To England, with Rationality
I imagine most Americans are as surprised I was when I learned that England does not have a written constitution. As I understand it, all Acts of Parliament are considered to be additions to the constitution of the nation. Some are recognized, given their content, as being more ‘constitutive’ than others are.
Governance is governed by tradition. At the heart of that tradition are the timeless Rights and Privileges of the ‘Freemen’ of the realm. Those are given explicit expression in English Common Law.
In 1689, following England’s Civil War, the Englishman John Locke published Two Treatises of Government, wherein he formalized equality (in the first Treatise) and liberty (in the second) as the twin pillars of just governance everywhere. In the early 1800’s the Englishmen Jeremy Bentham and James Mill developed utilitarianism as a (supposedly) mathematically precise, fully secular moral system. Both of those conceptual developments were added to the English tradition concerning governance; neither necessitated the removal of any extant part of it.
It is all so very English. It is all quite vague, yet it is understood that within the mists of that governing tradition there are walls and hedges that define most distinctly, with more or less rigidity, the bounds of proper governance.
That approach to governing governance has certainly had its advantages. It has allowed for social evolution while establishing channels to control the direction of change. The greater the change contemplated, the more lines of resistance, each stronger than the last, that will be encountered.
Unlike the written Constitution of, say, the U.S. there can be no hard and fast phrases and clauses that can be claimed to establish political absolutes. That removes from the English system of governance any possible claim of political inerrancy (thus establishing opponents as being necessarily in error). In making all governance a matter of settling upon the ‘right place’ within that conceptually fog-bound labyrinth for the resolution of every political issue, the English approach to governance has made coming to an agreement that all parties can live with the essence of governance. It has also made ‘muddling through’ the quintessence of the nation’s existence.
It seems, however, that heretofore unseen fault lines underlying that approach to governance are now being exposed. I would suggest that the reason is the absence of an overweening external threat. Over its history as a nation England has been confronted with Spain then France then Germany then the Soviet Union as powers that could conceivably destroy, if not conquer, the small but powerful island nation.
Following the fall of the Soviet Union no such threat has existed. As a result, internal divisions that had forever been subordinated to the ‘national interest’ are now exposed like the raw ends of national nerves.
The sciatic nerve of contemporary politics in England — as in, to a greater or lesser extent, all Liberal nations — is the tension that appears to exist between equality and liberty. A focus on equality is seen by some as a threat to liberty; a focus on liberty is seen by others as a threat to equality. What is needed is a principle that can somehow transcend that divide.
Democracy is the key to solving the puzzle. That is where those potentially conflicting values inexorably unite. Democracy, which we equate with equality, cannot exist without liberty for all; liberty for all cannot exist without democracy.
Though we equate democracy with equality, however, that is incorrect. Rather, the definitive value governing democracy is mutual respect.
So the solution for Liberal society’s most fundamental source of political strain and pain is mutual respect. Mutual respect follows from — is implied by — equality. Mutual respect as the ethic governing the governance of society would maximize liberty as a practical matter.
Mutual respect means all people taking all other people into account. That might seem too vague if not altogether vapid, but I have found that mutual respect yields a first-order minimum, a necessary condition of justice that forms a distinct demarcation dividing unjust acts from acts that are ‘just enough’. It can be stated in Lockean terms: as a minimum of just conduct, every person/group of persons must refrain from ‘subjecting’ any other person/persons to one’s own “arbitrary will.” With just a pinch of Kant added, that dictum can be boiled down to a handful of absolute prohibitions: no killing, harming, coercing, manipulating (lying, cheating, etc.), or stealing in the course of achieving any end.
Applied to the political process, as the process of effecting choices for the community as a whole, mutual respect engenders two requirements. First, it requires freedom of political speech for all citizens of the nation so that all citizens can participate in the political process. The other requirement is that all (other) political rights must by default be available to all citizens of the nation; any restriction on any political right, such as the right to vote, must be universally applicable and universally applied. Age is perhaps the only such restriction that is possible. Of course, the personal conduct of all participants in the political process would be governed, as everywhere, by mutual respect. [Did anyone hear a cough?]
On the practical level there are four great issues that divide the body politic: unemployment, poverty, taxes, and public debt. Those issues have tentacles that reach into every crevice and corner of society.
Everyone is presumably against all of those, but they are seen as inevitable evils. After all, all of them are as old as civilization itself.
Neither egalitarians nor libertarians claim to have an actual solution for any of those societal problems. Yet, they seem ready to rend society asunder rather than see the ‘management’ of them in the hands of the other side.
A resolution of those issues, in a way that people of every political stripe could live with, would take much of the pressure off the body politic. Mutual respect, it so happens, can provide the means to eliminate all of them.
That can be accomplished by borrowing from political democracy to create a ‘democratically distributed income’ (DDI). Like the right to vote, it would not be available to all citizens, but it would be available for an unlimited number of citizens, and the criteria for eligibility would be universally applicable and universally applied. While all citizens would not be paid the DDI, any citizen could become eligible for it. [I, the author of that idea, do have an M.A. in economics; I’ve been working on all of this for some time; all questions that can be answered prior to the actual implementation of this idea have been answered.]
The money for the DDI would be created as needed. That is what would allow it to be available for an unlimited number of people.
The DDI would thus be an absolutely, positively guaranteed minimum income for all citizens. The amount of the DDI would be based on the current median income.
The total of that income would form the supply of money for the economy. Strictly in terms of economics, then, this proposal is but a different way of supplying the economy with money.
To prevent inflation money would have to be returned to its point of origin (which could be either the central bank or a newly created Monetary Agency). People and businesses could retain plenty of money (with the amount retained proportional to income) and, unlike taxes, no money would be collected from any person or business before it could be used for purchases or investing.
The DDI would eliminate unemployment (with government as an employer of last resort providing jobs that were paid the DDI) and poverty. The same process could be used to fund government without taxes or public debt. Government would be funded forever at the current rate of per capita total government spending — with no need for Welfare of any kind — thus eliminating the need for taxes/public debt.
That leads us to the added bonus provided by taking this approach to supplying the economy with money. Both the supply of money for the economy and spending by government would be governed, passively but effectively, by demographics. That means that total output would be governed by demographics. That would enhance sustainability.
It must be noted that none of those outcomes would require any particular behavior on the part of individuals. Rather, those outcomes are built into this, well, revolutionary way of supplying the economy with money. So no changes in behavior would be required.
At the same time, while this proposal is revolutionary, it is not radical. That is, it would not require tearing down one bit of the existing institutional structure.
Even the Bank of England would still exist. In fact, if the law were changed to allow the central bank to fund government directly, this proposal could be implemented by that Bank. Alternatively, a new Monetary Agency could be created that would administer the DDI and provide the money for funding government (and collect the money returned to its point of origin).
Either way, neither entity would have any discretionary authority in the matter of how much money would be supplied to the economy or how much would be returned to its point of origin. The supply of money for the economy, and the economy as a whole, would be self-regulating.
If curious, “By Request: How to Transform the Society of any Nation (summarized for a ‘5 min read’)” is available at medium.com. (There I call the DDI, more neutrally, the “allotted income.”)