The System › Part IV · The Economy
Distributive justice
Every citizen holds an equal beneficial claim on the commons and on the public share of automation built from common inputs. Realized commons yield pays a variable citizen dividend. A separate floor of real capability is secured upstream through access rights, direct essential provision, and, where independently measured idle capacity exists, capacity-bounded essential-layer settlement. Rent capture reclaims common advantage, restrains concentration and withdraws excess demand; it is not assumed to create the demand that makes rent collectible.
The floor belongs to each person. A cohort cannot create a fiscal claim merely by naming itself. Floor-relevant cohorts are recognised through published, stable, vulnerability-related criteria, privacy thresholds, and independent review; cohort statistics reveal patterned failure without turning an arbitrary group boundary into a claim on the commons.
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 a universal citizen dividend and a floor of real capability beneath every life. The floor is capability, not cash alone, and belongs to each person. A cohort cannot create a fiscal claim merely by naming itself: floor-relevant cohorts require published, stable, vulnerability-related criteria, privacy thresholds, and independent review. Their statistics reveal patterned failure without replacing individual standing. Above sits an anti-concentration ceiling and a bounded band, imposed early by general rule and never as a weapon against a named person. Floor-from-below and ceiling-from-above together sustain the large, stable middle whose 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).