What the economic order is *for* is the question political economy keeps fighting over, and with it whether the political community has structural distributional obligations to its members or only the contingent obligations contemporary participants happen to settle on. The framework's recognition tradition reads economy as recognition-and-distribution infrastructure (how a political community takes care of itself materially across the conditions its members need to act coherently) and derives proportionate-to-stake contribution and sufficiency-floor non-substitutability as twin structural commitments. Three contemporary traditions deny this framing at its premise from different directions.

The classical-liberal / public-choice tradition (Hayek 1944, 1960; Friedman 1962; Buchanan and Tullock 1962; the broader public-choice tradition through Tullock on rent-seeking) presses three converging objections. Hayek's *knowledge problem* (developed in Hayek 1945) holds that the local knowledge coordinating an economy is dispersed across millions of agents and is not available to any central authority; market prices aggregate that knowledge in a form no planning architecture can substitute for. Friedman's *minimal-state* position holds that comprehensive bureaucratic redistribution introduces distortions a minimal cash-transfer architecture (the negative income tax) avoids, and the more the state takes on the more it must coerce. The public-choice tradition's *capture* diagnostic holds that the regulatory state is itself the structure rent-seekers capture, and confidence that better-designed regulation can solve the problem mistakes the source of the problem for its remedy.

Strong-form libertarian entitlement theory (Nozick 1974; Rothbard 1982; the contemporary Locke-tradition libertarianism after Eric Mack) presses a different objection at the moral level. Where Hayek's case against redistribution is epistemic, Nozick's case is deontic: pre-political entitlement attaches to justly-acquired and justly-transferred holdings, redistribution from such holdings is wrongful at the level of derivation, and proportionate-to-stake contribution as the framework derives it is on this reading a euphemism for forced labor in proportion to productivity. Even granting that the political community provides infrastructure, on the Nozickian reading the contribution is owed at the level the participant freely agrees to and not at the level the framework derives.

The Marxist and structural-conflict tradition (Marx and Engels 1848; Marx 1867; the Marxist political-economy tradition through Luxemburg 1913; the contemporary structural-conflict tradition through Harvey 2003; Wright 2010) presses an objection from the opposite direction: the framework's claim that proportionate-to-stake contribution and sufficiency-floor non-substitutability can be derived *within* the structure of capital is itself a mystification. On this reading, capital's structural extraction is not a correctable design flaw within an otherwise sound architecture; it is the architecture, and any reform that leaves capital's structural position intact has reproduced the extraction at a slightly different layer. The convergence the framework claims to derive between economic justice and structural maintenance is on this reading the latest iteration of the bourgeois-reformist tradition that has always co-opted the energy for structural transformation into a survivable settlement for capital.

The recognition tradition the section operates within reaches the opposite destination on multiple independent grounds. Adam Smith reaches it from inside the foundation the classical-liberal tradition cites: *The Wealth of Nations* (1776) Book V Chapter 2 grounds proportionate-to-stake contribution explicitly, and *The Theory of Moral Sentiments* (1759) Part I Section III Chapter 2 grounds the recognition-payoff side; the framework runs both halves on the foundation Smith already provided, against the selective Hayek-Friedman reading. The physiocratic tradition (Quesnay 1758) developed the first formal model of an economy as a circular flow of value, with productive activity feeding distributions that return to producers; Marshall (1890) picks the structure up in the price-theoretic tradition; Joseph Schumpeter's creative-destruction work dynamizes it; Henry Ford's 1914 five-dollar day is the operational instance an industrialist ran on his own factory floor. Carnegie (1889) is the high-net-worth tradition's own articulation of the legacy-as-contribution distinction the framework recovers. The capabilities tradition (Sen 1985, 1999; Nussbaum 2000, 2011) reaches sufficiency-floor through the question of which capabilities institutions must maintain for participation to remain substantively available. Optimal-tax theory (Mirrlees 1971; Diamond and Saez 2011) derives progressive structures from welfare-economic premises. The Polanyian tradition (Polanyi 1944) names the structural fact that the market is embedded in social and ecological conditions it depends on for its own functioning. The public-goods tradition (Samuelson 1954; Pigou 1920) supplies the externality and public-goods derivation. The Henry George tradition (George 1879; Stiglitz on the Henry George theorem) develops the land-value-taxation case the framework converges on. The commons-governance tradition (Ostrom 1990) documents the multi-generational maintenance of resources outside both market and state. The contemporary inequality scholarship (Atkinson 2015; Piketty 2014; Stiglitz 2012; Wilkinson and Pickett 2009) documents the empirical patterns the framework's structural-extraction account predicts. The entrepreneurial-state tradition (Mazzucato 2013) documents the collective-investment record behind technological innovation.

The dispute the section frames is whether economic obligation can be reduced to epistemic constraints on planning, pre-political entitlement protected against redistribution, or class-conflict prescription against the framework of capital itself (theses pressed by Hayek-Friedman-Buchanan, by Nozick, and by the Marxist tradition) or whether proportionate-to-stake contribution and sufficiency-floor non-substitutability are the same structural commitment viewed from opposite ends of the distribution, a thesis pressed by the Smith-Quesnay-Carnegie-Sen-Mazzucato lineage through the empirical record on extraction and on sufficiency-floor performance. [§9.7.2](<9.7.2 What is Required.md>) carries the structural-necessity derivation that decides the dispute, reasoning from the [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>) / [§8.8](<8.8 Meaning.md>) / [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) / [§8.11](<8.11 Technology.md>) grounding to what economy must deliver to count as economy under a political community that recognizes its members as the participants whose subsistence and contribution constitute the community. *Thus the question stands disputed.*


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← [9.7 Economy](<9.7 Economy.md>) | [9.7.2 What is Required](<9.7.2 What is Required.md>) →
