An economy has to distribute material goods in ways that let members of a political community participate as equals. The conditions below specify what that requires. Each matters: if one is missing, the system is not sustaining participation across the community but permitting extraction somewhere in the chain.

*Proportionate-to-stake contribution architecture.* Contribution must scale with reliance on the political community. The institutional infrastructure a participant draws on (courts, currency, regulation, contract enforcement, IP regime, educated workforce, infrastructure, consumer base) is genuinely larger for larger-stake participants, and proportionality tracks actual reliance, not arbitrary class judgment. Flat-rate taxation systematically violates the condition because reliance scales nonlinearly with wealth (the framework's institutional-leverage analysis makes the nonlinearity explicit). Tax-haven structures, capital-gains-versus-ordinary-income disparities favoring large holders, and dynastic-inheritance mechanisms violate the condition by allowing large-stake holders to escape proportionate contribution. The condition holds at the architectural level; specific marginal-rate schedules, capital-gains treatments, and inheritance designs are underdetermined where multiple options satisfy it.

*A shared pool funds shared needs.* Public provision requires resources, and those resources come from the people the political community maintains. The derivation establishes that much: the people who depend on public institutions are also the people whose resources fund them. There is no outside source. The specific mechanism by which this happens (how contribution is structured, how coverage is distributed) is a design question the derivation motivates but does not uniquely determine. Taxation is the dominant current mechanism: compulsory contribution scaled with capacity, directed into the pool, drawn back as coverage. Other mechanisms are conceivable (voluntary contribution at high integration, common ownership of resource-relevant assets, sovereign wealth, money creation tied to public investment), and the present account does not decide between them. Several classical debates dissolve once the structural function is named. The pool is not subtraction from private capacity; it is the collective fund for the system on which private capacity itself depends: currency, contracts, courts, infrastructure, the educated workforce, the science the technology was built from. The pool is not charity (redistribution from haves to have-nots); it is contribution paired with coverage, where every person both pays in and draws back. Public goods structurally require the pool (Samuelson 1954); goods whose use cannot be excluded cannot be supplied by markets, and the pool is the structural answer the framework has had all along. Whether the pool is filled by compulsion, by orientation, or by some mixture is an integration question: the framework names the structural requirement, and the integration level shapes the mechanism the requirement takes.

*Sufficiency-floor non-substitutability.* Subsistence (health, disability, unemployment, survivor income, baseline housing) must be provided through the political community and not through profit-extracting substitutes occupying the subsistence space. Insurance is structurally redundant for subsistence: the political community already maintains its participants in their constitutive vulnerabilities, and insurance, as a substitute for being-part-of-the-arrangement, becomes structurally redundant for the function it was performing at the floor. Single-payer, multi-payer-with-strong-subsistence, and hybrid designs that maintain subsistence without profit extraction at the floor satisfy the condition. Privatized-insurance architectures that occupy the subsistence space and extract profit margins at the point of constitutive vulnerability violate it. Discretionary protection above subsistence remains private-market territory.

*Subsistence-adequacy tracking locality, capped at adequacy.* 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. Implementation must track actual-adequacy-where-the-person-lives, drawing on the same regional cost-of-living measurement infrastructure (BLS regional CPI; the Living Wage Calculator and Family Budget Calculator; military BAH locality-adjusted housing allowances; or a purpose-built Adequate Living Cost index) that public administration already maintains. Subsistence caps at adequacy: the framework delivers the structural condition for participation, not replication of any particular pre-existing standard of living. Above-floor holdings remain the participant's responsibility, on the same logic by which discretionary holdings (the yacht-stays goods) remain in their owner's stewardship.

*Maximum possibility requires conditions: what societal needs structurally are.* *Societal needs* is not a vague gesture. They are the conditions under which a person can be a live participant in the political community: the conditions whose absence collapses real possibility into survival-response and cuts a person off from the field of action the framework has been describing throughout. These conditions are not earned through participation and are not granted as permission to participate; they are what the political community must maintain so that formal rights become real alternatives. Concretely: shelter sufficient for sleep, hygiene, and rest; food sufficient for a person to feed themselves; healthcare that does whatever it can without bankrupting the patient; the formation of new persons through education and care of children; care for people who cannot care for themselves at a given life-stage (the very young, the very old, the seriously ill, the disabled); public safety; mobility within the medium; access to the medium's information; clean air, clean water, livable environment; and enough time not working to be a person rather than an output. The list is not exhaustive, and what counts as a societal need takes more or less specific institutional form across societies and eras (T.H. Marshall 1950), but the structural function is fixed: whatever people need in order to be the people they are. The threshold does not specify how each is delivered, nor at what level of generosity above the bare minimum, nor what sits in the discretionary territory above. The threshold specifies that the conditions under which a person can participate are the maintenance the system exists to perform. The list converges with the central capabilities Nussbaum develops in *Women and Human Development* (2000) and *Frontiers of Justice* (2006): both lists pick out conditions whose absence reduces a subject below the threshold of participation rather than ranking goods to be distributed. Sen's *Development as Freedom* (1999) develops the same threshold from the capability-development side, and the chapter-opener convergence-with-capabilities paragraph at §9 root locates the operationalization toolkit (HDI/IHDI, Doughnut Economics, OECD Better Life, Bhutan GNH) the framework's categorical commitments hand to implementation.

*Certain social possibilities require necessary resources.* Deliberation requires time and stability. Meaningful consent requires information, maturity, safety, and freedom from coercion. Free labor requires enough security that employment is not survival-hostage. Law-abiding participation requires viable means of survival that do not run through desperation. Mutual sustenance requires subjects whose own minimal survival is not consuming the whole field. These conditions are what makes the social possibilities just named live alternatives rather than nominal ones: what maximum possibility requires of the structure that maintains it.

*Universal-maintenance with recapture on the tax side.* Subsistence maintenance goes to every adult in the configuration, not only to those who fall below a means-tested threshold. Means-testing reintroduces the giver-and-receiver structure the framework rejects, requires participants to perform need to receive the structure they are owed, and produces a steep marginal-tax cliff at the threshold that distorts the work-relation maintenance exists to free. The design holds maintenance universal and handles the distribution question on the tax side, where progressive contribution already does the structural work of collecting more from those with more. Universal down, progressive up.

*Public amenities not participation-conditioned.* Access to public goods (libraries, parks, transit, public health resources, civic spaces) may not be conditioned on work-participation status. Conditioning would reintroduce, at the level of amenity, the coercion subsistence maintenance exists to eliminate at the level of survival; it would create a class of participants who can subsist but cannot participate in the public commons of the configuration they belong to. Amenity access is a participation condition the configuration provides for itself, not a reward for performing the configuration's preferred forms of activity.

*Structural-extraction reduction pressure, institution-and-individual symmetric.* Any acceptable design must 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 runs the same at institutional scale (regulatory capture; sanctioned disproportion; tax-haven structures; denial-of-claim profit margins; executive compensation disconnected from productive output) and at individual scale (insurance fraud; tax fraud; benefits fraud; false claims). The political pressure to treat these as opposed (corporations versus cheaters; the wealthy versus the poor) 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. The dual-channel closure of capture (legal closure of the inside channel through anti-corruption enforcement; structural closure of the outside channel through campaign-finance and lobbying limits) is required by the condition.

*Corruption is a structural infraction against everyone.* The derivation already established that any arrangement that redirects the shared structure's maintenance toward a subset's preferred conditions is not maintaining the social structure but the subset's position within it. Corruption is this failure at the level of the individual officeholder: a person in a position of political maintenance who redirects the shared pool or the direction-setting mechanism for private gain is not committing an offense against an abstraction called *government*. The victim is every person whose conditions depend on what was taken: the healthcare not funded, the school not staffed, the infrastructure not built. The resources were drawn from the shared pool that everyone contributes to; their diversion is a direct subtraction from everyone who depends on what they were supposed to maintain. Corruption is cheating in the exact game-theoretic sense: defecting from cooperation while continuing to take its benefits. This is true at every scale. A local official who redirects municipal funds, a legislator who writes rules for a paying client, a regulator who clears the way for an entity they will later work for, each is doing the same structural thing: converting a position of maintenance into a position of private extraction. The social structure they were entrusted to maintain degrades in proportion to what they take.

*Regulatory capture is the same failure operating from outside.* An entity that extracts value from the shared structure while externalizing costs onto it is doing precisely what the derivation identifies as political failure: taking the benefits of the shared structure (infrastructure, educated workers, contract enforcement, currency, stable markets) while offloading the costs of its activity onto others who bear them without compensation. The word "regulation" misleads here, because it sounds like government constraining free activity from above. But if the people control the social structure (which the derivation requires), then regulations are the people collectively setting the terms under which entities operating within the shared structure must operate. Regulation is not government versus market. It is the participants in a shared structure deciding what counts as fair participation in something they collectively maintain. An entity that poisons a river to reduce its production costs has not exercised a freedom. It has taken a cost it should bear and placed it on everyone downstream, a structural taking, not a market transaction. The regulation that prevents it is not an imposition on the entity. It is the people enforcing the terms of participation in the structure they share. Corruption inside government and under-regulation outside it are the same structural failure: the mechanism that is supposed to maintain the shared structure for everyone is being used to maintain a subset's position within it. The only difference is where the capture occurs.

Consider concretely a planning board reviewing a chemical-plant permit upstream of a residential watershed. Two failure modes lead to the same outcome through different mechanisms. *Inside the board:* a board member receives an undisclosed consulting retainer from the applicant and covertly steers the review past the watershed objection. *Outside the board:* the applicant successfully lobbies the legislature to weaken the rule the board enforces, so the rule no longer requires watershed review at all. Different mechanism, same structural result: the downstream community absorbs a cost the applicant should have borne, and an institution whose function is maintenance of the shared structure has been converted into an instrument of private extraction. The first form is illegal in most jurisdictions and the perpetrator can be prosecuted; the second is currently legal in much of the regulatory landscape and the rules themselves get rewritten. The framework treats them as one structural infraction with two implementations. Closing one channel without closing the other leaves the failure open.

*Extreme inequality threatens the social structure itself.* Extreme inequality is not only a problem for people at the bottom. It is a structural threat to the social structure for everyone, because it produces a subset with the resources to capture the direction-setting mechanism. The derivation established that any arrangement allowing some to set direction on behalf of others is not maintaining the social structure but the subset's position within it. Concentrated wealth becomes exactly such an arrangement when it converts into political direction-setting: campaign contributions, lobbying capacity, media ownership, and institutional influence allow wealth to translate directly into control over the mechanism that is supposed to register the direction of all. The problem is not merely that some people are poor. It is that extreme concentration at the top creates a structural threat to the direction-recognition requirement, not as a contingent political risk but as a predictable consequence of allowing wealth differentials to grow unchecked within a structure where wealth converts to direction. This is why the threshold and the shared pool are not simply about helping those who need it. They also maintain the structural conditions under which direction-recognition can function at all. A society in which some people control resources at a scale that allows them to direct the maintenance mechanism is a society in which the direction-recognition requirement has already been compromised, regardless of whether formal voting rights are intact. The argument for structural limits on the conversion of wealth into political direction is not redistributive morality. It is structural self-maintenance, and it applies to everyone in the shared structure, because a captured mechanism eventually serves only the subset that controls it, and any subset can be outmaneuvered by a smaller subset with greater concentration. The empirical record on inequality dynamics confirms the structural prediction. Piketty's *Capital in the Twenty-First Century* (2014) documents the r > g pattern as the empirical signature of structural extraction: returns to capital systematically exceeding returns to labor across generations produces precisely the concentration-and-direction-capture dynamic the derivation names. Stiglitz's *The Price of Inequality* (2012) develops the political-economy mechanism. Atkinson's *Inequality: What Can Be Done?* (2015) develops design-architecture alternatives at the implementation register.

*Concentration past necessity threatens the field of action on possibility grounds alone, independent of capture.* The case against extreme concentration made so far runs entirely through the capture mechanism: concentration is dangerous because it converts into political direction-setting. Strip out that conversion step and, on the capture argument alone, the case would go quiet in a world where wealth could not buy political influence. It should not go quiet, because a second, independent argument for the same ceiling runs through the maximum-possibility principle this section has already derived. The Samuelson pool argument above turns on non-excludability; a symmetric point holds on the rivalry side. The field of action the political community's infrastructure, land, attention, and productive capacity can support is large but not unlimited: possibility past necessity is substantially rivalrous, and a holding that takes more of that field than it returns subtracts from what remains for every other participant to draw on, whether or not the holder ever converts the holding into political direction-setting. The boundary that keeps this from over-proving is not how much a person holds but whether the holding is extractive or contributive — the same structural-extraction condition already derived above, measured here in possibility rather than in dollars or direction-setting capacity. A holding that reflects a genuine net addition to the shared field (a firm that employs, a technology that expands what the field can support, an investment that grows the pool it draws from) enlarges the field rather than depleting it, and nothing here counts against it regardless of size. A holding that takes more of the shared field than it puts back is what subtracts from it, and it is the taking, not the magnitude, that does the subtracting. Capture is one channel through which extraction erodes the field of action — the political channel — not the whole of the case against concentration. The scoping preserves the Hayek concession and the discretionary economy intact: above-floor holdings that reflect genuine contribution, including the yacht-stays goods already exempted above, remain the owner's regardless of scale, because the condition tracks extraction, not size.

*Stake-and-capture matching at multiple scales.* The proportionate-stake principle runs at economy scale (proportionate-to-stake contribution; sufficiency-floor non-substitutability) and at firm scale (compensation tracks contribution; firm performance feeds back to participants proportionate to stake; pay ratios bounded by plausible measures of proportionate contribution). The empirical record on firm-scale architectures that satisfy the condition (Mondragón Corporation; Lincoln Electric profit-sharing since 1934; John Lewis Partnership; Employee Stock Ownership Plans in the United States; German codetermination) documents that the structural derivation matches reality across multiple operational instances. 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 simultaneously. The condition closes the firm-scale loop. Specific architectures (full worker cooperative; profit-sharing within conventional ownership; ESOP; trust-owned partnership; codetermination) remain open.

*The framework engages the classical-liberal economic-tradition objection.* The most-developed contemporary opposition to the universal-maintenance + proportionate-contribution architecture runs through Hayek (*The Road to Serfdom* 1944; *The Constitution of Liberty* 1960), Friedman (*Capitalism and Freedom* 1962), and the public-choice tradition (Buchanan and Tullock, *The Calculus of Consent* 1962; Tullock on rent-seeking). Hayek presses the knowledge problem: the local knowledge that coordinates 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 presses the minimal-state position: comprehensive bureaucratic redistribution introduces distortions a minimal cash-transfer architecture (the negative income tax) avoids. Public-choice presses regulatory capture as endemic rather than incidental: 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. The framework grants each its central concession. Hayek's knowledge problem is granted at the production side: the framework does not centrally plan production, set prices, or substitute for the informational function of markets above subsistence; the discretionary economy operates on market mechanisms throughout, and the framework's substantive constraints sit at the participation-conditions floor and at the ecological substrate ([§9.5](<9.5 Environment.md>)) rather than at the price-formation interface. Friedman's preference for cash transfer over bureaucratic provision is granted as a design principle: universal maintenance on the tax-side architecture this section derives converges with the negative-income-tax form Friedman defended. Public-choice's diagnostic on capture is granted in full, and is the foundation of the *Corruption is a structural infraction* and *Regulatory capture is the same failure operating from outside* derivations above; the framework parts from the public-choice tradition not on the diagnostic but on the conclusion the tradition draws from it: that the diagnostic licenses minimal regulation rather than dual-channel closure of capture (legal closure of the inside channel through anti-corruption enforcement; structural closure of the outside channel through campaign-finance and lobbying limits, both derived above from the same premise). Where the framework parts from the classical-liberal tradition is on what subsistence is: subsistence is not redistribution from autonomous market participants but the participation conditions without which the market does not operate as a market among rights-bearing-equals; the same [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) derivation that engages Nozick and Hayek at the rights level applies here at the economic-architecture level. The framework converges with the classical-liberal tradition on the price-formation function of markets, the cash-transfer preference over bureaucratic provision, and the structural reality of capture; it parts from the tradition on whether subsistence is the precondition of market participation or a redistribution from it.

Together, these conditions are what economy as recognition-and-distribution infrastructure structurally requires: each one carrying weight, substantive economic architecture coming together only when none is missing. [§9.7.3](<9.7.3 What is Predicted.md>) takes those conditions and tests predictions against them.


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← [9.7.1 What is Disputed](<9.7.1 What is Disputed.md>) | [9.7.3 What is Predicted](<9.7.3 What is Predicted.md>) →
