The Economy
§10 Two layers of money
Money is not abolished — it is demoted. It keeps its two useful jobs, a settlement layer and a common numéraire, but loses its role as the sole measure of worth: it becomes one axis among ten, not the axis to which all others are silently reduced. Separating money's accounting function from its civic supremacy is the whole move.
And it is made to move. Demurrage — a small carrying cost on idle money — removes the premium that lets money "rule the roost" by declining slowest of all assets; hoarding is penalised and liquidity released. Because a tax on idle cash alone would simply chase the hoard into near-money, metals, or land, demurrage is paired with the general anti-hoarding and rent-capture regime so there is nowhere cheaper to hide.
§11 Markets and the externality overlay
The market interior is kept intact: it clears allocation and carries the profit signal, and Axiacracy does not override it. What it does badly — ignore the harm a transaction imposes on axes the price cannot see — is corrected by an overlay, not by seizing the wheel.
The overlay is a multidimensional Pigouvian charge: a wedge on a live price where the harmed good is traded, gated by a market-still-clears test, and framed honestly as a liability rather than a "true price." Prices in, quantities out — the state sets the price a factor faces and never dictates the quantity it chooses. What the market does well it keeps; what it is blind to, the overlay makes visible and payable.
§12 Property, rent and the commons
Property divides on provenance, not sentiment: the earned is private and protected — Smith's "most sacred and inviolable" — while the unearned rent belongs to the commons. Rent is metered as market value minus reproduction cost, and a reproducibility firewall draws the line: rent attaches to a non-reproducible position — a location, a spectrum band, a monopoly, a platform's network effect — never to a reproducible capability that anyone could build.
Capture is by forward flow, not by seizure. Since an asset's price is simply its rent stream capitalised, taxing that stream deflates the asset without expropriating a soul — Marx's own capitalisation theorem turned into an instrument. And "land" is generalised to the new land — compute, data, and network-effects — which the commons overwhelmingly created and which no private effort reproduced.
§13 The capital and credit engine
Capital is mobilised, never directed. Credit puts dead stock to work — it does not conjure capital from nothing — so the engine rewards patient, productive lending over speculative claims on "all the wealth that can ever be produced." The knowledge-problem bar holds: the state shapes the boundary conditions of investment, it does not pick the investments.
Finance has its own earned/unearned seam — the enterprise return is earned, the pure scarcity-rent on capital is not — and it is disciplined accordingly. Fictitious capital and runaway leverage are capped on the systemic pivot; stabilisers are counter-cyclical and suspendable, never mechanically contractionary at the very moment liquidity is most needed (the mistake of 1844).
§14 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.