as a practical matter. That same mutual respect can be applied to the economic system (through a ‘democratically distributed income’) and as a result make the existing economy completely self-regulating (with built-in safeguards against inflation) while providing the means to eliminate unemployment (at no cost to anyone), poverty (without having to redistribute anything), taxes (of all kinds), and public debt (at all levels of government) — and increasing sustainability (even without additional regulations). [For the economic implications of these ideas, go to “My Final Answer’ (below).]

Differences in income/wealth, however large, are not of themselves an issue of justice (though I personally believe that wealth co-existing with poverty is immoral). That same democratically distributed income could be extended to eliminate exploitation, but even then differences in income/wealth of any size could exist. Either way (eliminating exploitation or not), totally eradicating the social ills of unemployment and poverty (along with taxes and public debt, while increasing sustainability in a self-regulating economy) would be a product of justice, not the definition of a truncated aspect of it.

To realize justice completely, mutual respect as the ethic of justice must be divorced from beliefs altogether, to include a belief in equality. Otherwise, establishing it as the ethic for governing the governance of society inevitably becomes a matter of some imposing their beliefs on others. That is a violation of mutual respect, whatever its source.

Better Governance Requires Leaving Ideology Behind

and egoism — and recognizing the legitimate limit of theology

[Medium has it as a “12 min read.”]

Ideology was purposely developed to replace theology — and egoism — in the governance of society with a rational approach to that unavoidable human task. It delivered an approach to governance based on secular beliefs rather than sacral beliefs, the bases of theologies. [All that follows refers to an ‘approach to governance’, to include ‘organizing principles’, not political arguments centering on particular policies or programs to be adopted (or not) for any particular community/society/nation-state.]

Both theologies and ideologies, being bodies of thought, are conceptual constructs. Building such things upon a non-rational basis — foundation — i.e., with one or more beliefs as starting points, means that the whole of any such thing is ultimately non-rational.

The upshot is that ideologies can be no more rational than theologies are. Non-rational is not the same thing as irrational (though the former must always be present in the latter). Accepting (or rejecting, for that matter) any belief, however, be it secular or sacral, is in the end, as Soren Kierkegaard put it (though referring specifically to sacral beliefs), a “leap of faith.”

That does not make beliefs invalid. Indeed, all beliefs (including irrational beliefs) are absolutely valid — true — for whoever holds any belief.

It does, however, make all beliefs purely personal truths. Any belief is only valid for whoever happens to accept one. Rationally, no other person can be expected to abide by — act on the basis of — any belief of any person. [Yet, it is the case that beliefs — secular or sacral — can legitimately inform individuals’ participation in a democratic political process, including lawmaking as part of it (beyond the scope of this effort, but addressed in the linked article, below).]

The problem for ideology as an approach to governance is obvious: the organizing principle(s) of society are not shared by all of the members of any (civilized) society. That sets up society for either endless conflict of a fundamentalist kind or a totalitarianism, in which one viewpoint is forced upon all of society. [Non-civilized societies have enjoyed a uniformity in that regard, with an organizing principle of ‘one for all and all for one’, but no civilized society ever has or ever could emulated that kind of universality; that principle follows for those societies from the very material conditions — sheer survival — that civilization was ‘invented’ to overcome.]

Four ideological traditions have developed in Modern times. [‘Definitions’ given herein are not claimed to be the ‘final word’, only feasible descriptions for present purposes.] Liberalism (referring to the meta-ideology, not specifically the political ideology) is based on a belief in human ‘equality’ (in some sense) and the existence of a priori ‘Rights’, such as ‘Natural Rights’, most pointedly including a ‘Right to liberty’. Marxism, despite Marx’s claim that it is “scientific,” takes equality as the organizing principle of society to a logical endpoint. (“Exploitation” cannot be ‘wrong’ without a belief in ‘equality’.) Fascism, in whatever guise, is based on a belief in the inherent superiority of some particular group of people. (The authoritarianism we are witnessing today in many nations, which is often incorrectly labeled as ‘Fascism’, is actually egoistic demagoguery.) Nationalism is a belief in the inherent superiority of a particular nation-state. (‘Love of country’, which has always had an element of chauvinism, to say the least, was encouraged as part of the development of Modern nation-states, but Nationalism developed in the 1800’s, mostly as a misappropriation of Darwin’s ideas.) Nationalism is closely related to Fascism in one sense, but in the latter the supposed source of superiority is not a mere geopolitical unit, a nation-state (though one of those can be claimed as the ‘homeland’ of the most special group), but something more essential, e.g. the Nazis’ focus on ‘blood’/’race’, a ‘nation’ as a fundamentally related group of people — hyper-culturally if not biologically.

It is possible for any of those beliefs to be sacral, with reference to some spiritual realm, or essence, or other thing. They can also be secular, with no reference to any spiritual anything. If sacral, such beliefs are appendages on a system of belief that has a ‘higher’ source. It is as secular beliefs that they are the bases — foundations — of ideologies.

All of that does cause many people to confuse their ideology with their theology (and vice versa). It does suggest, however, that ideologies do have a potential for universality that theologies lack. Ideologies are — or at least can be — open to both sacralists (of any tradition) and secularists, whereas a theology excludes both secularists and sacralists of any other tradition. Of course, many people hold both secular and sacral beliefs and individuals can borrow from different theologies and ideologies — but therein lies the potential for confusion. The point is that, while any theology or ideology, being an abstraction, could possibly become universal — be shared by all people — ideologies don’t (necessarily) have the intrinsic exclusivity that theologies have. As an example, Marx was vehemently atheistic, but a sacralist can still be against exploitation and in favor of a Marxist society(/world) — understanding that the old Soviet Union had about as much in common with Marx’s idea of a communist society as Stalin, as a person, had in common with Winston Churchill or President Roosevelt.

All of that is important because the potential of ideologies for universality contributed mightily to misleading thinkers of yesteryear into thinking that ideologies are rational (besides simply insisting that this or that personal truth was ‘universal’). That is a categorical error that postmodernists have perpetuated (below).

All of those ideological traditions developed in Europe. The development of ideology came after the development of Modern science on that continent (in its basics as an intellectual process, at least). The two are not unrelated.

People in Europe were driven to thinking about a definitive answer to the question of how society should be governed by the political strife that had plagued that continent for centuries. Kings/Queens and Popes, with their representatives, all vied incessantly for the power to rule (over as much of the world as possible). Then came the ‘Reformation’, followed inevitably by the ‘Counter-Reformation’. Egoism and religious beliefs (always impossible for any observer to distinguish) had infected Europe with never-ending political violence of every stripe. Some alternative was seen to be desperately needed. [The first of the four ideological traditions, Liberalism, was developed by John Locke during England’s comparatively not-so-violent but long-lived transition (almost a half-century) from an all-but-absolute monarchy to a strong and independent Parliament (which included along the way the world’s first Modern dictatorship, Cromwell’s ‘Protectorate’).]

The obvious rationality of science suggested that rationality could offer a path to determining, once and for all, how society ought to be governed. Above all, science was secular, not sacral. It was seen to lead to objective truths, which, because they were objective, as opposed to the subjective — personal — truths of egoism and religious beliefs, were universally valid for all people. So: secular = rational = objective = universal.

The thinkers who brought ideology into the world failed to recognize the existence of secular beliefs in their thinking that, being non-rational beliefs, could be no more ‘objective’ than religious beliefs — or egoism — could be. Governance remained subject to personal truths.

Postmodernists insist that they (led by Jacques Derrida) have rendered that transitive sequence (above) invalid by recognizing the impossibility of ‘objectivity’, thus making universality regarding any organizing principle impossible. Yet, while it is the case that no human being can ever be purely objective, i.e., totally free of subjective influences, we do perceive a material — objective, in that sense — existence. Experiences of that existence can be necessarily universal.

Still, the impossibility of ‘objectivity’ has led postmodernists to reject ‘foundationalism’ in itself: since universality (in the sense of being necessarily universal) is (therefore) impossible for any and all ideologies (and theologies), to put forth any organizing principle for society is to place it in an arbitrarily ‘privileged’ position. Postmodernists have failed to see that it is beliefs as the foundations of both ideologies and theologies that makes both of those kinds of constructs purely personal truths that can only obtain a foundational status for society by being arbitrarily ‘privileged’ over any other truths.

In short, postmodernists are right about the inadequacy of ideology as an approach to governance, but for the wrong reasons. Even so, all of that does suggest that an approach to governance following from a universal (and universally verifiable) experience of material existence would be universally valid: valid for any and every human being. Its being an organizing principle would therefore not be a matter being arbitrarily privileged. [Even if more than one possible organizing principle could be found to follow from material existence, rational arguments could be employed for a society to decide which principle to adopt — rational persuasion, not the sheer “contests of power” (from Michel Foucault) that differing beliefs inspire.]

Meanwhile, Critical Theory (in its initial iteration, as developed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno starting in the 1940’s) recognized the totalitarian potential in all ideologies — but failed to see that it is the presence of beliefs as the foundations of ideologies that generates that ‘totalizing’ impetus. Even Liberalism, it turns out, is not immune. Many people are convinced that contemporary ‘critical theory’ seems bent on demonstrating the totalitarian potential of a belief in equality. At the same time, the newfangled ‘conservatism’ abroad in the U.S., especially in its religious manifestation, appears to be working its way toward making liberty a basis of a totalitarian form of governance, by establishing some criterion for ‘legitimate’ access to liberty (such as, say, professing to be a Christian).

Eventually ideology (aided and abetted by advances in technology related to warfare) fueled violence in Europe on a scale, geographically and humanly, that dwarfed anything that had gone before it. WWI was the product Nationalism. WWII was a three-way between Fascism, Marxism, and Liberalism. The ‘Cold War’ between Marxism and Liberalism that followed WWII enveloped the entire planet and very nearly triggered on more than one occasion a thermonuclear exchange in which any sliver of humanity that might have survived would have been ‘bombed back to the Stone Age’ (a threat often leveled, especially back then, at any opponent of America).

So ideology failed to deliver a rational approach to the governance of society. Yet, people are completely convinced that at least one ideological tradition — the one to which they adhere — is rational. Given the failures in governance and the crimes against humanity associated with all four ideological traditions, the association in people’s minds of ideology with rationality has given rationality itself a bad name — something postmodernists seem to be certain they can’t overstate. Moreover, the adherents of any ideology are totally convinced that its supposed rationality makes the belief(s) on which it is based not mere personal truths, but undeniably universal truths that it is just plain morally wrong to deny (the starting point for sacralists regarding their beliefs). For sure, there are ranges of intensity of adherence for both ideologists and theologists. Even so, any insistence of any person(s) on the rationality of any belief(s) or belief-based conceptual construct can be nothing but self-delusion (at best — and a vehicle for lusting after power at worst).

If its foundation in beliefs renders ideology null and void as an approach to governance that is ‘better than’ theology or even egoism, what is left to say about those?

In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari insists that there is no meaningful difference between ideology and theology because, essentially, both are all about personal beliefs. His thesis and the one being related here agree obviously to a point, but, as already suggested above, those two kinds of conceptual constructs are also very different. Besides the difference between secular and sacral, one meaningful difference between ideologies and theologies is the differing focus of the two. In the former the focus is on relations among people within society as a whole; the latter focus on the individual.

To be sure, both theologies and ideologies have implications for individuals and societies. It is a matter of emphasis.

Still, a focus on individuals makes theologies compatible with the strictly rational approach to governance related in the linked article (still below). Governance includes self-governance, people taking it upon themselves to act as they should. For individuals, this strictly rational approach to governance boils down to five absolute prohibitions regarding our actions in seeking whatever we want in this world: no killing, harming, coercing, stealing, or manipulating (which includes lying, cheating, etc.). This author knows of no theology that would reject any of those prohibitions. So long as theologies stuck to a focus on individuals, they and this strictly rational approach to governance could readily coexist (reiterating that beliefs — sacral and secular — can legitimately inform individuals’ participation in a democratic political process).

There would, however, be no place for egoism. Egoism is not the same thing as egotism.

The latter is bad enough. It involves a sense of superiority usually following from some very real manifestation of being far above average, as in intelligence or some other ability or talent, which then gets translated into a generalized sense of superiority. Beyond simply making a person unpleasant to be around, it can itself lead people to disregard other people’s persons and interests, which can lead to particular acts that are unjust: violate the prohibitions noted above.

Egotism is not a necessary precursor for egoism, but it certainly morph into egoism. A person infected with egoism is convinced of a kind of superiority that transcends egotism. Such a person believes that any thought or ‘feeling’ — intuition — or any other product of that person’s subjective self is, due to its source, an absolute truth. For sure, such a person can be completely mediocre (or less) in any respect. In more recent history Hitler and Mussolini are prime examples of egoism. That they are associated with ideologies exemplifies how those can be used as vehicles for egoism. As noted above, the contemporary rise of authoritarianism is an outbreak of egoism (one that hardly ever references ideology — or theology).

As also noted above, there is functionally no difference between egoism and any belief-infused ‘will to power’ (to borrow a phrase from Friedrich Nietzsche). For that matter, since the only reason any belief is true is a person’s (non-rational) acceptance of the belief, to insist that other people must accept our beliefs because they are ‘true’ is actually a form of egoism.

What we need is a strictly rational approach to governing the governance of society, one that is not egoism and does not involve any belief(s). In this article* such an approach to governance is related as an advance in Liberalism — because that is the only ideological tradition to attempt to put justice first. Really, it is an advance from Liberalism. It leaves behind that belief-based approach the governance of society — as well as all belief-based approaches to it, including any sacral ones. The truth of it can only be the result of rationality, not a leap of faith or egoistic (or even egotistic) insistence upon the truth of it.

Albert Einstein was not being egoistical or egotistical when he announced that, as it turns out, “Energy equals Mass multiplied by a constant (the speed of light) squared.” Neither is it egoistical or egotistical to ‘announce’ that, as it turns out, justice follows from the observation (from Warren J. Samuels) within that same (perceived) material existence that human beings have no choice but to effect choices, i.e., choose among perceived alternatives and take action to bring that choice to fruition.

That makes choosing integral to being human. That makes justice people’s respecting one another’s capacity to choose, beginning with anyone’s choosing whether/how/to what extent to be involved whenever any choice is being effected.

That this ethic will not possibly be recognized by all people, or even fully realized at all times and in all places by people who do recognize it, does not invalidate it as an ethic or a universally valid organizing principle for society that ought to be realized whenever and wherever that would be possible. We’re not talking about a Utopia, but ‘only’ a better — more just — community/society/nation-state/world. A demonstrably universally valid organizing principle trumps, if you will, any organizing principle that isn’t demonstrably universally valid.

For all that, any existing Liberal society that came to be governed by this ‘New Liberalism’ (not to be confused with neoliberalism) would not look any different. It would have the same institutional structure. Yet, while the institutional structure of the society would not change, its functioning — its effects on people — would be transformed, especially in the economy. Liberty would be maximized — but as a product of justice, not its source, or foundation, etc. For justice, ‘equality’ would be rendered an unnecessary complication: all that would matter for justice is that the beings involved were humans.

As an approach to governing society this conception of justice necessarily has implications for individuals, the political process, and the economy. It is vitally important that, because it is strictly rational, this approach to justly governing governance is self-limiting to and within those areas of human existence. It does not contain any impetus towards totalitarianism.

This approach to just governance involves no belief at any point. Obviously, it has nothing to do with egoism. It would deliver for humanity that which ideology promised but failed to deliver.

Logic, Validity, Truth, Verifiability, Rationality

and the implications for justice

[Medium has it as a “15 min read.”]

I have been pondering for some time the connection between materiality and rationality. That has been prompted by my claim to have developed an approach to justice that is “strictly rational” because the whole of it (i.e., both its determinant and its referents) is contained within “(perceived) material existence.” That is to say, unlike any approach to justice ever proffered before this one, it does not involve even one subjective truth.

In an exceptional article here in Medium (“How Formal Logic Can Make You A Better Thinker”), Diana Cariun wrote an introduction to formal logic as a branch of philosophy. Upon reflection, the distinction she makes there between “valid” and “true” provided me the understanding I sought.

As Cariun explained, “valid” means that there is a logically sound chain of reasoning from a premise to a conclusion. It is important that the premise itself is irrelevant as far as an argument’s being valid is concerned. All that matters for validity is the logical soundness of the argument itself. Whether the result of a chain of reasoning is true or not depends on, in addition to logical soundness, the truth of the premise.

[I thank Cariun for her contribution to my understanding of these matters; for better or worse the rest of this essay is my own thinking. I do not claim to be the first person to have any of the following thoughts, and I manifestly acknowledge that I have been influenced by my extensive reading and conversations with other people, cited or not, including philosophy and philosophical concerns. I am merely relating here my own thinking on these matters.]

So, the issue becomes what can count as ‘true’ and how that relates to rationality — and justice.

There are two kinds of truths. They used to be referred to as “subjective” and “objective.” Postmodernists, led by Jacques Derrida, have (as far as I am concerned) rendered ‘objective truths’ obsolete. They have successfully made the case that no person can engage in any path of reasoning that is uninfluenced, if unconsciously, by subjective factors.

“Subjective” truths still exist. Those can be consciously delineated or not. Such truths can be unconscious — unrecognized — prejudices and biases (for or against) of which we are completely unaware. Still, subjective truths can also be consciously delineated — or occupy a vague space between those two mental states. In their vaguer form such truths can be intuitions, ‘feelings’, a ‘sense of things’, etc. In their most ‘concrete’ form such truths are beliefs. (Besides subjective truths, other — usually entangled — subjective factors that influence us include sheer egoism/egotism, lust for power, sexual desire, desire for ‘status’, greed, fear, aesthetics, a desire to ‘do good’ — itself subjectively determined — etc.)

So a belief is a concretely formed subjective truth. In my experience, the implications of such a truth might not be thought all the way through (usually will not be — perhaps cannot be). Still, that truth is there to be applied at any time, in any place, regarding any matter (deemed by the believer to be) related to it.

Beliefs can be sacral or secular. An example of the former is a belief in God (a belief of mine). An example of the latter is a (non-sacral) belief in ‘human equality’ (also a belief of mine) — as is a (non-sacral) belief that there are groups of humans who are inherently superior(/inferior) beings, such that merely being a member of such a group makes a person a superior(/inferior) being, no matter what. Whether sacral or secular, all beliefs are the same thing: concretely formed subjective truths.

Beliefs are a form of knowledge. Indeed, they are the most certain form of knowledge it is possible for a person to obtain. That’s because our beliefs become knowledge when we accept them as truths. It is our acceptance of them that makes our beliefs ‘true knowledge’.

None of that makes beliefs in any way illegitimate. It does render them non-rational and purely personal.

As Soren Kierkegaard put it, a belief (though he referred specifically to sacral beliefs) is a “leap of faith.” That applies as well to secular beliefs because it denotes the non-rational process involved in accepting any belief (or not?). We can logically reason our way to a belief, but committing to any belief cannot be a rational decision. Even if we accept a belief after we have thought about it for some time, that can still only be, at the very end, an extra-rational subjective act. We do not rationally decide to accept a belief; we find that we have accepted it. [We can rationally reject a belief because it is non-rational, but since we all have beliefs (must all, for one thing, believe in either equality or inherent, intrinsic superiority/inferiority among human beings), that is a blatantly — stupidly — illogical thing to do.]

So here’s a thing: conclusions that have subjective truths as premises can be not only valid, but true for those who accept the truth of the premise — yet must always be non-rational. A non-rational premise cannot produce a rational conclusion. It can be logically valid, but it can’t be rational. Consider, ‘God exists, so . . .’ or, ‘People are equal, so . . .’ . The status of the conclusion as rational or not is irrevocably tied to the status of the premise in that regard. No amount or degree of logic between a premise and a conclusion can sever that tie, transform an argument following from a non-rational premise into something rational.

That has vast implications for justice. Not only Liberalism, but the whole of the ‘Enlightenment project’ (late 1700’s) as it pertained to how society should be governed — ideology itself — was based on the presumption that non-rational subjective truths (if secular) could be a source of rational conclusions. For the thinkers involved in that “project,” ‘secular’ was equated with ‘rational’ (and ‘sacral’ with non-rational, at best). [Karl Marx (middle 1800’s) famously insisted that his ideology was strictly rational, that it did follow from an ‘objective’ premise, but I insist that he was the penultimate equalitarian, dressing that premise in the garb of ‘scientific’: without a belief in equality, how can “exploitation” be ‘wrong’? (Besides that, there are other arguments against the supposedly ‘scientificness’ of Marx’s ideology).]

To invoke postmodernists’ favorite word, it is ironic that postmodernists have perpetuated that fundamental error. As far as I am aware, no postmodernist has recognized that ideologies are the products of reasoning from (secular) non-rational premises. All of them continue to insist that ideologies are a huge part of ‘the rational’ that has ‘de-humanized’ our existence. No religious fundamentalist can surpass a postmodernist in equating our human capacity for rationality with ingrained evil.

While, as noted above, objective truths, as conclusions following from a chain of reasoning, are not possible, I perceive that I exist in a material reality: an objective — physical — “phenomenal,” as Immanuel Kant put it — realm. I have a material existence that transpires within an ‘objectscape’ — one that includes other beings similar enough to me that I perceive us to be ‘of the same kind’: human beings. What follows is addressed as conveying any truth only to those who share that same perception.

The perceived objective realm is not a product of the subjective self. The existence of printed words — including texts we cannot even begin to understand but that other people can — proves that things are perceived that are not the product of the subjective self. For that matter, since people act on the basis of our perceptions, to include a material existence external to us (which includes other human beings) that acts upon us and is acted upon by us with ‘real’ effects, whether or not the objective realm we perceive is in fact external to our subjective selves is in the end beside the point.

Statements about that objective realm can be true or false. They are true if they coincide with what is experienced in that realm. In that more limited sense, then, objective truths still exist.

Even then, our subjective selves can influence what we even perceive. If we start reasoning from those truths to their implications, the influence of subjective factors increases with every argumentative step we take. That is especially significant regarding their implications for other people, and most especially significant regarding their implications for justice — how we humans ought to treat one another.

Still, such objective truths have something no subjective truth can ever have: verifiability. Verifiability comes from an experience of a truth that comes from outside our subjective selves. So verifiability ties rationality to materiality.

That tells us that we can only be truly rational when we are referencing objective truths (in that narrower sense). We learn of such a truth by experiencing it for ourselves or accepting an account of an experience of it of some other person(s).

Such verifiability comes from our senses. It is those shared capacities for experiencing materiality that allow us to hold truths in common. We can know how another person knows an objective truth. Most importantly for justice, it allows us to identify truths that are common to all human beings.

No subjective truth can be verified in that way. Regarding any and every subjective truth, we only have a believer’s ‘word’ to ‘take’ for it. Any number of people can hold the same subjective truth, but for every one of them accepting it is as a truth is a unique, personal event. All subjective truths exist as a separate, personal truth for each and every person who accepts one of them. They lack the commonality that learning through the senses we have in common about a realm of existence that we all perceive we share in common provides.

A subjective truth can also originate outside a person’s consciousness. (I have had an experience of such a truth myself.*) Such truths can even relate to material existence. Yet, the truths themselves are irrevocably subjective — profoundly personal.

Objective truths can be of a kind that verifying them requires particular education/training and/or equipment. Yet, there are objective truths that are universally verifiable among human beings.

Verifiability is most important when it comes to proffering an ethic: a rule to govern relations among people. If such a rule is — or follows from — a subjective truth, then people can reasonably or rationally reject it for any reason or no reason. No one can reasonably or rationally expect anyone who does reject any subjective truth to abide by it or any implications of it. No matter how vociferously any number of people might insist on such a truth, anyone can still reject it without being the least bit unreasonable, much less irrational. To reject a (sufficiently verified) objective truth (in that narrower sense) on the other hand, is not only unreasonable, not just non-rational, but is irrational: crazy: insane: lunacy.

[Of course, in the end each individual has the power to pronounce any proposed objective truth to be sufficiently verified or not. We are considering, however, a real material existence that has real affects on people. To act in ways that are contrary to truths about that reality is to court real harm — for oneself and others, including the unborn. It would surely be reasonable to apply ‘Pascal’s bet’ to matters pertaining to that existence: the greater the potential threat, the more reasonable it is to err on the side of precaution.]

We do experience that part of our material existence involves living in a group with other people. Keeping in mind that an ethic can be any kind of rule, some ethic will necessarily inform how any society will be governed — will govern the governance of society (often referred to as an ‘organizing principle’). Over the course of human history, and especially since the emergence of civilizations, ‘rule by the most ruthless’ has often been the ethic — rule — governing the governance of society. It might even be considered to be the ‘default value’ to which human societies revert in the absence of any other organizing principle.

Why that should be the rule for governing governance is no more verifiable than a rule based on equality is. To govern governance on the basis of any subjective truth means that it must be imposed on those who do not accept it as a truth. That puts coercion at the very core of any such society — including one that bases governance (in whole or in part) on ‘equality’.

All of that gets us to ‘arbitrariness’. A long, long time ago (1689) John Locke published Two Treatises of Government. In it he had equality as a kind of precondition for a just society — one that would maximize liberty consistent with upholding equality (such that “one [person’s] liberty” famously “ends at the person or property of any other [person]”). Most importantly for this effort, he famously defined injustice as “being subject to the arbitrary will” of any other person(s).

In all the reading I have done on the topic of ethics/justice, I have never encountered anyone disputing that definition. I definitely would not. Indeed, I would go further: in human relations, arbitrariness is injustice.

All of the preceding disputation leads to the conclusion that every person’s subjective truths are arbitrary from the point of view of any other person. Therefore, to make any subjective truth the foundation for governing the governance of a society is to introduce arbitrariness into that governance at the very start. Yet again, that includes the subjective truth of ‘equality’.

To arrive at an ethic to govern the governance of society that avoids such arbitrariness can only be accomplished by having an observation within material existence — an objective truth (in the narrower sense noted previously) — as a starting point for it. To reject a sufficiently verified objective truth is every bit as arbitrary as accepting a subjective truth is (from the point of any other person). To reject a universally verifiable objective truth is the apotheosis of (mental/intellectual) arbitrariness.

Yet, the place of arbitrariness in injustice followed, for Locke, from a belief in equality. As noted above, he had that as a precondition for a just society. To start from there to work towards what justice must be is no more free of arbitrariness than to start with equality itself and go to any conceptual construct of justice would be. Still, arbitrariness can stand as a reasonable standard for assessing injustice/justice — as long as it is not the starting point, the premise from which any valuations of just/unjust follow. It can’t be the starting point for justly governing governance, but it can serve as a handy corollary.

As Locke accurately emphasized, we humans are by our nature “separate and independent” beings. As noted above, though, we are also at the same time social beings: we live together in groups. That makes governance integral to being human: we have no choice but to accept that governance must be part of our existence as humans (except for those extremely rare individuals who choose to live outside society in any form, as isolated individuals). For any and all human beings living with others in a group, we only have one fundamental choice: either governance will be governed by some arbitrary subjective truth or it will be governed by an objective truth (in the narrower sense noted previously). If it is universally verifiable, can be verified by any human being, such a truth cannot be at all arbitrary.

The ‘utilitarians’ (Jeremy Bentham, et al., who were a part of the ‘Enlightenment project’) thought they had arrived at such an ethic: do whatever accomplishes the greatest happiness/good for people. Their approach, however, depended on the subjective truths of ‘good’ or ‘happiness’ (or any equivalent term anyone might substitute for those).

Here is an observation within material existence that is a ‘pure’ objective truth: human beings have no choice but to effect choices. That is, we cannot avoid choosing from among perceived alternatives and taking action to bring that choice to fruition. Those choices can range from the trivial, such as when/what to eat, or what to do for entertainment, etc., to the life-defining, such as whether/whom to marry, whether to have children, what to do about education or a career, etc. [I got that from Warren J. Samuels in “Welfare Economics, Property, and Power,” his contribution to a compilation of scholarly essays in Perspectives of Property, edited by Gene Wunderlich and W. L. Gibson (1972): for economists, “welfare economics” refers to ‘externalities’, factors not taken into account in the classic ‘free market’ economic model, such as pollution and, yes, poverty — among others, such as, Samuels argued, ‘power’ as it applies to the economy (producing/acquiring goods/services), which is always nothing but effecting choices and in which property is, to say the least, a major source of power.]

The thing is, to be a human being is to be required to effect choices. If we are conscious, we are always effecting a choice: doing what we are doing rather than anything else we could be doing. Even when we are asleep, we have (usually) chosen to (try to) go to sleep — and designated a time to be awakened.

We all face constraints on the choices we can effect. Those constraints can be greater or lesser from person to person and from time to time, and in all manner of ways, especially regarding any particular choice one person or another might seek to effect. That part of all this was Samuels’s focus.

For me, the very fact that we have no choice but to effect choices stood out as a starting point for an ethic. As part of that process, we all have a capacity to choose. Again, we all face constraints on the choices we can effect, but a capacity to choose among perceived alternatives is something all human beings have. That is to say, a capacity to choose is part of what it is to be a human being: it is integral to being human.

So, to recognize one another as fellow humans we must respect one another’s capacity to choose. To act otherwise is to assert by our actions that some difference in status exists: superiority/inferiority — or even whether the other being is (fully) human. To justify any such conduct can only be done with reference to some subjective truth.

A person might think that what we have here is a rational justification of equality, but regarding justice that would be a categorical mistake. For justice, equality is an unnecessary complication. All that matters for justice is that the beings involved are humans.

That is why justice is tied inextricably to recognizing one another as fellow humans. It can be expressed as the predicate of justice: to act justly is to recognize one another as fellow humans (by recognizing one another’s capacity to choose) and to recognize one another as fellow humans (in that way) is to act justly. (Compare with ‘justice is liberty’: is liberty — people doing what they want — justice?) [Here in Medium Dr. Douglas Giles, Ph.D., has written about the work of Axel Honneth and Cillian McBride, who also have “recognizing one another” as the centerpiece of ethical conduct, but ultimately tracing back to a belief in equality.]

Others’ being as humans is an objective truth. It cannot be rationally — or even reasonably — rejected (or ignored). No one can deny the applicability of this ethic of justice (a requirement to respect the capacity of all people to choose) to any human being, including oneself: either its obligations or its protections.

Of course, before now human beings have not had the option of an ethic to govern governance that follows from a universally verifiable observation within (perceived) material existence. While this approach to justice is in that most meaningful way a departure from all previous attempts at justice, it shares a basic value that is common in them, as related in “An Idea That’s Time Has Come?” (above): mutual respect

In all previous cases a ‘requirement’ of mutual respect has followed from a subjective truth (whether sacral or secular). Here — one more time — a requirement of respect is bound up in the objective truth that we humans have no choice but to effect choices. No ethic following from a subjective truth can bring true, rational — real — justice to any society. Only an ethic following from a (narrower) objective truth can accomplish that.

[The implications of this approach to justice for the governance of society are in “A New Liberalism” (below). It is worth noting here and now that for Liberal nations society would ‘look’ the same. Equality would be rendered superfluous, but liberty would be maximized — as the product of justice, however, not its source, or foundation, or predicate, etc. ‘Individualism’, recognizing that we are by our nature separate and independent beings, would still be a large part of the governance of society, but it would not be the grossly self-centered individualism of Liberalism as we have known it. Those nations would retain their existing institutional structure, even in the economy, but the functioning of those institutions — their affects on people — would be transformed, especially in the economy.]

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*For readers who are curious, I experienced a ‘visitation’ by spirit-beings. As a result of that experience I was given to understand three things. Two of them related to purely personal matters. The third related, strangely enough (because it was not a matter I had ever debated subjectively), to equality as it pertains to men and women: I was given to understand that there is no hierarchical arrangement between the two as far as God is concerned, but both are equal in their relation to God. Whether that is something new or has always been the case was not a part of what I was given to understand.

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

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. (I saw somewhere that 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 at this writing) 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” (below).]

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 last article in this ‘booklet’ relates an idea for improving democracy.]

The Economy

I relate a paradigm that would make the economy more just (among other good things) in “My Final Answer” (two articles below). 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 previous 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 “My Final Answer” (below), 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.

To reiterate, making the economy more just in the paradigm I developed 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 would have a far ‘better’ economy — most importantly, far more just economy — than any civilized society has ever had.

Towards the “Star Trek” Economy

Seriously.

[Medium has it as a “6 min read.”]

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 (actually, in Star Trek, ‘beamed’ to the destination). 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’ [“My Final Answer” (below)] 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 of 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 — increased sales, increasing market share, 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 it exceeded existing incomes. Up to that point, it would be replacing existing incomes. It is obvious, at any rate, that the DDI would have to start low and be raised gradually to allow supply to adjust to increasing overall demand over time. To reiterate, the presence of significant benefits would free income for other expenditures, which, again, is another reason the DDI would have to be raised gradually. The affects on prices of increased benefits in themselves would be more complicated, but certainly something that would have to be take into account. Reducing taxes, which would also increase disposable income, would also have to be done gradually to prevent inflation. The whole process could have to be paused on occasion if inflation started to occur. As long as inflation was kept under control, however, the final level of the DDI could be (carefully) adjusted to account for any inflation that had occurred during the transition.

Domestically, once the paradigm was in place consumption, therefore prices, 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 Proposal for Improving Democracy

promoting more purposive participation in politics

[Medium has it as a “15 min read.”]

[The U.S., where this author has always lived, is used for illustrative purposes.]

There is no shortage of ideas for improving how elections are conducted in democratic nations. When to vote, how to vote, how votes get counted, and the criteria for determining winners of elections are all matters of concern. All such suggestions are attempts at improving the electoral process as an end in itself and with the expectation that participation in elections will be encouraged, and democracy thereby strengthened.

As beneficial as such proposals could be, this proposal is not about any of that. Rather, it is a call to improve democracy itself by making the political process in representative democracies, whether republics or parliamentarian systems or an amalgam of both, more directly democratic. This proposal would increase the opportunities for running for (national) office as well as more meaningful, impactful participation of other kinds in the political process, including perhaps influencing national legislation.

[For present purposes, the political process is defined as ‘the process of effecting choices for the community as a whole’ — be it a book club or a nation-state — choosing what to do and taking action to accomplishing it.]

In any democracy all citizens are free to express their thoughts, beliefs, and opinions and they have the rights to vote, run for office, (peaceably) assemble, and petition the government — except for restrictions that are ‘democratic’: universally applicable and universally applied (with age being the only inarguably universal restriction). Yet, only a paltry few people are in a position as an individual to have an impact on the outcomes of the political process. In the U.S., especially, much of that is due to the influence of money: rich people and the representative of large corporations are invited into the inner sanctum of the political process; for anyone else, the only way to impact directly political outcomes is to be one of the handful elected to public office. The informal but very real constraints on achieving that end (many having to do with money) are well-known to all. (Working up to being a ‘senior aide’ to an elected official is another way to have some influence, but aides are hired based on conformity with the attitudes and goals of their employers.)

For most people, to make any attempt at getting elected to public office or having any meaningful impact on outcomes in the political process requires first becoming a member of a political party. Also, political parties do serve many other functions, many of them positive, in the political process. In general, they are a conduit for participating in the political process in ways that do go beyond expressing opinions and voting for whoever happens to be on the ballot. Still, unless a person is one of the few people with influence on the choices the party opts to seek to effect, that level of participation does not amount to much more than anything any other citizen can do. Moreover, political parties have negative impacts on the political process that can easily exceed their positive impacts. They are sources of friction, internally and among parties, that is added to the already fraught process of effecting choices for any community as a whole. The party in itself — and a person’s place in it — can become more important to members of it than the best interests of the community are.

While political parties do serve as vehicles for people to participate in the political process, that participation is especially limited by the very nature of the parties in the U.S. The two major parties self-identify in some general way along the left-to-right political spectrum and they have a big, overarching issue or two or three that they emphasize in a general way, but they are not as a party much interested in specifics. Even a party’s platform is no more than a list of mostly general, blustering positions on various issues. For most people, to join a party is to endorse its place on the political spectrum and to contribute in very small ways, perhaps doing some grunt work. For only a handful of members of a party does participation in it go anywhere near as far as influencing in any way even one of its political positions.

In addition, the goal of all political parties everywhere is to become as big as possible. That contributes to making meaningful participation in any party difficult to achieve. To reiterate, however, most members of even small political parties are nothing more than filler.

Perhaps most importantly, political parties are exclusive. A person can only be a member of one political party. No party anywhere allows its members to be a member of even one other political party at the same time.

All of that discourages people from joining political parties — with good reason. Given that joining a party is about the most a person can do in this country to get involved in the political process, that is not good for democracy. As I see it, then, besides a general dearth of opportunities for meaningful, impactful participation in the political process, the biggest problem in democracy is the very existence of multiple, competing political parties.

To be sure, this proposed tweak to the existing political system — the set of institutions, including political parties, via which the political process proceeds — is only a suggestion. Nothing here is written in stone. I am convinced, though, that this idea has the potential to transform the political process in any democratic nation for the better, by genuinely empowering the citizenry in new ways in the governing of the nation via the political process.

That would be accomplished by creating a single political party. What?! Yes: there would be a single legally recognized political party — at the national level, anyway (at least at the start).

‘Single-party state’ is a term associated with Nazis and Bolsheviks, historical perpetrators of the most brutal forms of totalitarianism. It would be possible, though, to retain the existing political process in any democratic nation yet transition to being a nation with one legally recognized political party at the national level. Still, distrust at any mention of a single party is one reason for limiting this proposal (at least initially) to the national level, allowing traditional political parties to continue in state and local politics, at least at the beginning.

I suggest calling it, in the U.S., the US Party. The only function of this Party would be to act as a host for (any number of) formally organized caucuses. Those caucuses would perform (at the national level) all of the functions for citizens that political parties now provide, but would vastly improve the quality of that participation in every way.

Before going any further, though, I think it is important to emphasize how much would remain the same with this paradigm in place.

First of all, our system of government would not change at any level. Every geopolitical unit, from the tiniest town to the nation as a whole, would continue with the form of government it has at present. To reiterate, other political parties could still exist, as individual states could retain the existing party system within each state. (To be clear, those parties would not be eligible to nominate candidates for elective offices at the national level.) All elections for office would be conducted exactly as at present except for determining, for national offices, how candidates would be nominated (see below).

Citizens who were not a member of the Party could still freely engage in political speech, peaceable assembly, petitioning the national government, voting in national elections (if registered, as at present), and running for any office at the state or local level. That is, they would retain every political right they currently have — including the right to vote in national elections — except the right to run for a national office. [Since any citizen old enough to vote could join the party, the right to run for a national office would not thereby be restricted, so no constitutional issue would arise — in the U.S., anyway.]

Historically, single parties in nations have been characterized by ideology and exclusivity. This party would represent no ideology (or theology) and would be wholly inclusive. One more time: any citizen old enough to vote could join the party.

Joining the party would be a formal process, but would be free. Any (old enough) citizen could join at any time, quit the Party at any time, and could join and quit any number of times. Yet, even people who had been convicted of felonies (and are therefore currently denied certain political rights in some states) could still join/remain in the Party. Given the place the Party would have in our national politics, any means of expulsion would be too dangerous of a political tool to have lying around. Caucuses within the Party would presumably choose to have some process for expelling people from them, but the Party could not be allowed to expel anyone who had joined.

The idea for a single Party with an unlimited number of caucuses was inspired by the functioning of the two chambers of the Congress of the U.S. In both chambers there are caucuses: groups of lawmakers that crystallize around an idea or even an attitude towards governance. An idea might be ‘saving the natural environment’ or ‘promoting economic growth’. Various caucuses are ‘progressive’, or ‘conservative’ or ‘centrist’. Most importantly, caucuses are not (necessarily) restricted by party affiliation: they certainly can be open to membership on the basis of some shared goal or issue or perspective, regardless of the party to which a person belongs (if any — there are a few Independents in our national legislature). Finally, a representative or senator can be a member of more than one caucus.

Before getting into the completely necessary but more tedious details of the proposal, I’ll relate some of the positive outcomes it would provide for the democratic political process.

I am convinced that this proposal would combine the best elements of the parliamentary system and the republican system. The former, with more parties holding offices of government, encourages more active participation in politics by more citizens, but, as noted above, makes party politics — internal to parties and among parties — too much a part of governing. Also, encouraging the proliferation of parties leads to the unwieldy ‘coalition politics’ parliamentarianism often generates, which can make government far too unstable. Our system in the U.S. is supposed to mitigate that kind of instability by including many points of view and political positions within each of the two major parties, but of late it has not been doing a good job of that. A partisan divide has emerged that has made the two-party system a fault line threatening to reduce to rubble our democratic political process. At the same time, our system leaves all but a very few citizens, including even almost all members of both major parties, as passive participants left only to choose between the potential candidates that the powers that be in those parties bring forth. This proposal, with limitless caucuses but those caucuses existing outside of government itself, would combine the participatory engagement that having numerous effective political parties encourages with the stability of our system, in which party politics is not (supposed to be) such a large part of actually governing.

Unlimited caucuses with the power nominate candidates for national office would decentralize political power in this nation. People pursuing power would at least be contained in smaller ponds. At the same time, seeking national office would become easier and far more accessible for far more people, at least as far as getting on the ballot is concerned.

Here, though, I want to relate an even more important way that this idea would improve our political system. In the House and Senate much of the process of arriving at actual laws and programs and policies takes place in caucuses. This paradigm would actually give all citizens (old enough to vote) the opportunity to participate directly in the process of formulating potential legislation at the national level.

To be taken seriously in that respect a caucus would have to have members who could do the necessary research and then draft laws and policy proposals in a useable form, but there would be no formal restriction on what any caucus might propose. Even in the technical process of formulating potential legislation, though, a caucus could be small enough to allow all voices within it to be heard. To my mind, that is, most specifically, the most important contribution of this idea to strengthening democracy. It would make the process of governance much more directly ‘democratic’.

Any member of a caucus who felt ignored or didn’t like some particular outcome within a caucus would be free to start another one. (Anyone who was too much of a nuisance or there merely for the purpose of being disruptive could be — presumably — voted out of a caucus.) Caucuses could self-limit the maximum number of members they might have, such that when one reached a certain size a portion of the membership would depart to establish a new caucus, with the various iterations of the caucus acting as one politically. That way the participatory inclusiveness of caucuses could be maintained while the number of people involved in furthering any cause could be unlimited. In democratic politics the ultimate power is numbers.

If a caucus did not have the expertise (or desire) to formulate actual (potential) legislation, its members could still make their collective voice heard regarding any issue that might be of importance to them. Caucuses could exist for many other reasons than developing actual potential legislation; here I’m emphasizing having that capacity because I think it is the most important contribution of this idea to improving the democratic political process.

That brings us to another strength of this idea, that it does establish a fence between the legislature and the Party. As alluded to above, one obvious lesson from both our political system and parliamentary systems around the planet is that mixing party politics with legislating is a formula for increasing the difficulty of governance. So while the caucuses within the Party could debate and develop potential laws, programs, and policies, they would not be directly related to any caucus that might exist in the House or Senate. (To that end, there should be a rule requiring any person elected to office to disassociate from all caucuses to which that person belonged for as long as that person held office.)

Now for those details. . .

Like political parties now, the only official function of the caucuses in this single national Party would be the nomination of candidates for elective offices. That part of the political process would become much more intimate, more streamlined, and far more inclusive than it is at present in any democratic nation.

To be clear, any member(s) of the Party could organize a caucus based on any particular issue or any political, cultural, or moral perspective. That is, there would be no constraint on what could serve as a ‘seed crystal’ for a caucus.

Members of the Party could be members of as many caucuses as they wanted (subject only to the requirements of membership a caucus might have). On the subject of membership requirements, caucuses would be wholly self-governing. Each would be run however its members saw fit — including requirements for membership, based on any criteria whatsoever. The only rule imposed on all caucuses would be to allow freedom of disassociation: freedom to leave and have one’s name stricken from the membership rolls — merely by declaring oneself to be disassociated from the caucus — effective immediately, at any time.

Caucuses would be organized commensurate with the different geopolitical units that exist at the national level: in the U.S., national level (for president), state level (for the Senate), and at the level of a congressional district (for the House of Representatives). In every case each caucus would be a separate organization for purposes of nominating candidates for national offices. Any caucus could have ‘chapters’ in areas as small as neighborhoods, but the relevant scope of the caucus itself would be the national or state or congressional level.

As an example, there could be caucuses for banning the production or sales of meat of any kind. People sharing that goal could organize a caucus at the national level and also caucuses in different states and within various congressional districts. Again, any of those could have ‘chapters’ down to the local — even neighborhood — level, but as a unit each would be confined to acting at the national, state, or congressional level. They would all be related by virtue of their goal, but each would be its own organization. That does not preclude a functionally unified set of caucuses existing through all governmental levels with the same goal(s) and for that matter the same rules of internal governance at every level, but the important point is that membership would be separate at each level: a person would have to join any caucus at each level. That becomes important in the process of nominating candidates for office in this paradigm.

So a person could be a member of a caucus at any of those levels. At any level, a person could also be a member of more than one caucus. To participate in the process of putting forth a candidate for a national office (however any caucus might have chosen to organize that process), a person would have to be a member of that specific caucus.

To be clear, a nominee would have to be a member of the Party, but would not have to be a member of that caucus. So any caucus could nominate any member of the Party to run for office at the level of that caucus. Caucuses that did not formally nominate a candidate could still endorse candidates.

To nominate a candidate a caucus would only have to have a sufficient number of members. For any given election, to nominate a candidate the membership of a caucus would have to be at least, say, 10% of the total membership of the Party in the relevant geopolitical unit.

> For a caucus at the national level to put forth a candidate for president the membership of that caucus would have to be at least 10% (?) of the membership of the whole national Party.

> For a caucus at the state level to put forth a candidate for the Senate the membership of that caucus would have be at least 10% (?) of the number of members of the Party living in* the state.

> For a caucus at the congressional district level to forth up a candidate for the House of Representatives the membership of that caucus would have to be at least 10% (?) of the number of members of the Party living in* that congressional district.

[*A person could only count as “living in” one state and one congressional district.]

At any level, the same person could be nominated as a candidate for an office by any number of caucuses (with enough members) within the geopolitical unit relevant to that office. So a person could be nominated as a candidate for president by any number of (eligible) national caucuses, a person could be nominated by any number of (eligible) state-level caucuses within a state to be a candidate for the Senate, and a person could be nominated by any number of (eligible) caucuses within a congressional district as a candidate to represent that district in the House of Representatives. Every candidate for any office nominated by at least one caucus (with enough members) would appear on the ballot [along with the name(s) of the caucus(es) that had nominated the candidate?].

While a member of the Party could be a member of any number of caucuses, in each election a person could only participate in (presumably, vote in) one caucus to nominate a candidate for each office. For example, a person who was a member of more than one national caucus could only participate in one of them to nominate a candidate for president. At the state level that same person could choose to participate in any caucus of which that person was a member to nominate a candidate for the Senate, and choose any caucus of which one was a member to participate in nominating a candidate for the House. So as far as nominating a person for office, a person would only have one vote to give (at each level).

It is of the utmost importance that this Party would be separate from and independent of the national government. The only thing the government would have to do with this party would be to pass a law limiting running for national office to being a member of the national Party — and ensuring its internal governance would be subject to the requirements of the Constitution (such as membership being open to any citizen old enough to vote). Any individual caucus could be undemocratic as all get-out, but the Party as a whole could not abridge any political right.

To make it absolutely clear, the government would have nothing else to do with the organization, administration, or funding of the Party. Funding would come solely from voluntary donations from individual members of the Party. Again, given the place it would have in our politics, the rules of the Party as a whole would have be subject to the guarantees of rights of citizens in the Constitution: the Party (as opposed to a caucus)could not adopt any rule regarding participation in it that would be contrary to the rights of people pertaining to the political process that are guaranteed in the Constitution.

Many people are of the opinion that democracy needs some kind of reboot. Most of those people are focused on how elections per se within the existing political system. This proposal concerns more meaningful participation in the political process — the process of effecting choices for the community as a whole — that goes far beyond elections in themselves. It would at the same time reduce the level of ‘politics’ in actual governing, while increasing the possibilities for impactful participation in the political process for all citizens, to include running for national office and actually having real input in the formulation of possible legislation.