Who sets the weights, and how capture is resisted

The weights are set by a vote, the founding line of the whole doctrine. Individual value is subjective; but a democratic vote constitutes value as objective for governance, a declared, binding act of collective self-government, neither a science of the Good nor a dictator's decree. The vote picks general-rule weights, bounded to the ascertained and held under the Charter; it is preferred to any single optimiser not because crowds are wise but because a mistaken electorate is correctable by argument where a mistaken ruler is correctable only by rupture.

Capture is the standing threat, and it is resisted structurally. The corrector is impersonal, every correction is imputed to the published rule, never to a face, and builds no partisans; its officers hold power divorced from private enrichment (a non-transferable ledger). An anti-ruling-class monitor watches for the compute-and-capital owners becoming the new estate whose committee the state is; the value-norms themselves are audited for whether they encode one cohort's interest as the common good; and beneficence is watched as a capture vector, since tyranny hides under a semblance of generous deeds.

What it means

This § answers the deepest question a value-governing state faces, who decides what matters?, and its answer is the founding line. Is a clean river worth more than a factory's output? No formula settles it. So the polity votes the weight between the ecological and economic axes, while the effects on each, fish stocks recovered, jobs lost, are counted objectively. Cardinality lives in the measured effect; aggregation lives in the vote. Two guards make this real. The corrector is impersonal: a rent charge is imputed to the published rule, not to an official who could be lobbied or feared. And an anti-capture monitor watches whether the compute-and-capital owners are quietly authoring the value-norms themselves, the modern form of "the state is a committee of the ruling class."

Why Axiacracy needs it

Because "govern by value" collapses instantly into either technocracy ("experts will compute what matters") or mob rule ("vote on everything, including the facts") unless someone draws the line precisely. This § exists to make value objective-for-governance, a binding, legitimate collective choice, without a philosopher-king claiming to know the Good and without a majority voting on what is true.

Compared with other approaches

Against Plato's philosopher-king, who would have the wise know the Good and rule by it, refused: legitimacy is not knowledge (Plato). Against Mises, who says there is no actionable collective value, answered: a declared vote over objectively-counted effects is both (Mises). Against raw majoritarianism and its cousin futarchy ("vote values, bet beliefs"), whose instinct, separate the valuing from the measuring, Axiacracy shares but binds under a Charter. The qualifier is Confucius's: it is the people restrained by law who are trusted (Confucius). What bounds the vote is the Charter, §16.

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