The System › Part IV · The Economy
Distributive justice
The captured rent funds two things: a citizen dividend and a floor of real capability beneath every life. The floor is capability, not cash alone, unconditional, non-wage-contingent, and rent-funded, so it raises the reservation wage instead of subsidising a low one; and in a post-work age it must cultivate the ability to use released time, since a bare transfer plus idleness breeds anomie, not flourishing.
Above sits an anti-concentration ceiling and a bounded band, keeping wealth and power from compounding until they capture the state itself. The ceiling binds early, by general rule, re-based to a moving aggregate, never retroactively and never as a weapon against a person. Together the floor-from-below and the ceiling-from-above manufacture the large, stable middle whose very existence is survivability: the gradual euthanasia of the rentier, sparing the earned.
What it means
The rents captured in the previous sections fund two things: a universal citizen dividend and a floor of real capability beneath every life. The floor is deliberately capability, not cash alone, guaranteed access to housing, healthcare, learning, and the time to use them, and in a post-work age it must teach the use of released time, because a dividend plus idleness breeds anomie, not flourishing (Aristotle's warning that leisure needs more virtue than labour). Above sits an anti-concentration ceiling and a bounded band: concentration is capped early, by general rule, re-based to a moving aggregate, never retroactively, never as a weapon against a named person. Floor-from-below and ceiling-from-above together manufacture the large, stable middle whose very existence is survivability.
Why Axiacracy needs it
A post-wage society has only two destinations: it guarantees a floor and caps concentration, or it fractures into a rentier apex over a dispossessed base, the precise instability that has ended republics for millennia. This § exists to make distribution the engine of stability rather than an afterthought of charity, euthanising the rentier gradually while leaving the earned untouched.
Compared with other approaches
Against UBI as usually proposed, Axiacracy insists on capability, not cash alone, and funds it from captured rent rather than a labour tax. It parts from Rawls on floors: sufficientarian thresholds, not the difference principle's maximin (Rawls), while sharing his priority-of-right. The capability floor is Sen and Nussbaum's. Keynes makes the floor macro-efficient through the multiplier (Keynes); Aristotle supplies the middle-mass survivability theorem (Aristotle); Machiavelli the ceiling's method, cap early and prospectively (Machiavelli); and Polanyi's Speenhamland the dividend's design, unconditional, non-wage-contingent (Polanyi).