Thank you. That’s an essay I’ll store as a reference.

As it happens, I have made my own study of justice, both within and outside academia. (I’m 67.) I have learned that the ethic of justice is mutual respect (of a basic kind: taking one another into account). It follows from a belief in equality. Mutual respect is the ethic that actually governs political democracy.[“Equality Is All We Need” here in Medium, for the curious of mind]

It occurred to me that money is to the economic system as political rights are to the political system: necessary for participation in it. So applying democracy to the economy takes the form of applying the “democratic distributive principle” that governs the distribution of political rights in a democracy to money.

That does not result in ‘socialism’ or anything like it. In fact, differences in income, no matter how great, are not in themselves an injustice.There would be no redistribution of anything.

Applying that principle to the economy takes the form of a “democratically distributed income.” It would be sufficient to live on (based, say, on the current median income). It would not be paid to everyone, but like the right to vote right it would be available for an unlimited number of people: any citizen could become eligible for it; it would be an absolutely, positively guaranteed minimum income for all adult citizens. (Any nation could adopt this paradigm.)

The money for the income would be free. It would be created as needed. It would form the supply of money (as currency) for the economy. Unlike the system at present, the supply of money would be limited (by demographics — and only that) and there would be built-in safeguards against inflation. The supply of money — and therefore the economy as a whole — would actually be completely self-regulating.

The results of that economic paradigm for society are astonishing: “For Crying Out Loud, ACCEPT That A SOLUTION Actually EXISTS” (a “2 min read” — including options for further reading — also here in Medium).