The implications of the [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) derivation for institutional design fall into structural-constraint implications (what design has to satisfy) and field-engagement implications (how the framework asks readers across the political spectrum to engage with it). Both are distinct from the derivation itself and from the predictions in [§9.7.3](<9.7.3 What is Predicted.md>); this section organizes them in turn.

*Structural constraints.* Proportionate-to-stake taxation operates as the first design constraint. Any acceptable economic-distribution design has to satisfy the constraint that contribution scales with reliance on the political community. Flat-rate taxation systematically violates the constraint because reliance scales nonlinearly with wealth (a fact the [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) derivation makes explicit through the institutional-leverage analysis). Tax-haven structures, capital-gains-versus-ordinary-income disparities favoring large holders, and dynastic-inheritance mechanisms similarly violate the constraint by allowing large-stake holders to escape proportionate contribution. The framework precludes these mechanisms at the level of design, while leaving the specific marginal-rate schedule, the specific capital-gains treatment, and the specific inheritance design underdetermined where multiple options satisfy the constraint. The design constraints stated in this subsection are contested at their premise by three traditions: the classical-liberal economic tradition (Hayek, *The Constitution of Liberty* 1960; Friedman, *Capitalism and Freedom* 1962; the public-choice tradition of Buchanan and Tullock, *The Calculus of Consent* 1962); strong-form libertarian entitlement theory (Nozick, *Anarchy, State, and Utopia* 1974; Rothbard, *The Ethics of Liberty* 1982); and the Marxist and structural-conflict tradition (Marx and Engels, *The Communist Manifesto* 1848; Marx, *Capital* 1867; Harvey, *The New Imperialism* 2003; Wright, *Envisioning Real Utopias* 2010); those traditions are engaged at section length in [§9.7.1](<9.7.1 What is Disputed.md>), and the constraints stated here apply under that engagement.

Non-substitutability of subsistence is a second design constraint. Any acceptable design has to satisfy the constraint that subsistence (health, disability, unemployment, survivor income, baseline housing) is provided through the political community and not through profit-extracting substitutes. Single-payer healthcare, multi-payer-with-strong-subsistence architectures, and hybrid designs that maintain subsistence without profit extraction at the subsistence level all satisfy this constraint. Privatized-insurance architectures that occupy the subsistence space and extract profit margins at the point of constitutive vulnerability violate it. The framework precludes the latter at the level of design.

Subsistence adequacy must track locality, and subsistence caps at adequacy. Two constraints follow directly from the definition of subsistence as the conditions under which a person remains the kind of subject political life consists in. First, adequacy is locality-relative: a subsistence amount adequate in a low-cost rural region under-delivers in a high-cost metropolitan one and over-delivers in the reverse direction; neither is what the framework derives. Adequacy means actual-adequacy-where-the-person-lives, which the implementation has to track. Second, subsistence caps at adequacy. The framework delivers the structural condition for participation; it does not fund supererogatory holdings. An adequate dwelling for the household in its area is what subsistence covers; a larger or more-amenity dwelling is an above-floor holding the participant funds themselves, on the same logic by which (in the *yacht stays* argument below) the yacht remains the owner's responsibility. The framework owes adequacy; it does not owe replication of any particular pre-existing standard of living. The implementation architecture — the specific cost-of-living index, the data sources (BLS regional CPI, the Living Wage Calculator and Family Budget Calculator, the military BAH precedent for locality-adjusted housing allowances, or a purpose-built Adequate Living Cost index), the update frequency, the household-composition adjustments, the transition design for inter-area moves, and the line items included — the framework leaves to the design literatures and registered direction. Multiple architectures satisfy the two constraints. The data-collection infrastructure itself, however, counts as collective-investment soft infrastructure of the same kind as census-taking, public-health surveillance, and BLS measurement work — not a design choice — and falls within the political community to fund and maintain.

Structural-extraction reduction operates as a design pressure. Any acceptable design has to apply pressure (regulatory, taxation, transparency, enforcement) against patterns of structural extraction at every scale at which they appear. The framework's symmetry construction means this pressure is institution-and-individual symmetric: regulatory capture, sanctioned disproportion, tax-haven structures, denial-of-claim profit-maximization, and executive compensation disconnected from productive output get the same kind of pressure as insurance fraud, tax fraud, benefits fraud, and false claims. The framework derives that the political pressure to treat these as opposed (the wealthy versus the poor; the corporation versus the cheater) is itself a form of structural-extraction maintenance: the symmetric account is harder to capture politically because it cannot be turned into a class-warfare lever.

Protection runs in two directions. Smith's *proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state* (Bk V Ch 2) has been read almost exclusively from the wealth side: more assets, more protection, more contribution owed. The framework completes the symmetry by reading the same phrase from the other end. Ordinary participants are also protected, but on a different axis: not in their assets primarily, but *from extraction by those whose stake is larger*. Labor law, consumer protection, antitrust enforcement, regulatory floors, public courts that do not run on who can pay better lawyers, antifraud institutions at institutional scale, housing protections from real-estate consolidation, and healthcare not tied to employer leverage each close an avenue through which large-stake actors could otherwise extract from small-stake actors. The wealthy contribute proportionately more because more of *their stake* is protected; ordinary participants receive proportionately more because more of *their not-being-extracted-from* is protected. The two readings are the same protection-relation observed from opposite ends.

This also turns the protection axis into a metric. The degree of protection-from-extraction a small-stake participant actually has is the measure of how much the structure is delivering to them. A society in which labor law is captured, consumer protection gutted, antitrust dormant, and regulatory capture licensed is a society in which ordinary participants are receiving less from the structure even when nominal infrastructure (roads, schools, courts) is unchanged. The protection-from-extraction layer is a real component of collective-investment delivery; its degradation registers as the structure failing to support ordinary people. This is an experience often dismissed as ideological resentment, but which the framework derives as a structurally accurate recognition of a real withdrawal.

*Field-engagement.* Consider first the legacy reframe for high-net-worth readers. Call this a charity-of-engagement passage rather than a derivation move: it addresses the actual emotional concern of high-net-worth readers — legacy, recognition, being-the-greatest. The framing is accurate to the derivation, not placating. The framework does not claim that historic accumulators (a Carnegie, a Rockefeller, a Musk, a Bezos) did not earn anything; their accomplishments at scale stand. What the framework disputes is the magnitude of *ongoing* accumulation matching proportionate stake. The legacy stands; the structural adjustment is at the rate-of-further-extraction end.

The reframe lands structurally because becoming the wealthiest person in history is a *one-time permanent record*: like a sports record, it does not get unmade by what comes after. Under proportionate-to-stake contribution, the record-holder keeps the record they already set; what is adjusted is the rate of further accumulation beyond proportionate stake, not the legacy already secured.

*The record is binary; it is held or it is not held. Holding it by $5 billion and holding it by $250 billion are the same record. The margin past the threshold buys nothing in admiration, and costs in resentment, which scales with visible disproportion. The marginal billion past the record returns negative status to the holder.*

The framework's lineage on this point goes back to Andrew Carnegie's *The Gospel of Wealth* (1889). Carnegie made this argument as one of the wealthiest Americans in history, then gave away nearly all of his fortune building approximately 3,000 libraries, universities, and public goods. The framework's distinction between legacy-as-contribution and legacy-as-accumulation is in Carnegie's own self-understanding. Citing Carnegie lands the move on a wealthy industrialist's own framing rather than on a critic's frame imposed from outside. The Giving Pledge (Buffett, Gates, and roughly 240 signatories) operates the legacy-versus-accumulation distinction inside the contemporary billionaire class; the framework extends a logic some peers already endorse rather than imposing a foreign one.

The positive theory of success follows. Success survives the framework intact, recoupled to contribution rather than abolished. The image is reciprocal flow: productive activity feeds the system, the system feeds back, proportionally, with substantial returns to the productive actor and a significant flow to collective investment, simultaneously. Taxation functions here as the feedback mechanism itself, not a cost extracted from earnings. The image has a deep lineage: Quesnay's *Tableau économique* (1758) first formally modeled the economy as circular flow; Marshall and Schumpeter develop the structure dynamically; Ford's 1914 five-dollar day is its supply-side proof of concept (Ford roughly doubled wages and the company expanded faster, not slower). Under proportionate-to-stake contribution, higher earnings literally mean higher collective investment, so the chronic critique of capitalism (*the more successful you are, the more you take from society*) inverts into its opposite. A precision: the feeding-loop image lands cleanly for genuinely value-creating activity (entrepreneurship, manufacturing, services, scientific work). It does not legitimize extractive activity disguised as productive: rent-seeking, externality-shifting, regulatory arbitrage, monopoly extraction remain structural extraction whatever the actor's self-description. Recognition follows from contribution per the [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) derivation: current resentment of billionaires structurally consists in failure-of-mutual-recognition at scale, not resentment of wealth as such. Smith made this side explicit in *Theory of Moral Sentiments* Pt I S III Ch 2: *to deserve, to acquire, and to enjoy the respect and admiration of mankind, are the great objects of ambition and emulation.* *Wealth of Nations* Bk V Ch 2 grounds the contribution mechanism; *Theory of Moral Sentiments* grounds the recognition payoff. The empirical pattern matches the derivation, as [§9.7.4](<9.7.4 What is Confirmed.md>) documents: wealthy contributors are widely admired, wealthy extractors widely resented, and the same individual can move from one category to the other across the arc of a career.

And the yacht stays. The closing pitch of this implications arc addresses the worry that the framework is communism in disguise. It is not. Discretionary above-floor holdings (yacht, mansion, art collection, second house, personal jet, wine cellar) remain in the owner's stewardship. The framework does not take them. The framework does not replace them. They are the owner's: personal use, enjoyment, and passing-on (subject to estate taxation operating on the same proportionate-contribution logic).

What the framework actually adjusts versus leaves alone separates cleanly:

| Adjusted | Left alone |
| --- | --- |
| Rate of further accumulation beyond proportionate stake | Existing personal holdings above the sufficiency floor |
| Mechanisms licensing sanctioned disproportion (tax havens, flat-tax structures, dynastic-inheritance mechanics) | Personal use, enjoyment, and passing-on of those holdings (each scaled by proportionate contribution) |
| Extraction patterns at every scale (institutional and individual) | The yacht. The mansion. The Picasso. |

The framework expropriates nothing. The wealthy do not lose what they have. They contribute proportionately to what protects what they have, and the rest is theirs to enjoy.

The class-warfare deflection is the load-bearing political move. Progressive-taxation framings have a chronic vulnerability: sliding into class-resentment politics where "the rich pay more" becomes "the rich deserve worse," and tacit license follows for vandalism, sabotage, and rhetoric of personal destruction. The collective-investment frame forecloses that slide *at the derivation level*. The same logic that grounds proportionate-to-stake contribution in this section also grounds the wrongness of property destruction in [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>) (Justice), on the same premises, at the same time. There is no line of derivation within this framework that gets to "stick it to the rich" as policy or practice. The cross-domain consistency is what makes the framework politically distinctive among progressive frameworks: it is unusable as a class-warfare lever by construction.

A further anti-objection runs: "I could protect my own stuff with private security and contracts." Private security operates only within a legal system that recognizes property, prosecutes theft, and enforces contracts. Private contracts are enforceable only because public courts will enforce them. Private security relies on currency stability, banking, regulatory frameworks, and an educated workforce that the political community built and maintains. There is no exit from the infrastructure. Private alternatives are additive within it, not substitutive for it. The libertarian fantasy of opting out is structurally incoherent on the framework's own terms.

*The public case for accumulation past sufficiency is structurally incoherent.* The justifications most often offered for the accumulation that produces concentration, examined under the same account, fail at the point they were supposed to terminate. Legacy requires audience; audience requires the field; extraction from the field shrinks the audience that would receive the legacy. The named foundation, the engraved monument, and the endowed institution persist where they served the field, and the persons remembered through history are remembered for what they did, not for what they held: the historical record of durable legacy is the record of contribution to the conditions of others, not extraction from them. Safety past sufficiency is field-dependent: the rule of law, public health, food systems, ecological stability, and social cohesion deliver protection that no concentration of private resources can substitute for, and the historical record of wealth in failed states confirms that private fortifications do not replace the shared structure they pretend to escape. Status is granted by subjects to subjects for what was done; ostentation purchases attention but not admiration, and adulation that has been bought or coerced is no exception, because what the wealth-pattern can command is the display of regard, never the regard itself, which only subjects who have not been dominated are positioned to give. The wealth-pattern that produces accumulation also produces the conditions that foreclose the very public life status was meant to be received within: the security details, the gated insulation, the paranoia about strangers, and the hostility from those bearing the externalized costs. The accumulator is structurally among the least free participants in the public space everyone less wealthy takes for granted, unable to walk through it as a person whom others look up to, because what others recognize on contact is the wealth-pattern, not the person inside it.

Comfort and happiness saturate at a threshold the body can verify (Kahneman and Deaton 2010). Killingsworth (2021) and the Killingsworth, Kahneman, and Mellers (2023) adversarial-collaboration reconciliation refine the saturation point upward and show its sharpness depends on baseline well-being. The structural point (that resources past a finite threshold stop converting into the kind of felt-experience the framework requires) survives all three findings. Past the threshold, additional resources produce optionality and management burden, not satisfaction. The richest person and the merely-comfortable person, asked under conditions of honest reflection, report convergent felt-experience; what differs at the upper end is the load of administering the holdings, not the quality of life.

The most emotionally compelling justification (that the wealth is being held for descendants) fails in the same structural form: an inheritance is a single-point bet on the survival of specific institutions (banking, currency, jurisdiction, the inheriting party's continued standing), while a healthy society is a distributed-resilience bet on the survival of the conditions of life themselves. Building the society is a far safer insurance policy for any descendant than any sum can deliver. Money buys recovery after vulnerability arrives; structure keeps vulnerability from arriving as coercive choice in the first place. The rational use of excess wealth is therefore not enclosure against the society that produced it, but investment in the society that makes enclosure unnecessary.

*Once lifestyle is fixed, only the mechanism is left to judge.* The saturation result just given already secures a constancy: past the threshold, felt quality of life does not track the size of the holding, so two holdings of very different size can fund the same life. Held against that constancy, the only variable left to distinguish them is what building each one did to the field it was drawn from, independent of the holder's own experience of holding it and independent of whether the holder meant to affect the field at all. A stake grown by expanding what others can reach and a stake grown by capturing a larger share of what the field already produced can be identical in size, fund an identical life, and still stand on opposite sides of the same structural-extraction account, because that account tracks the field's condition, not the holder's satisfaction with it. Indifference is not a third case: a stake that neither expands the field nor is redirected back into it has drawn on the field without returning to it, which the structural-extraction account already treats as the same failure under a different motive, not an exception from it. What legacy, safety, status, and comfort each failed to secure on their own terms, this reduction states directly: past the threshold, the only thing left for a fortune to be is whether building it added to what the field could return to others or subtracted from it.

*The fortress subtracts from the one who builds it.* The field-dependence of safety sharpens into a quantitative relation. The more of a fortune is committed to insulating its holder against the shared structure (private security standing in for public safety, gated enclosure for the commons, the private fortifications the failed-state record already showed cannot replace what they wall out), the less of that structure remains available to the holder as something they can actually move through. The fortress is raised against the very system the fortune was extracted from, and each wall against it walls its builder out of it. Economics names the goods this chase pursues *positional goods* (Hirsch, *Social Limits to Growth* 1976): goods worth only what others lack, so the scramble cannot be won and, in Hirsch's phrase, there is no such thing as leveling up. At social scale the pattern is the *secession of the successful* (Reich 1991; Lasch's *revolt of the elites* 1995): the withdrawal of those who can afford it from the public goods everyone else still depends on. And it is paid for in the currency the framework counts. Formal freedom (non-interference, the right to go where one likes) is left intact; *real freedom*, the live capacity to actually exercise it (Van Parijs, *Real Freedom for All* 1995), contracts with every wall, because the field one remains free-on-paper to cross has been hollowed and sealed by one's own insulation. The accumulator named above as the least free participant in the public space is unfree by construction: freedom across the structure varies inversely with the fraction of the fortune spent fortifying against it.

Each justification, taken seriously, points back at the field rather than away from it. The thing the wealth was supposed to secure is the thing the wealth-pattern erodes. What is left, once the public justifications are deflated, are the honest functions accumulation past sufficiency actually delivers: power over others, insulation from consequences, optionality, and position within the small circle of fellow accumulators. These are real goods being delivered, but they are not the goods publicly invoked, because they are harder to defend on civic terms. The account here makes the cover transparent: the case for accumulation past sufficiency cannot be made in the vocabulary of legacy, safety, status, comfort, or family security, because each of those vocabularies is intersubjective and field-dependent in exactly the way the account specifies. The case can be made only in the vocabulary of asymmetric protection: what [§8.12.5](<8.12.5 What is Concluded.md>) and [§8.12.3](<8.12.3 What is Predicted.md>) name as the genuine exception to the self-interest/morality convergence, and what the framework names as the structural threat that concentrated accumulation poses to direction-recognition ([§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)). The two converge: the wealth-pattern that produces structural threat is the wealth-pattern whose own justifications cannot survive structural examination.

The framework does not need the accumulator whose case has just failed to be moved. Its response operates at three concurrent levels rather than as alternatives a defector could play against one another: it *binds* him, since the indexical exemption is groundless and the recognized standing of the others claims him whether or not their claim moves him ([§8.12.5](<8.12.5 What is Concluded.md>), [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)); it *prevents* him, since the proportionate-stake limits cap the conversion of accumulation into direction regardless of motive; and it can still *move* him, since admiration accrues to contribution and withdraws from extraction. The honest functions just named are what is left where the third level finds no purchase: where admiration does not move the accumulator, the binding and the prevention hold without it, and what remains is named rather than dignified.

Surplus, redirection, and the rising tide come next. A common objection to floor-and-infrastructure architectures is that they presuppose surplus the economy does not have. The framework's response is that the surplus already exists; the question is whether it is reaching the political community or being captured upstream of it.

The empirical signature of extraction at scale is visible in the gap between productive capacity and population access to it: concentrated wealth alongside survival-precarity, productivity gains decoupled from wage growth since roughly the 1970s (the productivity-pay decoupling documented by EPI and others), private accumulation that exceeds any plausible measure of proportionate stake. Each is a marker of structural surplus that current arrangements bleed through extraction channels: sanctioned disproportion at the top, insurance-margin and carceral-contractor margins at the floor, capture-rents in regulated sectors. The framework does not need to *generate* this surplus. It needs to *redirect* it: from extraction channels back into the political community.

*The constraint is closure. Wealth produced by the political community has to return to the political community proportionate to the stake that produced it, or the community bleeds: upward through sanctioned disproportion, downward through profit extraction at subsistence.*

Artificial intelligence sharpens the question to its limit case. AI systems are trained on universal inputs: the entire population's text, code, images, conversation, labor, and creative output. Under proportionate-to-stake, the population whose inputs trained the systems holds broadly-distributed stake in the resulting productivity gains. Yet the value capture is structurally narrow: equity in AI firms, equity in firms deploying AI, capital ownership of compute infrastructure. The gap between *who holds proportionate stake* and *who captures value* is wider for AI than for any prior technology, because the input base is more universal and the capture mechanism more concentrated. By the framework's own definition this is sanctioned disproportion at unprecedented scale, and the prescription follows directly: productivity gains from technologies whose stake is broadly held require broad distribution. Proportionate-stake requires a participant-dividend layer parallel to subsistence whenever the stake distribution and the capture distribution diverge as widely as AI makes them diverge — this is no optional addition.

The diagnosis is structural, not adversarial. None of this requires *billionaires are villains* or *AI is bad*. The framework names a structural mechanism (sanctioning accumulation beyond proportionate stake produces extraction regardless of who holds the accumulation) and the political community's task is to close the mechanism, not to punish the people who currently benefit from it. The error is in the structure, not in the people; closing the structure is what closing the error consists in.

The framework also satisfies what trickle-down asserted without providing. Reagan-era trickle-down promised that concentrated accumulation at the top would diffuse downward, raising every standard of living through unspecified pathways. The diffusion was empirically falsified: gains stayed concentrated, median wages stagnated, and the pathway by which the diffusion was supposed to occur was never structurally specified. Trickle-down asserted the conclusion. The framework provides the mechanism.

The mechanism inverts the directional image. Trickle-down imagined wealth flowing top-to-bottom directly, along a pathway that did not exist. The framework has contribution flowing from each participant *into* the political community (proportionate to stake), and floor-plus-infrastructure flowing *from* the political community back to every participant. The trickle scales with contribution capacity: a worker at the lower-stake end contributes a small trickle, a billionaire contributes a waterfall, both proportionate to their stake, both fair in the same structural sense. The trickles and waterfalls accumulate into the political community, which is the body of water that lifts every boat. Rising tide actually lifts all boats here because the tide is fed, structurally, by proportionate contribution into a structure that maintains the floor and the infrastructure for everyone, including the participants whose waterfalls did most of the filling. The yacht still rises with the tide.

This is the trickle-down image used honestly. The pathway is named. The mechanism is structural. The diffusion happens because the political community is constituted to make it happen, not because anyone is asked to trust unspecified downstream effects.

How redirected surplus is allocated is underdetermined and is picked through recognized direction. Framework-compatible allocations include raising subsistence (which redefines adequacy upward as structural conditions improve), reducing contribution rates while maintaining infrastructure, expanding investment in domains the recognized direction calls for, distributing surplus as a participant-dividend layer parallel to subsistence, or some combination. The framework precludes only allocations that route surplus back into extraction channels: further sanctioned disproportion, further capture rents, further profit margins at the floor. The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, which has distributed annual oil-revenue surplus to all Alaska residents since 1982, is the operating precedent for the participant-dividend architecture at sub-national scale. The framework generalizes the mechanism beyond resource rents to political-community surplus generally.

*Rollout follows the displacement.* The transition from current arrangements to the steady state does not require universal implementation on day one. The cohort whose participation conditions are most directly threatened by structural change becomes the first cohort: people whose work has been or is being displaced by changes the shared structure as a whole has chosen and cannot reverse without imposing larger costs on everyone. Insurance-claim work absorbed by automated systems, infrastructure-employment lost to network change, roles in extraction-layer industries the present account identifies as net-negative: these are people whose participation conditions have been disrupted by structural shifts the configuration is collectively responsible for. The configuration owes them the participation conditions it has just removed from their lives. Universal expansion follows once the displacement-tied implementation has demonstrated the design. The account here commits to the steady-state configuration, and to a transition that does not generate new structural failures while moving toward it, without committing to any one transition path.

*The proportional-income firm.* The proportionate-stake principle is not only an economy-level architecture; it has a firm-level analog: stake and self-maintenance inside the company. Inside a company whose income distribution tracks each participant's contribution to firm output (and whose firm-level outcomes depend on the sum of those contributions) the convergence the framework derives at the political-economic scale recurs at the firm scale.

The structure has three components: each participant's income is proportional to their contribution; firm earnings depend on the collective output; distribution of those earnings runs through the proportionality, including at the top. Under that structure, increased individual output raises firm earnings, which raises every participant's income proportionally, including the top. Reduced individual output lowers firm earnings, which lowers every participant's income, including the top. The form is self-maintaining: contribution benefits everyone with stake in the arrangement; slacking costs everyone with stake in the arrangement, and the cost is distributed across all participants whose continuation is entangled with the firm's. The dependency-objection-at-economy-scale becomes a slacking-objection-at-firm-scale, and both are answered at [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>). Subjects pursue their own continuation by structural necessity, and under proportional-income architecture that pursuit structurally requires contributing to the collective performance the participant's own income depends on. The convergence theorem runs at firm scale on the same logic as at economy scale.

The experiential side of the same structure is just as derivable. Mutual recognition is derived ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)) as constitutive of being the kind of subject political life consists in; the deepest registration of meaning is located ([§8.8](<8.8 Meaning.md>)) in orientations bearing on persistence and thriving, which [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) ties to contribution. Each commitment has a firm-scale instance. When stake and capture diverge widely (when a participant's contribution generates substantially more value than the share they receive) the participant is structurally recognized as a labor input rather than as a proportionate participant in the arrangement. The cog-in-the-machine experience counts as accurate recognition of a real structural relation, not subjective complaint. The slot-to-fill phenomenology is what recognition-failure at firm scale produces.

The framework's diagnostic converges with the diagnostic portion of Marx's alienation theory, not with Marx's premises or prescriptions. Marx identified, from different premises, the same structural pattern §8 derives: alienation from the product of labor, from the labor process, from species-being, and from other workers names a structural-recognition-failure the §8 mutual-recognition commitments derive on independent grounds. The diagnostic territory is shared; the dialectical materialism, the class-warfare logic, the revolutionary prescription, and the abolition of markets are not. The framework confirms the alienation diagnosis as a structural observation while declining the surrounding doctrine. The honest accounting is to name the convergence rather than to obscure it.

The flip side is the same structure from the other end. When stake and capture match (when the firm's success depends on the participant's contribution, the participant's continuation depends on the firm's success, and the participant's share scales with what they contributed) work becomes a site of mutual recognition rather than recognition-failure. The participant is collectively invested in the firm in a way that labor-input recognition cannot deliver. This is also where the *work-for-opportunity* claim from earlier in the implications arc becomes operationally real at the firm level: the firm itself is structured so that contribution and recognition track one another, which is what opportunity has always been supposed to mean and has rarely delivered. Subsistence outside the firm decouples work from survival; the proportional-income architecture inside the firm couples work to recognition. Both halves are needed for the work-for-opportunity claim to land, and the framework derives both.

The empirical record is among the better-documented in the economics literature. Mondragón Corporation, the Basque cooperative federation founded in 1956, operates approximately 80,000 worker-owners across industrial, retail, finance, and knowledge sectors, with pay ratios capped (typically six-to-nine times lowest-to-highest within member cooperatives) and substantially lower layoff rates than comparable conventional firms through multiple Spanish economic crises. Lincoln Electric in the United States has paid profit-sharing bonuses every year since 1934, including through depressions and recessions, with productivity sustainably above industry averages. The John Lewis Partnership in the United Kingdom has operated as employee-owned through a trust for nearly a century, with annual profit-share distributed to all partners as a percentage of salary. Employee Stock Ownership Plans in the United States cover approximately 14 million workers; the empirical literature (Doucouliagos's 1995 meta-analysis; Blasi, Freeman, and Kruse's sustained NBER-published scholarship) consistently shows broad-based ownership and profit-sharing correlate with higher productivity, higher firm survival rates, less wage compression at the top, and less layoff in downturns. German codetermination, while not strictly proportional-income, achieves a similar stake-broadening through legally-mandated worker representation on supervisory boards of large firms; German manufacturing has held its productive base under conditions that hollowed comparable sectors elsewhere. The empirics are not edge cases; they are a substantial body of evidence that the structural derivation matches reality.

What the framework derives at firm scale is the constraint, not the specific architecture: stake and capture must match at firm scale, not only at economy scale. Multiple architectures satisfy the constraint: full worker cooperatives (Mondragón shape), profit-sharing within conventionally-owned firms (Lincoln Electric shape), Employee Stock Ownership Plans (United States legal architecture), trust-owned employee partnerships (John Lewis shape), codetermination with board representation (German shape), or some combination. At firm scale the framework precludes the limit case: workers holding stake (their labor produces the firm's output) while capture concentrates narrowly in capital ownership untethered to productive contribution, with pay ratios that exceed any plausible measure of proportionate contribution. These are the same preclusions the framework runs at economy scale, applied inside the firm. The productivity-pay decoupling that begins in the 1970s is the economy-aggregate signature of those preclusions failing across most of the corporate sector simultaneously.

The architecture closes most components of the empirical gender pay gap directly. The within-occupation pay gap collapses because compensation tracks contribution rather than gender; the well-documented negotiation-gap mechanism dissolves because compensation is structural rather than negotiated; the promotion-based compensation-accumulation gap reduces because compensation tracks contribution rather than seniority-and-title accumulation; and gender-coded discounting at the firm level closes for the same reason: the metric is contribution, not gender or the coded-feminine-versus-coded-masculine valuation of similar work. These collectively account for a substantial fraction of the within-firm gender pay gap documented across decades of labor-economics literature (Blau and Kahn's surveys are the canonical reference). The architecture closes them as a structural side-effect of the proportional-income form, not as additional policy.

The architecture does, however, force a question current arrangements dodge: how is contribution actually measured? Conventional pay structures defer the measurement question to market compensation: what each role is paid by the broader labor market. A proportional-income firm cannot naively defer in the same way, because market compensation is itself shaped by structural discounting of feminized and racialized labor, by historical assumptions about which work counts as productive, by bargaining-power asymmetries (unionization patterns, gendered occupational segregation feeding back into segregated compensation strata), and by network effects in finance and tech that have inflated those compensation strata far above any defensible proportionate-contribution measure. If the firm's contribution metric is *what the labor market pays this role*, the architecture imports the very distortions the framework's stake-and-capture matching is supposed to close. The framework precludes that arrangement. The metric must reflect actual proportionate contribution, and constructing such a metric is a design problem the framework forces rather than a problem it solves.

The operational precedent is the comparable-worth methodology developed in the 1970s-80s pay-equity literature. Job-evaluation methodologies score positions on four factors (skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions) and equalize compensation for comparable-scoring positions regardless of how the broader labor market has historically valued them. Treiman and Hartmann's National Research Council report (1981) is the canonical methodological reference; Joan Acker's scholarship on gendered organizations is the theoretical companion. Operational implementations include Minnesota's State Employees Pay Equity Act (1982) and its Local Government Pay Equity Act, Washington State's parallel program, Iowa's, and Ontario's Pay Equity Act (1987, the broadest jurisdictional implementation). Where these methodologies have been implemented, gender pay gaps in the affected sectors have measurably narrowed. The framework derives the constraint that the metric must not import structural-discount mechanisms; it leaves the specific job-evaluation methodology to design choice and recognized direction. Comparable-worth scoring is one operational form. Activity-based contribution metrics are another. Role-tier base with collective-performance bonus (the Mondragón shape) is another. Combinations are common. What the framework precludes is metric architectures that systematically reproduce the labor-market distortions the framework's broader stake-and-capture matching is supposed to close.

Above the constraint, the market still runs. The framework is not minimum-wage command-and-control. Once positions have been assessed for proportionate pay through whatever methodology the firm uses, the rest is market: firms compete for participants, participants choose firms, firm performance feeds back to participant compensation through the proportional-income architecture, and the convergence-at-firm-scale dynamic the prior subsection derived (everyone benefits when the firm does well; everyone pays when it does not) drives the alignment without external specification. A firm whose comparable-worth scoring is sloppy loses participants to a firm whose scoring is more accurate. A firm that pays poorly relative to comparable firms fails to attract and retain. The market regulates the precise numbers within the constraint; the constraint regulates which range the market is operating in. *Free market within proportionate-stake constraints* is the right description, and it is structurally distinct from both the unconstrained-market arrangement that produces the empirical pay gap and the centrally-specified-formula arrangement no acceptable design has ever sustained.

Managerial accountability remains fully intact. The architecture does not say every participant keeps their position regardless of performance. It says compensation for the position tracks proportionate contribution, and individual performance within the position is still assessable and actionable through ordinary management mechanisms. Firing for non-performance, performance-based variable compensation within a role, promotion to higher-rated roles, role restructuring, and internal mobility are all preserved. Mondragón has membership-track procedures that include removal for non-performance. Employee Stock Ownership Plan firms terminate underperformers. Lincoln Electric's profit-sharing layers individual merit ratings on top of the collective bonus pool. The architecture preserves accountability; what it removes is systematic discounting of feminized labor, negotiation-based compensation asymmetry, and capture-untethered-to-contribution at the top. None of that is the same as removing performance management, and the framework precludes none of the latter.

Components of the gender pay gap that arise upstream of the firm are not closed by firm-level architecture alone. Occupational segregation (women clustering in lower-paid sectors, the largest single component in most empirical decompositions), the motherhood penalty (the gap that widens dramatically after children), gender-coded educational steering, and workplace harassment and discrimination each require treatment outside the firm's compensation architecture: [§9.9](<9.9 Education.md>) Education for capacity-building decoupled from gender steering, [§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>) Healthcare for caregiving infrastructure that decouples motherhood from employment penalty, [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>) Justice for anti-discrimination enforcement at scale, and the household-configuration-problem-dissolves passage below for the survival-decoupling that re-opens labor configuration as a genuine choice rather than a survival-determined output. The empirical gender pay gap is a multi-domain pattern in current arrangements, and the framework closes it through multi-domain coherence rather than through firm-level architecture alone. That is a feature of the framework's structure: the analysis becomes honest about which components live where, rather than asking any single domain to do work that requires the others.

The framework's overall picture closes here. The convergence theorem runs at multiple scales (economy, firm, household, community) and the firm scale is where most participants spend most of their working lives. A framework that ran proportionate-stake at the economy level while leaving the firm structurally adversarial would have an internal incoherence: participants experiencing convergence at the political-economic scale and extraction at the firm scale at the same time. Closing the firm-scale loop is what makes the convergence operational rather than aspirational.

*Power, legacy, and the redirection orientation.* Legacy survives the account developed here, pointed at maintenance. The deepest registration of meaning was located ([§8.8](<8.8 Meaning.md>)) in orientations that bear on persistence and thriving. At the scale where a single person's decisions affect many people's conditions at once, the most far-reaching orientation available is toward the maintenance of conditions for everyone's thriving. The instinct that legacy matters (that what is built outlasts the builder, that what is given exceeds the giver) survives the structural account intact. What changes is what legacy points at. *What better way to be remembered than as the one who contributed the most possible to society?* The account here does not deflate the question; it answers it. A person with the resources to redirect the conditions of others is structurally positioned to take that redirection as the deepest registration of its own meaning, the legacy-impulse oriented toward what political maintenance is for. The argument favors redirecting resources already in motion; it takes no position against anyone who holds them. Nor is the argument against the system within which those resources arose. Capitalism figures here as one of the structures the framework examines, not as its target — the framework supplies a lens (meaning, legacy, the orientation of maintenance) rather than a verdict on the system itself. The redirection lives inside the system, not against it. Protection of all is not a constraint imposed on the powerful from outside their interests. It is the form their interests take when their position in the social structure is fully registered.

The miracle-impulse relocates without deflation. The same inversion the chapter has run on benevolence runs again here, on miracles. What earlier framings attributed to divine intervention (the curing of the sick, the feeding of the hungry, the lifting of the broken) names a category of relief whose felt force is unchanged when its source is relocated. Sufficient resources oriented toward maintenance can deliver such relief at scale; a person positioned to redirect resources at scale is positioned to deliver as many such miracles as they choose. The impulse the tradition named was real, and the relief it points toward is real. The account here does not deflate the category; it relocates the agent, and the resources to act as agent already exist. The miracle-impulse, fully followed, lands inside the same orientation the legacy-impulse already named.

Power is nothing without an affect. A position that touches no lives is not power but inert holding; the present account has already located meaning where the touching happens, and power, on the same account, is the capacity to land such touches at scale. There is a kind of power that allows its affects to enjoy the wielder's having it. The people touched by such power do not merely tolerate the position: they reach for it, are glad it exists, would not unmake it even if unmaking were on offer. The miracle-impulse, the legacy-impulse, and the redirection-orientation all name forms of this kind of power. The deepest legacy a position of power can leave is the kind its affects would protect.

*Welfare is crime policy.* The point has a specific policy shape. Healthcare, housing, nutrition, early-childhood support, education, and treatment for addiction and mental illness are not welfare programs competing for budget with crime and safety. They are crime and safety. Each removes a condition under which theft, violence, neglect, or domination appears locally rational to a citizen whose options have been narrowed. An untreated psychosis, an unsheltered person in winter, a child whose first five years lacked a reliable adult, a community whose nearest work is hours away: these are the upstream side of the same coordination failure that produces the downstream cases police and courts are asked to handle. The modal account collapses the categories: the investments that enable participation in norm-construction are the investments that reduce the rate at which participation fails. (Cross-section coupling: the justice-domain side of this same derivation is developed at [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>). The [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) wanting-downstream corollary names the foundational structural form this paragraph inherits.)

The threshold dissolves a stratum of derivative anxieties. A great deal of what currently shows up as personal-financial-anxiety is downstream symptom of the threshold's absence: each person forced to privately self-insure against everything universal coverage would otherwise carry (Case and Deaton 2020). The retirement-savings problem dissolves: a person whose old age is structurally part of the population the threshold covers does not need to accumulate enough to privately survive non-work-years. The medical-bankruptcy problem dissolves: healthcare without bankrupting is in the threshold by definition. The job-loss-as-existential-threat problem dissolves: losing a job no longer means losing housing, food, or healthcare — the threshold cushions the transition. The caregiving-as-financial-ruin problem dissolves: caring for an elderly parent or a disabled child does not bankrupt the caregiver, because the care is funded by the shared pool the family is part of. The entrepreneurial-risk asymmetry softens: starting a business does not risk literal homelessness if it fails, and those most positioned to take productive risks are no longer the only ones who can afford to. The household-configuration problem dissolves: with healthcare, retirement, education, and subsistence decoupled from any particular job, a household is no longer forced into the labor configuration that survives (single breadwinner, dual full-time, multiple jobs) regardless of what its members actually prefer. Two part-time jobs with time for the rest of life becomes a live option; one full-time and one at-home becomes a live option; configurations that change as life changes (small children, aging parents, a sabbatical, a return to school) become live options. Household labor configuration ceases to be a survival-determined output and becomes a genuine choice: the modal interval the threshold reopens for everything else, reopened at the scale of the household. The threshold is not a competitor to private industry; it sits beneath industry, not against it. The discretionary economy (markets, choice among providers, premium services, customization, innovation) operates above subsistence in the territory the threshold does not claim. Markets work better above a threshold than they work as the threshold itself: people not in survival mode produce labor markets that clear without coercion, demand signals that reflect preference rather than duress, and risk-taking that is genuinely voluntary rather than the privilege of those who can afford to fail. The threshold liberates industry from being conscripted into supplying survival: a structural job industry was never well-suited to perform.

*The threshold is freedom's condition, not its constraint.* A common objection holds that distribution and baseline maintenance restrict freedom: what the threshold gives the dependent it takes from the independent. The present account inverts the picture. What the threshold restricts is the capacity of survival pressure to coerce subjects into contributions they would not otherwise choose; what it enables is the marketplace its absence has been suppressing all along. A subject whose shelter, food, healthcare, and time are not contingent on any particular employer, partner, or transaction is for the first time in a position to choose what to contribute and what to draw from the shared structure on grounds other than duress. *Everyone can contribute exactly how they want, and get exactly what they want out of it*, not as slogan but as the structural consequence of removing the part of the exchange that was never freely chosen. Freedom-as-non-interference is preserved at every level above subsistence; freedom-as-non-domination is established for the first time at every level below it. What looked like restriction on freedom was the price of the absence of freedom below the threshold. Once the threshold holds, the appearance of restriction dissolves. The structural conclusion converges with Rawls's difference principle (*A Theory of Justice* 1971, §13), that permissible inequality is constrained by the position of the worst-off, on different grounds: Rawls derives it through the original-position procedure; the framework derives it as the structural condition under which liberty above the threshold is actual rather than formal.

The reason is modal freedom. The threshold gives a subject the distance from immediate need required for will to open: time to think, safety to refuse, enough stability to compare alternatives, enough education to understand consequences, and enough social protection that refusal is not punished by deprivation. These secure both pillars at once: the latitude to act and the conditions of modal depth. Political maintenance is therefore not merely external option-creation; it secures the latitude to act and preserves the internal conditions under which options can be understood as options.

Work, on the framework's account, recovers the function the rhetorical tradition has long ascribed to it but which current arrangements cannot structurally deliver. *Work is for opportunity, not for necessity.* When healthcare, retirement, education, and the sufficiency floor are not held hostage to whatever job a person can get, work becomes the vehicle through which a person pursues meaning, ambition, contribution, and the development of capacities: the things *opportunity* has always been supposed to mean. Under current arrangements, the rhetoric of opportunity sits over an operational reality in which work is what stands between the participant and survival; the participant takes the job that pays the bills, not the job that develops the participant. The structural inversion the framework derives is precisely the inversion the rhetorical tradition's flagship phrase (*land of opportunity*) has long described and rarely delivered. The framework delivers it: opportunity becomes operationally available because necessity has been moved into the political community where it structurally belongs. The relational-egalitarian outcome Anderson develops in *Private Government* (2017), workplace freedom requiring not just exit-rights but the structural conditions that make exit a genuine option rather than a survival risk, is the same outcome the subsistence-decoupling derives, with the section supplying the structural mechanism that delivers it.

*Consumer participation is the lateral channel through which work runs.* The argument does not need a separate device to channel subjects into work, because the channel already exists in the form subjects already participate in: as consumers within the shared structure. Every subject is already a participant in the discretionary economy by virtue of having needs and preferences past subsistence: preferences for particular foods, particular kinds of housing, travel, entertainment, fellowship, the artifacts of culture. The pull toward work is the pull toward the discretionary income that funds participation in those preferences, and it operates without coercion because the alternative is no longer not subsisting: the alternative is not having the particular discretionary participations the subject prefers. Nobody needs to be coerced into wanting more than the basket. The configuration's drive does that work from the inside, and the consumer channel registers it without anyone having to construct an additional incentive structure. The shared structure is freed from the work of motivating its members. The motivation was already there.

This raises the objection critics will reach for first: that a guaranteed floor produces dependency, that participants will sit on the floor and stop contributing. The reply here runs on [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>), not on charitable assumptions about human nature. Subjects pursue their own continuation by structural necessity, and that pursuit does not exhaust itself in survival. It extends into flourishing, meaning, capacity-development, recognition, and contribution: what §8 derived as constitutive of being the kind of subject political life consists in. The drive toward individualism (one's own agency, one's own life-design) and the drive toward opportunity (meaning, ambition, growth) are not optional motivations the framework hopes participants will have; they are what subjects structurally *are* once survival is no longer collapsing the modal interval downward. The floor does not become the ceiling because the drive that takes a subject above the floor is structural to being the kind of subject the floor protects. The objection assumes contribution is externally motivated by survival pressure and would evaporate without it; the framework derives that contribution is internally motivated by the subject's own pursuit of opportunity, which the floor enables rather than substitutes for. The empirical record is consistent with the structural prediction: jurisdictions with strong floors have not produced populations who stop contributing; they have produced populations who contribute differently, with more entrepreneurial risk-taking, more caregiving labor, more educational attainment, and more cultural and scientific work.

And further: even granting the worry hypothetically, the framing of *gaming* does not survive contact with the proportionate-to-stake architecture. Gaming requires drawing more than one contributed. Under proportionate-to-stake with a floor, that avenue is structurally closed at the small-stake end. A participant who chooses to work minimally receives the floor (what every participant receives) and nothing more. The participant who works more receives proportionately more income, accumulates more life experience and capacity, gains more access to discretionary above-floor goods (the yacht-stays goods of the prior subsection), and earns more of the social recognition [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) ties to contribution. The trade-off is real and self-balancing: less contribution means less reward. Choosing a floor-only life is choosing a floor-only life, a preference the framework permits without converting the chooser into a free-rider. Free-riding is structurally drawing dividends without proportionate contribution, a pattern the framework derives and treats symmetrically at every scale; the floor itself is not such a dividend, because it is the structural condition of being the kind of subject the political community is for. There is no gaming opportunity in it because there is nothing to be gamed.

What the framework leaves underdetermined, it leaves to the design literatures: a specific marginal-rate schedule, capital-gains-versus-ordinary-income treatment beyond the constraint that they not function as proportionate-stake-evasion mechanisms, the specific architecture of estate taxation beyond the proportionate-contribution constraint, whether sufficiency-floor delivery is single-payer, multi-payer-with-floor, or hybrid (only that it is non-substitutable by profit-extracting mechanisms at the floor), whether universal basic income, negative income tax, jobs guarantee, or some combination is the right architecture for the income-side floor, specific land-value-tax implementation parameters (assessment frequency, jurisdictional scope, transition design), and specific antitrust and anti-monopoly policy beyond the structural-extraction constraint. Where multiple designs satisfy the constraints, the framework leaves the choice to the design literatures, the empirical record, and the recognized direction of the population through [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) (Representation).

*Politics, on this view, means maximizing the connective tissue for meaningful exchange rather than winning or losing.* Once the threshold holds, the political question is no longer who beats whom for which share of a fixed pool. It is how much of the shared structure is doing the work the structure is for: how many subjects can reach how many others on terms each would freely endorse, and how much of what each contributes returns to it as something it actually wants. The metric is connective. The exchange in question is commercial as well as non-commercial: labor for wages, goods for money, services for services, alongside the non-priced exchange of attention, care, ideas, and time. Markets, operated above a secured threshold, are themselves a primary form of the connective tissue: a structure for finding out what other subjects have, what they will trade for it, and at what proportion, on terms each side would freely accept. A society in which more subjects can engage in such exchange across a wider surface, on terms less distorted by survival pressure or position-asymmetry, is performing the structural function more fully than one in which the surface is compressed. Where existing arrangements compress that surface, the structural function is not being performed; where they expand it, the function is. The win-or-lose framing is downstream of the threshold's absence. Where maintenance holds, the contest dissolves into the exchange it was suppressing.

*Comfort, contribution, and the principle of proportionate exchange.* Politics should be organized around principles most people already accept when stated plainly. People's problems are worth solving. Whatever helps people live comfortably is worth doing. If someone wants more than comfort, they are free to earn it: the baseline is not the ceiling, and ambition is not suspect. People seek more than comfort anyway: purpose, novelty, experience, the chance to contribute something, to be recognized, to follow their curiosity, to express what they find inside themselves. These are not demands on the system. They are what subjects do when the conditions are right. A person who needs time to recover from illness, loss, or exhaustion should have that time: organizations that depend on people should build contingency for that, because a system with no slack for human recovery has designed the human out. Pay people based on what they contribute. Build the baseline so that contribution is a choice rather than a survival mechanism. These are not radical propositions. They are what shared life looks like when it is organized around people rather than around the extraction of people.

So long as the comfort does not come at the expense of disproportionate exchange. The baseline is not funded by extracting more from those who have less. The system works when what each subject receives reflects what they contribute, and what they contribute is compensated proportionally. The minimum-wage debate is a proxy for a simpler question: at what point does the exchange between a subject's contribution and their compensation become disproportionate? The baseline answers the survival half of that question unconditionally. Proportional pay answers the fairness half. Addressed separately, both are tractable. Collapsed into a single number, neither is ever fully resolved.

A society collectively values convenience. The people who provide it (in every form, at every hour) should not have to worry about their survival or health in exchange for doing so. A person who works anywhere (or nowhere, for whatever reason) is owed the same baseline. The baseline is not a reward for labor. It is what the shared structure maintains for every subject inside it.

All told, the [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) argument across its five subsections turns on one thesis: proportionate-to-stake contribution and sufficiency-floor non-substitutability are the same structural commitment viewed from opposite ends of the distribution, from the top, where the political community's protection of large holdings generates a proportionate-contribution obligation, and from the bottom, where the political community's obligation to maintain participants as participants generates the floor. The confirmation record shows that the trickle-down-asserts-without-providing pattern, the insurance-extracts-at-the-floor pattern, and the productivity-pay-decoupling-since-the-1970s pattern are all structural predictions the empirical record confirms wherever extraction has been permitted to occupy both ends of the distribution simultaneously. The institutional-design implications are correspondingly unified: economic reform that addresses only the floor without the contribution constraint, or only the contribution constraint without the floor, leaves the structural commitment half-executed.


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← [9.7.4 What is Confirmed](<9.7.4 What is Confirmed.md>) | [9.8 Housing](<9.8 Housing.md>) →
