The framework's predictions in [§9.7.3](<9.7.3 What is Predicted.md>) are matched against an existing body of empirical and theoretical literature. This section reviews the confirmations.

*First.* Wealthy under-recognize reliance. Bartels (2008) and Gilens and Page (2014) document that high-income earners systematically endorse policy positions that misalign with median-income outcomes, and that policy outcomes track the preferences of the top of the distribution far more closely than the median. Page, Bartels, and Seawright (2013) survey wealthy Americans directly and find systematic divergence from median-income preferences on infrastructure spending, taxation, and social-insurance questions. The framework's prediction that the wealthy will under-recognize their reliance on infrastructure is confirmed by the policy-preference data.

*Second.* Insurance-substitution pathologies. Akerlof (1970) and Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976) establish that insurance markets characterized by adverse selection and moral hazard cannot reach efficient allocation through individual underwriting; the markets fail in directions the collective-investment frame circumvents because it does not depend on individual underwriting at all. Empirical literature on US healthcare administrative costs places administrative spending well above peer-system levels, confirming the gatekeeping-and-bloat prediction without requiring any single administrative-cost estimate to carry the whole claim. Himmelstein et al. on medical bankruptcy (contested in magnitude but still central to the US healthcare-finance debate) supports the profit-extracted-from-vulnerability prediction at the vulnerability interface. The Commonwealth Fund's cross-OECD healthcare-outcomes comparisons show that the US spends substantially more while underperforming peer systems on many major access, equity, and outcome measures, exactly the pattern the framework predicts when insurance occupies the subsistence space.

The mechanism behind the aggregate pattern is concrete at the level of a single participant. Consider a person with type-1 diabetes under a private-insurance regime. The insurer's underwriting models them as a high-cost participant and prices them accordingly: premiums, deductibles, and coverage limits are set to recover expected payouts plus profit margin. The patient pays the underwriting cost in higher premiums; the insurer extracts a margin on what is, structurally, the maintenance of a chronic condition the political community already has the institutional capacity to maintain through any number of available mechanisms (universal coverage, single-payer, public option, multi-payer with strict community rating). The insurance layer adds nothing the political community could not provide directly; it adds an extraction layer on top of what would otherwise be the political community subsisting one of its members through a chronic condition. The argument does not say the patient should not be cared for. It says that the way private insurance is currently structured, as the primary mechanism for handling chronic-condition maintenance, adds a profit margin to a service the structure could provide without one.

*Third.* Extraction-tolerance correlates with aggregate suffering. Wilkinson and Pickett (2009; *The Spirit Level*) document that across OECD countries, social-outcome measures (mental health, drug abuse, obesity, teen pregnancy, homicide, imprisonment, social mobility, life expectancy) track inequality far more strongly than they track absolute wealth. Case and Deaton (2020; *Deaths of Despair*) document the pattern in the US where extraction-tolerance is highest and where deaths from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease have risen sharply among working-age white Americans. Mullainathan and Shafir (2013) and Haushofer and Fehr (2014) document the cognitive and decision-making consequences of poverty exposure. The aggregate pattern is what the framework's account of political-community failure predicts.

*Fourth.* Property-tax misalignment. Henry George's *Progress and Poverty* (1879) established the analytic case for separating land value from improvement value; the contemporary land-value-tax literature (Foldvary; Stiglitz on the Henry George theorem) confirms the framework's derivation that LVT captures collective-investment-generated value without the redundancies of standard property tax. The urban-economics literature on property-tax-induced displacement of fixed-income homeowners and on speculative land-banking patterns confirms the misalignment prediction.

The derivation behind the prediction separates two cases. Under proportionate-to-stake progressive contribution, *standard property tax* (taxing both land and improvements at assessed value) is structurally redundant: the property is already protected by infrastructure, the protection is already paid for through proportionate contribution scaled to wealth and income, and taxing the property again because the wealth happens to be in property form double-counts the same stake. *Land-value taxation* (the Henry George tradition) is the opposite case: land value is overwhelmingly a function of collective infrastructure (proximity to schools, roads, transit, jobs, regulatory protections), so taxing it captures collective-investment-generated value directly rather than double-counting anything. Same domain, opposite verdicts, and the derivation tells you which is which.

The contrast is concrete in two adjacent parcels in a city neighborhood. The first holds a single-family home whose owner has improved it over twenty years: a new roof, a finished basement, an updated kitchen, a carefully tended garden. The second holds a similar plot the owner has held vacant, waiting for the surrounding neighborhood's improvement to raise its resale value. Under standard property tax, the improving owner pays more each year than the speculating owner, even though the speculating owner is capturing infrastructure-driven appreciation without contributing back. Under land-value taxation, both parcels are taxed on the value of the land (the value the schools, transit, regulatory protections, and surrounding neighbors have created), and the improvements the first owner made are not penalized. The improving owner's bill drops; the speculating owner's bill rises to match what the land has already captured from collective investment. Same neighborhood, same tax dollars in aggregate, different distribution of who pays what, and the difference tracks the framework's distinction between value created by collective investment and value created by individual contribution.

*Fifth.* Wage stagnation tracks extraction. The Economic Policy Institute (Mishel and Kandra, ongoing) documents the divergence between productivity growth and median compensation since approximately 1979 in the US: productivity has roughly doubled while median compensation has grown weakly, with the gap absorbed by top-of-distribution accumulation. Piketty (2014; *Capital in the Twenty-First Century*) documents the long-run dynamics of capital-share growth versus labor-share growth across OECD economies. Bebchuk and Fried (2004; *Pay Without Performance*) document the executive-compensation patterns that disconnect compensation from productive output. The mechanical-relationship prediction is empirically confirmed.

*Sixth.* Trickle-down failure. Hope and Limberg (2022; *Socio-Economic Review*) review tax cuts for the rich across 18 OECD countries over five decades and find that the cuts produced no significant aggregate growth or employment effects but did increase top-of-distribution income shares. The IMF Fiscal Monitor (2017) similarly documents that progressive tax-and-transfer policy is compatible with growth. Hungerford (Congressional Research Service, 2012) and Romer and Romer (2010) confirm that the relationship between top-marginal-rate adjustments and growth is empirically weak. The framework's prediction that trickle-down rhetoric does not produce trickle-down effects is broadly confirmed across the empirical record.

*Seventh.* Crisis extractions larger than steady-state. Saez and Zucman document the post-2008 and post-2020 recovery patterns in which top-of-distribution wealth shares grew faster than at any other recent period. The crisis-period prediction is confirmed by accelerating accumulation patterns in 2008–2010 and 2020–2022. Atkinson (2015; *Inequality: What Can Be Done?*) provides the comparative-historical context for the pattern.

*Eighth.* Admiration tracks contribution. The historical record confirms the prediction directly. Andrew Carnegie was vilified during the industrialist phase (Homestead 1892) and venerated after the libraries-and-foundations phase. John D. Rockefeller was a robber baron during Standard Oil and a respected philanthropist after the Rockefeller Foundation. In the contemporary record, MacKenzie Scott has accumulated enormous public goodwill through rapid distribution-focused giving (approximately $17 billion given out 2019–2024); Chuck Feeney gave approximately $8 billion anonymously through Atlantic Philanthropies and was widely admired; Yvon Chouinard transferred Patagonia to environmental purpose and was almost universally admired. The pattern is what the [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) account of mutual recognition predicts.

*Convergent confirmations: shared-conditions empirical record.* The maximum-possibility prediction is the most consistently confirmed across the comparative-political record.

*The Nordic countries.* Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden consistently rank at or near the top of the World Happiness Report (Helliwell, Layard, and Sachs, annually since 2012), the Human Development Index, and cross-national measures of social trust and institutional confidence. They do so while maintaining market economies above the threshold, which is precisely what the account predicts: the threshold does not crowd out industry but produces the conditions under which industry and individual flourishing operate without coercion. None of these countries is without internal tensions, contested policies, or criticisms from within and without. That is beside the point. The point is that where the threshold holds, the metrics the account identifies as constitutive of political maintenance (economic security, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, institutional trust) improve together, because they are aspects of the same structural fact.

*Costa Rica.* Costa Rica abolished its military in 1948 and redirected the budget to education and healthcare; it now has the highest life expectancy in Latin America and consistently ranks as the happiest country in the region. The partial implementation of the threshold produced partial confirmation of the prediction.

*Germany: Soziale Marktwirtschaft and Bismarckian social insurance.* Germany's social market economy was explicitly designed as a floor-plus-market architecture, with the Bismarckian social insurance system (originating 1883; Hennock 2007) as the oldest surviving example of collective pooling structured around contribution and universal coverage.

*Bhutan: Gross National Happiness.* Bhutan's GNH index names the same structural insight at the level of national accounting: the metric of a society's success is what its members are actually able to be and do.

*The World Happiness Report findings.* The report's findings show that the largest share of variance in national happiness scores is explained by precisely the variables the present account derives as constitutive of maximum possibility under necessities met: not decorative add-ons to a prior notion of happiness, but the structural conditions the account derives from first principles, confirmed by what populations actually report when asked how their lives are going.

*Theoretical convergences (the framework is not alone in its conclusions, just unusual in its derivation).* The framework converges on conclusions independently reached in optimal-tax theory (Mirrlees 1971; Diamond and Saez 2011), the capabilities approach (Sen 1985, 1999; Nussbaum 2000, 2011), public-goods theory (Samuelson 1954; Pigou 1920), institutional economics (North 1990; Acemoglu and Robinson 2012; Polanyi 1944), the entrepreneurial-state literature (Mazzucato 2013), behavioral-economic accounts of bounded rationality (Kahneman 2011; Thaler and Sunstein 2008), and the basic-income literature (Standing 2017; Van Parijs and Vanderborght 2017). Convergence from independent grounds is the strongest form of confirmation: the conclusion is robust under alternate premises.

*What does not confirm the framework.* Strong-form efficient-market theory (Fama; Lucas) and pure-market-information accounts (Hayek 1945 at the strongest version) predict patterns the framework does not observe and does not predict. Trickle-down economic configurations at their strongest predict empirical effects that the empirical record does not deliver (Prediction 6). Strong-form Nozickian entitlement theory (Nozick 1974) predicts a moral landscape in which proportionate-to-stake taxation is itself wrongful, a prediction the framework precludes at the level of derivation. Where the empirical record and the derivation diverge from these accounts, the framework takes the empirical record and the derivation as authoritative. The confirmations stated in this subsection are made under engagement with the three opposition traditions [§9.7.1](<9.7.1 What is Disputed.md>) names at premise: the classical-liberal / public-choice tradition (Hayek, Friedman, Buchanan and Tullock), strong-form libertarian entitlement theory (Nozick, Rothbard), and the Marxist / structural-conflict tradition (Marx, Harvey, Wright). Those traditions are engaged at section length in [§9.7.1](<9.7.1 What is Disputed.md>), and the confirmation record stated here applies under that engagement.


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← [9.7.3 What is Predicted](<9.7.3 What is Predicted.md>) | [9.7.5 What is Concluded](<9.7.5 What is Concluded.md>) →
