HOW TO IMPROVE CAPITALISM

First of all, improving capitalism is only a good idea because capitalism has so much to commend it, despite its problems. It is premised primarily on liberty. Liberty is the necessary condition for innovation to take place. Free markets are a vehicle for allowing those innovations to be shared by the general public. As a result, capitalism has been the conduit for all manner of material improvements to the lives of human beings—including the lives of people who rail against it. As an economy, it is the best one ever developed for creating wealth.

Still, capitalism does have some fundamental problems. It is inherently unstable, and has always been dependent on governments and central banks to keep it from collapsing in on itself, which has in turn created a countervailing tendency towards inflation. In capitalism as it has ever existed, taxation is the means of funding government, and taxation has issues related to both economic performance and justice. The uneven development of capitalism in the world has made seeking economic opportunity the prime motive for massive migrations of people (not to mention the conflict those migrations generate). Capitalism has always had involuntary unemployment and poverty associated with it. Finally, we have learned of late that capitalism as we know it might be environmentally unsustainable. It does, after all, depend on increases in total output to maintain, much less increase, the general level of economic well-being. That necessity for expanding output makes capitalism dependent on increases in the consumption of fossil fuels and other natural resources as well as the production of wastes of all kind. Presently, the world is headed for the edge of a cliff. To avoid disaster, there is an unknown but certain deadline by which sufficient technological innovations would have to be developed and implemented regarding both energy and the general process of production of all kinds of goods.

It is true that those basic problems are not unique to capitalism. Indeed, except for the issue of sustainability, they have been associated with the very existence of civilization for the entirety of its history. For that matter, issues related to the environment aren’t completely new. For instance, people depending on wood for both heat and building material threatened the existence of woodlands before the industrial revolution tapped coal, then oil, for the former. Before machines replaced horses for transportation, people were calculating the immense amounts of horse dung that loomed in the future, especially for major cities. Even so, instability, taxation, uneven development, involuntary unemployment and poverty, and the question of environmental sustainability are problems.

Arguing about the best ways to deal with those problems and their corollaries has been the major focus of domestic issues in the politics of all democratic, capitalistic nations. Though relatively little progress on those problems has been made to date, the political process is the only vehicle through which they can be solved. If capitalism as a process could solve them, we would presumably have evidence of that capability by now. This essay will present a solution to all of capitalism’s aforementioned problems except environmental unsustainability, and would give us a much better chance of overcoming it. What’s more, instituting this idea would not only preserve the beneficence of a free-market economy, but enhance it. (Instituting it would presumably also strengthen political democracy, though that is not an issue that will be addressed in this essay.)

There is one other problem that must be addressed. Capitalism is what might be called the institutional end-product of the (more or less) free-market economy as it developed over time. It is marked by the presence of large-scale business enterprises, a scale that has grown as capitalism has increased its reach in the world. The different areas of enterprise in which large-scale businesses have emerged has also increased, from trading, to manufacturing, to what is called FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate), to media, etc. The problem is, the hugeness of such enterprises and the immense economic power available to them present challenges to the liberty of  individuals. Power corrupts. There is no reason to exempt economic power from that truism. So far, the only response to such vast economic power has been to counterbalance it with increased power on the part of government. For people who love liberty that is at best a risky proposition. A better response, I'm saying, would be to design the institutional structure of the economy in such a way that the maximum liberty for all--including businesses--would be guaranteed by that very structure. The purpose of this essay is to present the basics of an institutional structure that would accomplish that goal--and, serendipitously, many more good things--and how, in general terms, an economy with that institutional structure would function.

There is precedent for such action. That is the very thing that constitutions have done, historically, for political processes. Constitutions enact institutional structures that form frameworks for those processes. In democracies, the principles that form the foundations for those structures have been maximizing liberty and upholding equality. Any outcome in such  a process is legitimate as long as it doesn't compromise that institutional structure or violate the principles upon which it is founded.

Conflicts have arisen involving those principles. Maximizing liberty is usually an optimality problem, not an either/or problem, whereas equality, in the sense of its being a philosophical principle, is much more absolute. That has created an ineluctable difference in considerations of those principles which causes some people to be convinced that the former is always being short-changed. The simple fact of  people living together in a community is, however, the source of that dilemma: In that context the liberty of individuals cannot be absolute, but can only be increased or decreased. Besides, equality has been the basis for the structure of  democratic political processes, which naturally gives it more emphasis in that sphere, and bringing democratic processes into better alignment with that principle in the 1900's rightly emphasized it. With respect to the economy, liberty is to be emphasized by the nature of things, much the way equality is emphasized in the political process. (All that is revisited with the introduction of considerations of justice, below.)

It perhaps bears emphasizing that the economy would still be capitalism: Liberty would be maximized; the profit motive would drive the economy; the free market would decide what was produced, in what quantity, and at what price; there would be no limit on how much money anyone might make or how much property anyone might acquire; and the size of enterprises would not be limited. In it, however, the only role for government would be to purchase goods and services from the private sector in providing whatever public goods and services the community as a whole chose to provide for itself in the political process. Neither government nor any central bank would have the means, much less the opportunity, to attempt to manage the economy. Lest I forget to mention it, there would be no taxes of any kind whatsoever.

The solution would be a profound yet relatively simple change in our approach to the money supply. It would enter the economy in the form of individuals' incomes. It would be purely fiat money, but that part would hardly be anything new. The money would be generated by a monetary agency that was wholly and completely separate from and independent of government.

Those being paid that income would be retirees, people old enough to work but genuinely too incapacitated to work, and those who had jobs that were paid that income. In businesses, the rank-and-file workers would receive that income; only those paid more than that amount would be paid out of the revenue of a business. (To be perfectly clear, anyone who received any pay out of the revenue of a business would not be paid the allotted income.) Everyone who worked in government would be paid the allotted income (and legislative bodies at all levels of government would doubtlessly award additional income to various offices from the revenue of government). The cost of all common labor would at any rate be zero. No one, however, would be required to earn the allotted income; people would be at least as free as they are at present in capitalism to do whatever they wanted to earn money.

The amount of the allotted income for each individual who was paid it would be the average income at the time this change was instituted. Thus, instead of the size of the money supply being determined by a cloistered group of individuals trying to 'manage' a chaotic economy, it would merely be the total of the incomes received by those who were paid the allotted income. The size of the money supply would therefore be exogenously determined—basically, by the size of the adult population. The total of the allotted income would equal the number of people being paid it multiplied by the amount of it, plain and simple. The size of the money supply would in turn determine total output. Instead of a relatively small money supply that circulates many times over in the generation of total output, the economy would have a huge money supply and a very tiny 'multiplier effect'. 

The general idea is that the money supply would be passed along to businesses via consumers' purchases, get transferred to government, then get transferred back to the monetary agency from government. Both businesses and individuals would transfer money to government, at the end of each quarter for the former and each month for the latter. Both businesses and individuals would be allowed to retain some amount of money: For businesses, it would be a (fixed) percentage of the money in their accounts; for individuals, it would be an absolute amount—say, three months' worth of the allotted income. Before the transfer occurred people and businesses would be free to spend all of their money beyond the amount they were permitted to keep in their accounts, meaning they would contribute nothing to the transfer. (Though for a business to avoid the transfer it would have to have zero money in its account, "spending" would include pay to employees not receiving the allotted income, to include quarterly bonuses.) Even if someone insisted on calling the transfer of money to government a tax, it would be avoidable, and, if not avoided, would require no paperwork. There would in any event be no payroll taxes, no property taxes, no sales taxes, and no excise taxes. The transfer of money from government to the monetary agency would also be quarterly. It would complete the circulation of the money supply, preventing an accumulation of money in the economy, which would cause inflation. The amount transferred by government would be equal to the total amount of money spent on purchases by consumers plus net exports.  

It’s important to understand that the monetary agency would have no discretionary authority whatsoever. It would merely be the paymaster for the economy. Again, money would simply be printed as needed, but its total amount could not be manipulated. It could be a cashless economy, but the existence of cash does contribute to liberty. The monetary agency could be a national agency, with each nation having its own currency, or an international agency, with every nation that joined the system sharing the same currency. There are pros and cons to each of those options. The latter option would not in any way threaten the sovereignty of any nation in the system.; the monetary agency would have no standing to get involved in the domestic politics of any nation. If the former option were instituted, the exchange rates of the currencies of all nations using this system would have to be fixed. That would preclude speculation in those currencies and prevent differentiated exchange rates from artificially skewing international trade.

According to usgovernmentspending.com, total government spending in the U.S. for 2007 was 4.90 trillion dollars (what was spent, not what was collected in taxes). Based on an allotted income of $36,500, 200 million people being paid it, and 67% to 80% of the money supply being transferred to government, with this approach to the money supply in place government would have at its disposal between 4.89 and 5.84 trillion dollars. Yet, there would be no need/justification for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, or Welfare payments of any kind. The transfer of money to government would be collected, in the U.S., by the federal government. Money not spent by the federal government would be apportioned to the states, based on population. The members of the national legislature would be perfectly aware that the less that was spent at that level, the more money would be available for state and local governments. (In the first quarter of the operation of the economy with this approach to the money supply that agency would have to provide government the estimated amount of money it would receive quarterly.)

An economy with such a money supply would be dynamic yet stable. In short, capitalism would function as theory has always says it should. That such an economy would have no involuntary unemployment or poverty is obvious. With the absence of taxation government would lack the means to try to manage the economy; the stability of individuals' incomes would preclude any need for it or any other entity, such as a central bank, to attempt to perform that function, anyway, as the presence of the allotted income, available to all adults no matter what their circumstances might be, would put an end to instability. The chance for environmental sustainability would be enhanced because increases in total economic well-being would not depend on increases in total output, but could come from increased efficiency in the consumption of non-labor inputs; also, less developed countries could adopt this system and become viable economic entities without the physical development that Euro-American nations have achieved. To the extent that poorer countries did institute it, that would put an end to seeking economic opportunity as a motivation for human migration. There would be three safeguards against inflation: (1) the absence of wages for common labor would not allow an inflationary spiral to develop; (2) so many people having the same, fixed, income would control the overall price level (so that a rise in the price of any commodity would induce less demand for it and/or other commodities, leading to offsetting decreases in prices); and (3) the system of transfers of the money supply would keep the ratio between total income and total output constant. Increases in efficiency in the utilization of non-labor in production would lead to a slight deflation in consumer prices over time, meaning the purchasing power of the allotted income would actually increase as time goes by.

Though justice has not been directly addressed in this essay, the institutional model described in this essay would form a just economic system. That institutional structure resulted from the author's effort to formulate a truly just economy. This author has discovered what justice must be. Every account of justice ever attempted (up till now) has involved a long-winded theological or ideological narrative. Real justice, it turns out, can be stated in as few as five words: mutual respect in effecting choices. To be sure, that most basic answer prompts many more questions, but the answer to each of them is almost that simple. While lots of simple answers linking together must create a degree of complexity, real justice, it so happens, is at least as definite, as verifiable, as certain as E = Mc² .

What is most important about real justice is that it provides an ethic which is necessarily universal: No one who considers oneself to be a human being living among other human beings can deny that the ethic of real justice applies to oneself. That's because it doesn't depend in any way on any belief, whether theological or ideological. Rather, it follows from observations that every human being who has ever lived has verified for oneself in the course of one's life on this planet. Also, it is concerned only with interactions among people in the process of bringing their various choices to fruition. Morality, usually from religion, covers anything else in anyone's life which requires a rule of personal governance of any kind--such as actions that don't affect other people; how one ought to treat animals and the rest of the physical environment we inhabit; attitudes and thoughts generally; etc. So, within the domain of justice we must, as a minimum (one is always free to do better), abide by the ethic of real justice, whereas outside that large but finite domain personal morality must govern our lives.

One can readily see that real  justice must apply to the economy, since economic activity of any kind is all about effecting choices. (As for political processes, any political process is the process of effecting choices for a community as a whole.) The ethic of real justice would supplant equality and liberty as the foundation of political and economic processes. Don't panic: The requirement of mutual respect is more immediate than equality is (though equality does itself imply a requirement of mutual respect), and real justice would create the maximum liberty that co-existing people (and enterprises) can enjoy simultaneously. In other words, liberty, it turns out, is the product of justice, not the source of it. Where there is more justice--real justice--there is more liberty. To secure for ourselves and our posterity the most--and most secure--liberty possible in the economic realm of life we must implement an economic system based on real justice, e.g., the institutional structure put forth in this essay.

The essay at the bottom of this page of this website, “Real Justice," provides a reasonably full explication of it.. For more explication, the second and third chapters of  A Just Solution are also available on this site. (See Table of Contents, 'buttons' to left.)

What to Do

Real justice prohibits co-opting people in the process of establishing just political and economic processes. What must one do? There is only one thing one must do, but it must be done: Learn about real justice and, especially, the change that is needed to fix the capitalist economy, to solve the fundamental problems that have plagued it from its inception, and encourage others to do the same. When enough people have done that, the economy will be changed. The peoples of the Soviet Union and the nations of the Warsaw Pact brought down that rotten and decrepit system without so much as firing one shot or tossing one Molotov cocktail. They did it by sheer weight of numbers. Unfortunately, all they had to replace the economic system of those nations was undemocratic capitalism. Now we have available a really just, completely good form of capitalism. With the Constitution of the U.S. the people of this nation "ordained and established" for themselves and their posterity "a more perfect Union." Now peoples everywhere on Earth can ordain and establish for ourselves and our posterity a more perfect economy. 

About the Author

The author of all this is Stephen Yearwood. He was born in Atlanta, GA, U.S.A. on October 11, 1952. He has been working on this ethic and its implications for personal interactions, political processes, and the economy for more than a quarter of a century. He’s done this and that for subsistence while focusing on this project; for the past fifteen years or so he’s been billing himself as an itinerant carpenter. He doesn’t have a Ph.D. in anything, but along the way he has earned a B.S. in political science, most of an M.Ed. in the area of social studies, and all of an M.A. in economics (thanks to the educational benefits of the G.I. Bill). He has read a small library’s worth of history, philosophy, and economics. Although the realization that the domain of justice is limited to interactions among human beings in effecting choices is original, this ethic rests on all that has come before it in the modern philosophical tradition. [Mutual respect is the only generalizable ethic available to postmodernists.] While he has learned that justice must be totally temporal—completely contained within the world of our material existence—he is a person of faith. He believes in the God of Abraham. He believes the God of Abraham loves justice and hates injustice. Yet, his God has never provided a straightforward definition of justice. Perhaps God gave us human beings our magnificent brains so we could figure out for ourselves what justice must be. Mr. Yearwood is hoping he hasn’t been foolish in assuming that the citizens of the U.S.--and the world--in this day and age have the self-confidence to think for themselves and to judge for themselves the validity of this account of justice and what it requires of us in our relations with one another, both direct and those we experience through the structure and functioning of our political and economic processes.

“Justice for All Not Possible Using Beliefs,” The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Faith and Values Section, September 30, 2006
[the editor’s awkward title, by the way, not mine]

“Justice: Mutual Respect in Effecting Choices,” Contemporary Philosophy (Vol. XXVII, No. 1 & 2, Jan./Feb. & Mar./Apr., 2006) 71-75.

“Democratic Capitalism: An Economic Model for Presently Less Developed Nations,” Contemporary Philosophy (Vol. XIX, No. 6, Nov./Dec., 1996) 16-22

“A Model of the Political Sphere of Society,” Contemporary Philosophy (Vol. XVII, No. 5, Sept./Oct., 1995) 28-29

“The Science of Chaos Has Important Lessons for Democracy,” featured Letter to the Editor, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, March 10, 1990 [again, the editor’s grandiose title]

REAL JUSTICE

For centuries, Euro-Americans have insisted on the universality of liberty and equality as the foundation of justice. We frequently hear references to those “universal values” in the defense of the war in Iraq and the foreign policy of the U.S. in general. Those two values seem to be summed up for most people in the term “democracy.” I propose to prove herein that the maximum possible liberty is the product of justice, not its source; that equality comes close to justice, but isn’t it; that justice—real justice—is mutual respect in effecting choices; and that democracy, because it conforms with real justice, is a universal value, after all—though that means that it must also be applied to the economy.

It does seem to be the case that most people, once exposed to life with liberty and equality, prefer that to life without them. Yet, there are those who do not. One doesn’t have to be a militant Muslim to see the challenge liberty presents to religiously rigorous life. Religion and liberty can be reconciled, through freely willing to obey God’s will, but the mere mention of "free will" opens at least one more can of theological and philosophical worms to untangle. Meanwhile, there are interpreters of Judaism and Christianity as well as Islam (among other religions) who insist that all people aren’t equal in the eyes of God: believers v. non-believers; men v. women; etc. Besides that, the theoretical and practical problems associated with secularly equating equality with justice are greater than people often appreciate. For example, the fundamental issue that has informed the left-to-right political spectrum, with all its attendant conflict, is how and to what extent equality should be addressed in the economy.

In one of the most famous statements in philosophy regarding justice, John Locke identified injustice as “being subject to the arbitrary will” of another. In that he was correct. He went from there, however, to equate liberty with justice. In that he was mistaken. On the face of it, one can ask how people running around doing whatever they want can have anything to do with justice. According to Locke, the Rights to life and property set legitimate limits on the Right to liberty: Everyone’s liberty ends at everyone else’s person and property. Setting aside the very large questions of where Rights come from and why, as a Right, property should trump liberty, another question that arises is why all human beings would be equally entitled to those Rights. Locke’s answer is: It’s because we’re all equal, because God created us equal. That, however, makes equality, not liberty, the basis of justice. Worse for Locke’s case is that any assertion of human equality, whether it involves God or not, can only be a belief. Beliefs are perfectly valid, but the validity of any belief is limited to those individuals who have chosen to adopt and continue with that belief. Thus, some people imposing their beliefs on others is the very thing Locke himself recognized as being injustice. So, to erect the structure of a community’s political process on a foundation of belief is to act unjustly as Locke conceived it; yet, a belief in equality is the foundation on which all notions of democracy (currently) rest. (Beliefs have a perfectly legitimate place in a just political process, but not regarding its structure.)

As even that brief analysis of one person’s ideas about justice demonstrates, the central problem of justice is how people can be, well, justly required to abide by a particular ethic. The only way that can be possible is if that ethic is necessarily universally valid for human beings. In that case its applicability to everyone cannot be coherently denied by anyone. Only justice in that form can be real justice.

Historically, even to see that as the problem has been difficult. The ancient Greek city-states had such homogeneous cultures that every citizen in the community easily shared the same ideals—and anyone who seriously didn’t was invited to leave. Asian cultures have centered on social harmony, with tremendous social pressure to conform to whatever has been the prevailing norm. In many times and places, including Medieval Europe, religion has provided the ethical principles for justice. Europe’s Renaissance gave rise to secular approaches to the search for justice. Modern philosophers correctly recognized that religious belief could not provide a necessarily universal ethic because religious beliefs, being beliefs, cannot be necessarily universal. Those philosophers thought that secular reasoning is inherently objective and that whatever is objectively true is necessarily true. So, they constructed elaborate philosophical systems to explain all of ‘what is’, or at least what we can know, which necessarily included some ethic. We’ve learned that reasoning from secular suppositions results in ideologies that are in effect secular religions, which can be no more objective than any clerical religion. (That real justice can supplant all philosophical ideologies is one of its greatest contributions.) Postmodern philosophizing has established that objectivity itself is hopelessly ephemeral, and thus inadequate for determining a necessarily universal ethic.

In short, no previous ethic proposed for justice has been necessarily universal with respect to human beings. That’s a sufficient reason why all previous assertions as to what justice is have eventually come to naught: Less abstractly, that lack of universality has always been ‘found out’, making the ethic vulnerable to the elements of lust and greed. Once in that state, those ethics had about as much of a chance of providing a guiding light as a candle in a rainstorm. A necessarily universal ethic cannot end lust and greed or the unjust acts they drive people to commit, but it can be, as an ethical beacon, perpetually impervious to their effects.

There is one form of knowledge which is necessarily universally valid for human beings: observational knowledge. That is knowledge which is validated by observations within our material existence. For justice to be necessarily universal, it must be in that form of knowledge.

[Postmodernist readers will object to that paragraph because it assumes that the material existence I perceive is what all human beings--given my perception of the existence of other beings with a consciousness like my own--must perceive. They’re right. On the other hand, anyone who reads this from within one’s own consciousness and perceives material existence consistently with the experience of that existence which I am describing is bound by the ethic at which I’ll (eventually) arrive. Only a being who truly believed that the world that was perceived as existing outside that being’s consciousness was a phantasm of that being’s subjective self would be exempt from this ethic. Yet, as Jesus of Nazareth, for one, pointed out, what we really believe about existence is revealed in how we act. Any being that would claim an exemption from this ethic on the grounds just described would have to demonstrate by the way it lived its total life that it was the only ‘real’ being of its kind on the planet. (If there was only one, why would it have a gender?) The very act of claiming an exemption—thereby acknowledging a perception that there are other beings with whom one is in a state of reciprocal claims regarding one another—would, however, obviate that purported belief. In short, the ethic of real justice applies to every being who perceives oneself as a human living among other human beings.]

An example of observational knowledge is the observation that Earth revolves around the Sun, and not vice-versa. Certainly, anyone can claim that the Sun does revolve around Earth. For laypeople to make such an assertion is harmless enough, in that nothing follows from it. If we were to attempt to send people into space and back based on that claim, however, it would have dire consequences for the people on that vehicle. Justice, or its absence, has consequences for everyone. Therefore, we must all acknowledge justice that is shown to be valid via observations within our material existence.

Two possible objections to observational knowledge as determining what justice must be come to mind. One is that such knowledge can be unexpectedly impermanent. There have been observations about the world that were once accepted as valid but eventually turned out to be erroneous. For instance, the idea that Earth was flat was deemed to be true for millennia. On the other hand, there are observations about the world that are and have been valid from the day Adam first looked upon Creation. For example, no object has ever simply fallen off Earth. We’ll see that the observations that determine real justice are in no danger of ever being discovered to be invalid. The other possible objection concerns sufficient validation of observational knowledge. That depends on the use to which the knowledge is being put. In casual conversation, little or no validation may be required. In engineering, we like to have lots of validation. We’ll see that the observations that determine real justice are not only universally valid, but are universally verified by all people in the course of our experience of our material existence.

So, for justice to remain in the plane of material existence, where everyone can see it and must acknowledge it, neither its referents (the beings and their acts for which it exists) nor its determiners (the particular elements that decide for us what justice must be) can lie outside that plane. In other words, all of justice, everything about it, must be contained within material existence. If even one referent or determiner of justice were found to be outside material existence we would be back to the murky places where we’ve always been respecting this subject of inquiry.

Let’s start with the referents of justice. The beings for whom it exists are humans. That seems straightforward enough. One’s personal moral code can include rules regarding how one should treat other living things or the inorganic environment, but justice is limited to human beings. Among human beings, justice is limited to interactions in effecting choices (choosing among perceived alternatives and taking actions to bring those choices to fruition). Effecting choices is what we do, literally every moment of our waking lives. It is integral to human life. No human being can stop effecting choices (though we can be severely constrained by circumstances regarding available alternatives as well as our abilities to effect our choices). That is the only choice that is eternally denied us (unless one makes that one most awful choice). Most importantly, one human being can only materially impact another human being by effecting a choice. Again, one’s personal moral code can contain rules regarding private actions, or attitudes, or even thoughts, but the concern of justice is interactions with other human beings in effecting choices. [I was directed toward recognizing the place of effecting choices in justice when I read Warren J. Samuels’s Property and Power, in Perspectives of Property, Gene Wunderlich and W.L. Gibson, eds. (1972); in it he defined “social power” as “the ability to effect choices.”]

Real justice, then, is limited to interactions among human beings in effecting choices. That is the domain of justice. Outside that domain one’s personal morality must take over, but within it every human being must allow oneself to be governed by justice.

Now, everyone observes that we humans are social beings: We live together in communities. We further observe that choice-effecting people living together in communities generates conflict. The question arises, what should we do with respect to those conflicts? The tricky part of that question is the central problem of justice already noted: For any person to be required to accept any particular answer to that question, that answer must be necessarily universally valid for human beings. That is the only criterion available for deciding that question. If anyone were required to abide by any answer to it that wasn’t necessarily universally valid for human beings, that would be a case of some people arbitrarily imposing their wills on others. That’s why ‘what justice is’ must be a bit of observational knowledge.

All of that echoes Locke’s logical juncture at which he identified injustice. We also find in Locke’s thought something else that is part and parcel of the issue of justice, the will. This brings us to the most crucial observation concerning real justice: All of us observe that every human being has a will that is independent of the will of every other person. Yet, the will is immaterial. How, then, can the will be any part of real justice? While the will is immaterial, it manifests itself in a material way in the process of effecting choices when one decides which perceived alternative to pursue. Though that mental act is abstract, it is necessarily a part of effecting any choice within the material realm, where people’s wills can effect other people. Given that effecting choices is integral to our material existence and that choosing is an integral part of that process, for anyone arbitrarily to constrain any other person’s capacity to choose is to deny that person his or her full status as a human being. Therefore, protecting all people’s capacity to choose for themselves is the heart of the mater of justice.

The issue of justice finally becomes one question: Whose will should prevail in a conflict which arises in the process of effecting a choice? If anyone could materially demonstrate that the will of one of the people involved in the conflict was somehow inherently more worthy of being fulfilled than was the will of any other person involved in that conflict, that would provide an answer. That, however, is not possible. That means anyone who wanted to believe such an assertion could believe it, but no one could be justly required to believe it, much less submit to an outcome based on such an assertion. [A Just Solution contains answers to the questions that arise in unavoidably hierarchical relationships, such as parents and children, and work and school, but space doesn’t permit going into all of that herein.]

The inexorable, unassailable conclusion to which the above analysis leads us is that we have no choice but to engage in mutual respect for the mutually independent wills of all people in effecting all choices (“mutual respect in effecting choices,” for short). That’s the definitive, sufficient, prescriptive condition of real justice; it tells us how we must act regarding other human beings in the process of effecting choices. The minimum, necessary, proscriptive condition of justice draws the line between just and unjust acts; it tells us what we cannot do in the process of effecting choices. It is this: No one may co-opt the will of any other person in that process. That is, anyone’s participation in the process of effecting any choice must be sufficiently informed and wholly voluntary. That participation can only be just if the participation itself is something the participant has chosen. Conversely, anyone must be allowed to participate in the process of effecting any choice that affects that person. Basically, the minimum condition of real justice disallows killing, coercing, lying, cheating, or stealing in effecting choices.

It is important to note that having one’s will thwarted is not necessarily an injustice. This takes us back to Samuels, who observed that our ability to effect choices depends on our possession of sufficient amounts of the sources of social power relevant to a particular choice. If one does lose out in the competition for effecting one choice or another that is not an injustice as long as there has been no co-option and the outcome has been uninfluenced by factors extraneous to the relevant sources of social power. (To the extent that people decide such competitions, if in doing so they go outside the relevant sources of social power, whatever their motivations, they are arbitrarily asserting their own wills in the process.) Whoever has the most of the relevant sources of social power—most certainly to include determination, i.e., strength of will—should prevail.

That’s what I call real justice. It couldn’t be any simpler. Its referents are interacting human beings effecting choices; its determiners are a minimal number of material observations; at its minimum it boils down to a handful of proscriptions. When everyone is engaged in mutual respect for the mutually independent wills of all people in effecting all choices, then that establishes the maximum liberty that two or more coexisting people can enjoy simultaneously (as “liberty” is commonly understood: exercising the will). After all these millennia, at long last humanity can know, as certainly as we can know anything, what justice must be.

A Just Political Process

We can now turn to the application of real justice to the political process. We can extend Samuels’s conception of social power to define the political process as the process of effecting choices for the community as a whole. As such, it is a socially organic thing. It is inherent to the very act of having a community of human beings; every community of people necessarily has a political process. The very act of establishing a formal community is a political act. The political system is, then, the set of institutions via which choices are effected for the community as a whole. The political system includes political parties and other politically oriented organizations, etc. Of particular note is the institution that is the community’s constitution (or its equivalent). The constitution states the general rules governing participation in the political system (as rights) as well as specific rules for the structure and intended functioning of the government. The government is the set of institutions via which choices are actually implemented for the community as a whole. As such, it is a part of the political system. It is the innermost core of the whole of the political process.

So, the political process is the process of effecting choices for the community as a whole. The institutional structure through which that process operates is the political system. At the heart of that institutional structure, the place in the political process where choices are specified and particular actions are taken to implement those choices—where the proverbial rubber meets the street—is the government.

Here’s the thing: if the constitution establishes the rules for the political system, on what basis can the process leading up to the establishment of the constitution be governed? The answer is that the area of the political process that extends beyond the political system is political speech. That means political speech is something more than a right. It is integral to the political process: Since every member of the community will be affected by the choices effected for the community as a whole, every member of the community must be allowed to participate in the political process via speech—every man, woman, and child. Protecting political speech is necessary for a just political process.

Political speech can be divided into two categories, primary and secondary. Primary political speech is restricted to presenting choices for the community to effect. It does not include arguments for or against, merely the prospective choice itself. There must be absolute liberty of primary political speech. That is, there can be no prior restrictions on what choices people might proffer, nor can there be any repercussions whatsoever received by the person or persons introducing or reiterating any potential choice, whether from the government or any private person or group. Speech for or against any such choice is secondary political speech. That speech must be free. That means it cannot have any prior restrictions on what can be said. It would be possible to have certain ex post restrictions, in the form of penalties for engaging in libel or slander. Such restrictions would be limited to civil action initiated by the individual suffering the alleged offense, however. There could be no penalties or constraints of any kind initiated by government on secondary political speech—or accomplished through private thuggery.

Unlike political speech, participation in the political system and government can be justly restricted among members of the community. The fact that every member of the community will be affected by those choices means that those restrictions must be minimal. In fact, no restriction can be valid unless it can be sufficiently argued—under conditions of justice regarding political speech—that disallowing that restriction would compromise the functioning of the political system or the government. Restrictions based on age, as a proxy for maturity, are the best example. All that can be put in the form of a succinct principle: Political rights must be available to all members of the community but for objective restrictions, universally applied. Here “objective” means without reference to any belief, whether a creed, or religion, or ideology, etc. We can call that the democratic distributive principle.

A political process with liberty of primary political speech, freedom of secondary political speech, and political rights that are distributed in accordance with the democratic distributive principle is political democracy. Democracy as we know it is consistent with the application of real justice to the political process—in its structure, at least. Historically, the various forms democracy has taken have been based on the equality of the participants in the process (though in various times and places there have been unjust restrictions on eligibility). While equality is a belief, it does generate an onus of mutual respect for those who hold that belief. As we’ve seen, applying real justice to the political process would engender a few changes in how one thinks about it, but basing the political process on equality has allowed for the creation of just political structures.

Democracy is above all a vehicle for nonviolent social change. Liberty/freedom of political speech and the constitutional rights to vote, run for office, petition, and assemble are all means to that end. The objects of change can range from particular Acts, to general policies of government, to the structure of the entire political process, to the idea of justice that undergirds democracy itself. Liberty/freedom of political speech provides that self-referential capacity. Democracy, properly understood, not only allows for nonviolent change, however, but requires it: Real justice restricts us to rational persuasion in the political process. All of this, by the way, provides democracy an inherent practical advantage over all undemocratic political processes: It allows for individuals and ideas to come to the fore as needed for the benefit of the community.

Nonviolence isn’t the real basis for touting democracy, however. Rather, we can celebrate the simple fact that democracy accords with real justice. It isn’t that democracy is better than any other form of government because it’s the form of government Euro-Americans chose to establish and Euro-Americans are somehow better human beings, or closer to God, or any such thing. Rather, Euro-Americans, in their search for universal Truths, hit on equality as one of the determiners of justice, and equality, the historical basis of democracy, turned out to be darned close to the actual truth of the matter of justice. None of that gives anyone a right, or even a license, much less a duty, to go around the world establishing democracy at gunpoint: indeed, real justice prohibits co-opting people in the process of establishing just political and economic processes. By making democracy a genuinely, truly, irrefutably universal value, however, real justice has won for those who favor democracy total, final victory over any who would oppose democracy in the battle of ideas.

A Just Economy

The changes that real justice would bring to the economy are far more striking. Applying justice to the economy would result in what I call democratic capitalism. I call the particular model of democratic capitalism I have developed the demand economy (because the money supply enters the economy via consumers' purchases of goods and services). Even at that, the economic system could take different forms, and within those forms adopt or leave out various options. In the previous essay on this page of this website I presented a sketch of one form that the institutional structure of the demand economy could take. That form of the demand economy would require the minimal possible change in the structure and functioning of the capitalist economy that is already in place. In it, all that would be changed would be the money supply--the source of it, and the way it entered the economy and circulated through it. Two other possibilities--still capitalism, but requiring more changes in the economy (not to mention people's attitudes)--are presented in A Just Solution. Real justice requires that there be a democratically distributed income. A democratically distributed income is one which would be available to all (adults), but which is required for no one (anyone who wanted to could choose not to earn it, and make money some other way). It is similar to the case with rights in a political democracy, though the fact that rights are pure abstractions while money is a material thing does create certain differences. Any economy with a democratically distributed income would meet the minimum requirement for economic justice. In that previous essay the "allotted"  income is a democratically distributed income.

Conclusion

To summarize, the domain of justice is limited to human interactions in effecting choices. Within that large but finite domain the sufficient condition of justice is mutual respect for the mutually independent wills of all people in effecting all choices. The necessary condition of justice, the prohibition against co-opting the will of any other person in effecting any choice, provides an absolute ethical standard to govern interactions among us. Both of those conditions of justice are necessarily universal with respect to human beings because they are determined by universally valid—and universally verifiable—observations of temporal existence. Outside of that domain one’s personal morality must take over, but inside it any and every morality must be governed by real justice, due to its universality. The realm of justice most emphatically does include the political process of any community and the economy. It must govern the structure and functioning of both. Political democracy as we commonly think of it generally accords with real justice, at least in its structure, because equality, the historical basis of democratic structures, implies a requirement of mutual respect. There is not now, nor has there ever been in the history of civilization, a just economy anywhere on Earth. Applying real justice to the structure of the economy would make it as just in its structure as political democracy is in its structure, improvinging capitalism, and strengthening political democracy in the bargain.