Thank you for such a thoughtful and provocative essay. I see all of the other usual suspects have already responded to it.

Would you agree that a “new social contract” for Liberal societies must begin with re-thinking justice? I maintain that our current crisis is a crisis of justice caused by the dawning realization that neither liberty nor equality is in actuality an ethic (a rule for governing conduct), much less one that can be justly applied to governing governance. [My Thesis for my M.A. (political economy) included a Review of the Literature of the academic debate concerning ‘distributive justice’ initiated by the publication of Rawls’s book.]

To that end, I nominate ‘mutual respect’ (most broadly, people taking other people into account) to be our ethic of justice. Mutual respect as an ethic follows from a belief in equality, but it also follows from observation within material existence, making it non-ideological. [“Re-thinking Individualism;” “Real Justice (summarized for a ‘5 min read’)” both here in Medium]

In the U.S., for example, were we to adopt mutual respect as our ethic of justice we would have the maximum possible liberty and we would reinforce political democracy (by making it more intellectually coherent). It can also be applied to the existing economy, via a “democratically distributed income.”

That last one can be accomplished with a single Act of Congress. Doing that would make the economy self-regulating 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 more regulations or any changes in behavior). [“A Truly Great Idea” also here (published in Data Driven Investor) in Medium]

The whole of it is in one place in “People for Tolerance, Unite!” here in Medium.