Tag
Philosophy
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The Floor and the Exit
The last essay settled what the dividend is. This one is about what it does, and the most important thing it does is not feed you. It frees you. A floor no employer can take away is the power to walk, and the power to walk is the only thing …
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Not Welfare, a Dividend
Almost every argument about a basic income is lost in the first word. Welfare is charity, a transfer from the people who earned the money to the people who did not. A dividend is the return on something you already own. The money can be the …
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The Cap
The hardest piece of the settlement, and the most attacked. A ceiling on what the people at the top can take, set as a multiple of the floor. It does almost nothing as redistribution, which is why it has to be defended on other ground.
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The Floor and the Share
Strip the settlement down to the two commitments that do the real work, a published floor of dignity and a real share of the surplus, and you have the part that needs no apology. They are not generosity. They are what you owe once you see …
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What We Refuse to Count
Almost everyone, left and right, agrees that pay should track value and that some people are worth many times what others are. They argue about the multiple. The premise underneath is the thing worth examining, because the multiple is …
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Enough and As Good
The whole case rests on five words Locke let slip and then seemed to take back. This part defends them against the three attacks that matter: that Locke abandoned the proviso, that it is an open door to theft, and the serious one, that no …
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The Third Answer
Most of adult life is spent at work, which makes the firm one of the main places human beings actually live together. The two answers our age offers for how owners and workers should relate are both forms of war. There is a third, and it …
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The Last Enclosure
A large language model is the knowledge of the species, enclosed by a corporation and rented back to the people who made it. The value it sells is mostly unearned, captured from a commons it did not create. Open models are the better path …
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What Liberty Requires Beyond Slogans
Liberty as a slogan asks nothing of you. Liberty as a project asks for everything: institutional design, cultural maintenance, and the discipline to want it for people you disagree with.
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The Tollbooth
The foundation essay and the first part of this series argued that the rent of bare land is unearned. This one looks at the thing itself: the landowner as a man who gates a road he did not build and charges everyone who passes. What the …
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From Plunder to Justice: A New Foundation of Law and Liberty
Law has one just purpose, to defend natural rights, and never to plunder them. But the hardest case for any philosophy of liberty is land, which no one made and everyone needs. Working from self-ownership and Locke’s own forgotten …