Strip the economy down and it is just the way a community takes care of itself materially: how the things people need to live, work, and take part get produced and shared among the people who depend on them. Seen that way, the line that matters is not rich versus poor but contributing versus extracting: feeding the shared life or siphoning from it. People who draw the most from the common scaffolding owe back in proportion (that is all progressive taxation is), guaranteeing the basics is the community subsisting its own members rather than charity from above, and skimming far more than you put back is the same wrong whether it is welfare fraud or a captured regulator. The surprising part is that none of this comes at the expense of the successful: the argument leaves the mansion and the yacht exactly where they are and changes only what success is connected to, recoupling it to contribution, where admiration actually follows. An economy organized this way asks not who reaches the top but what holds everyone up from the bottom.

Direction, once recognized and coordinated, has to be distributed in the form of material maintenance for the participants. Economy derives from [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) (Morality), [§8.8](<8.8 Meaning.md>) (Meaning), [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>) (Drive), and [§8.11](<8.11 Technology.md>) (Technology). The account of morality in [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) is that people wrong one another when they fail to recognize one another as real subjects. Meaning is what makes a person's life intelligible to themselves and to others. Drive is what makes any of this move. Applied to a shared society, those three claims imply that economy is not an autonomous market machine. Economy is how a population distributes the material conditions its members need in order to act coherently. The structural form of this distribution is, mechanically, the coordination of specialized modal representations ([§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>)). Different work is different regional coverage of the modal field (the surgeon's region differs from the carpenter's, the carpenter's from the engineer's, the engineer's from the parent's) and the economy is the institutional means by which bodies with different regional coverage can act in concert without each body having to map every region itself. Markets, professional structures, supply chains, professional vocabulary ([§8.10](<8.10 Language.md>)), and the technologies of coordination ([§8.11](<8.11 Technology.md>)) are the infrastructure that lets specialized representations connect at their edges. The productive surplus of any modern arrangement over the sum of its individual members is the surplus this coordination produces; the rigidity of any narrow arrangement is what happens when the representations under coordination are too homogeneous to cover the field the conditions actually present.

**Maintenance is productive.** Production depends on people who have been cared for, educated, and kept healthy; on infrastructure that has been repaired; on knowledge that has been preserved and transmitted; on institutions whose reliability supports cooperation; and on ecological conditions that continue to supply the material field. Care, repair, teaching, public health, and stewardship do not merely consume a surplus produced elsewhere. They reproduce capacities on which later production depends. This does not imply that every maintenance expenditure pays for itself financially. It means that an economy that counts only market output can understate some of the work required for productive life to continue.

*Finance organizes claims on the material world; it does not by itself create that world.* Money, credit, and secondary markets help coordinate claims on future production. Their operation depends importantly on public law, stable currency, enforceable contracts, usable information, and the labor and savings of the people whose future they price. Finance is therefore one part of the infrastructure through which a community directs resources toward some futures rather than others. It can serve the participation conditions when it helps make productive activity possible, distributes risk intelligibly, and makes its terms visible. It can become extractive where returns depend on opacity, manufactured scarcity, uncompensated cost-shifting, or financial holdings converted into unanswerable political direction. Publicly traded companies provide one limited illustration: because dispersed investors need usable information, public markets impose disclosure obligations. Insider trading is a regulatory case in which privileged information can disadvantage other participants. Secondary markets likewise require the same scrutiny. They can provide liquidity and price signals that support the wider process of financing productive activity, while particular gains may still reflect scarcity, opacity, or value captured from public conditions rather than contribution. The framework does not settle a single monetary school or financial design. It asks whether a given arrangement helps preserve the participation floor, makes risks and terms legible, supports productive activity, and remains politically answerable.

*Money and credit are collective infrastructure.* A unit of currency is a claim the whole arrangement honors. Its value is not produced by the holder or the issuer alone: it depends on public law, enforceable contracts, the courts that make the claim good, the taxing and spending that give the unit standing uses, and the accumulated trust that lets strangers accept it from one another. In the vocabulary this chapter has been running, that is soft and cooperative infrastructure, built and renewed by collective investment. No private balance sheet produces the conditions that make a monetary claim worth holding; every private balance sheet presupposes them.

*Creating money and allocating credit are public functions in kind.* Under the modern arrangement, extending credit brings new spendable claims on the shared arrangement into being; the claims are not merely transferred from prior savers. That is a corrigible description of the present monetary architecture, not a structural result, and the argument conditions on it rather than deriving it. What is structural is the classification that follows. The license to create claims the whole arrangement honors is delegated public power, whoever holds the charter. And credit allocation is direction in the chapter's exact sense: it decides which futures get resourced, which is to say it directs the shared structure toward some futures rather than others. A function that creates public claims and directs the shared structure is public in kind. That is a statement about what the function is, not about which institutions should perform it.

*The present arrangement privatizes the function.* The gains of money creation and credit allocation, the margins and financial rents the function throws off, accrue to private balance sheets, while the losses of the function's failure are socialized through guarantees, rescues, and the lender of last resort. Apply the test the chapter runs everywhere: who captures the gain, the floor or a private balance sheet? Here the test returns its cleanest verdict in the economy, because the function being captured is public by construction. Land value at least attaches to a parcel someone holds; the money-credit function is nothing but the shared arrangement's own machinery, so what private capture takes here is the yield of the machinery itself.

*The constraint, not a monetary school.* The framework does not select full-reserve banking, public banking, sovereign-money designs, or any other school, exactly as it selects no marginal-rate schedule. It generates the constraint any acceptable design must satisfy: no private capture of a public function. Two corollaries give the constraint content. The rents the money-credit function generates route to the floor, as land rent does in the housing treatment ([§9.8](<9.8 Housing.md>)), because they are returns on collective investment rather than on anyone's contribution. And the allocation function remains answerable to the recognition mechanism ([§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)): where credit direction is unaccountable, the polity's direction is being set by a subset, which the chapter root already precludes. Answerability is not allocation by committee. The knowledge problem the classical-liberal tradition presses is granted here on the same terms [§9.7.2](<9.7.2 What is Required.md>) grants it at the production side: decentralized lenders pricing local risk are the informational mechanism, and the corollary substitutes no planner for them. What must answer is the license, not each loan — who may create claims the whole arrangement honors, on what terms the delegated power is held, and where its rents land. A design that leaves every credit decision decentralized while routing the function's rents to the floor satisfies both corollaries at once. Designs vary freely above the constraint; the argument decides only where a design violates it.

*The gate reads the wrong record.* The answerability corollary decides a familiar case at the retail scale. Under the current arrangement, access to credit is gated by credit history: a record of prior borrowing. A member who has never missed a rent payment in fifteen years has produced a longer and harder record of exactly the variable the allocation function claims to price, dependable payment under standing obligation, yet that record does not register, while a shorter history of participation in debt products does. The defect is structural, not incidental. The gate is circular: the only way to become legible to the allocation function is to consume its products, so the arrangement manufactures demand for the very thing it gates, a scarcity of standing rather than of goods. The gate is unanswerable: what counts as creditworthiness is decided by privately held scoring institutions whose measurement choices answer to no one they measure, a subset directing allocation. And the asymmetry widens the divide between renting and owning by measurement alone: the renter's housing payment builds no legibility while the owner's mortgage payment builds it, so the line between them widens without any difference in conduct ([§9.8](<9.8 Housing.md>) develops the housing side of the divide). An allocation function answerable to the recognition mechanism reads the evidence of dependability a member's participation actually produces, whatever ledger it sits in. Rent, utilities, and other standing obligations are that evidence.

*Capture compounds.* Financial holdings converted into unanswerable political direction have already been named as extraction; what makes finance the chief vector of that conversion is that the capture compounds. Captured allocation directs resources toward whatever deepens the capture, so the drift is self-financing in a way ordinary rent-seeking is not. The repair is not a new mechanism. It is the same recognition-and-answerability architecture the chapter derives, applied to the allocation function itself.

*Three results follow, each developed at section length in [§9.7.1](<9.7.1 What is Disputed.md>) (under the three-counter-tradition engagement) and [§9.7.2](<9.7.2 What is Required.md>) (the required architecture).* *(i) Progressive taxation works as a fee scaled to reliance.* Smith already named this in *Wealth of Nations* (1776), Book V, Chapter 2: contribution proportionate to *the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state*. The collective-investment frame puts analytic rigor under the claim: institutional surface area is genuinely larger for capital owners (financial system, IP regime, contract enforcement, corporate-law system, currency stability, regulatory framework, an educated-and-trained workforce, a stable consumer base, all relied on continuously) than for the salaried worker who uses the same institutions occasionally. Proportionality tracks actual reliance, not class judgment. *(ii) Insurance becomes structurally redundant for the maintenance of subsistence.* The function private insurance was performing at the subsistence floor (health, disability, unemployment, survivor income, baseline housing) is already being performed by the political community more thoroughly and without an underwriting layer. The derivation precludes insurance as the primary mechanism *for subsistence*; discretionary risk-pooling above the floor remains a private market, public reinsurance for catastrophic regional events is already collective-investment territory, and voluntary mutual-aid above subsistence is additive rather than substitutive. *(iii) Patterns of disproportionate accumulation register as structural extraction* whether the form runs at institutional scale (regulatory capture, sanctioned disproportion, tax-haven structures, denial-of-claim profit margins) or individual scale (fraud, benefits gaming, false claims). The frame treats both symmetrically by construction; there is no line of derivation within this framework that licenses class-resentment ethics. The structural-extraction logic applies symmetrically to historical racial extraction: slavery as labor extraction at the founding, redlining at FHA/HOLC level (1930s–1968), GI Bill exclusion, urban-renewal demolition, and predatory subprime lending pre-2008 are extraction at the racial-population boundary, and the framework's distinction between contribution and extraction applies to that historical record on the framework's own logic (Mills, *The Racial Contract* 1997 and *Black Rights / White Wrongs* 2017 develop the canonical analytic engagement).

*Subsistence-generated, not income, is the value this framework actually tracks.* Income and wealth are proxies for contribution, and they are proxies that break exactly where extraction is most active: a rent extractor's income and a caregiver's foregone wages both register as identical income-axis numbers, though only one of them adds to what the political community can subsist on. The contribution/extraction distinction the chapter runs throughout already implies the correct unit: net subsistence generated, what an actor adds to the shared capacity for maintenance minus what the actor draws from it without contributing back. GDP is the clearest case of the proxy failing, since it counts activity rather than net subsistence and so credits extraction and harm-repair (the crash, the cleanup, the illness, the incarceration) as positive contributions to the very total the framework is trying to measure. Net subsistence generated names the unit the contribution/extraction distinction was already using — it introduces no new value.

*Net subsistence generated is the design target of the tax structure, not its measured base.* Measuring each actor's total subsistence-generated directly and taxing on that measure would hand a single certifying authority the power to decide, actor by actor, what counts as generated — a single-arbiter failure structurally analogous to the one [§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>) precludes at the information register ("No single authority adjudicates truth; the structural plurality does"), though the result of [§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>) is about media/information accuracy specifically and is invoked here as a parallel, not an inherited derivation — and a Goodhart problem the moment the measure became the target actors optimized against rather than a description of what they had already done. The measurable substrate stays income and flows, unchanged from the present arrangement; what changes is what a tax structure applied to that substrate is designed to accomplish, not what it directly measures.

*The sources-of-taxes principle: tax the measurable components of negative subsistence, and relieve genuine contribution.* Rent, externalities, resource draw, and harm are each independently measurable without appointing an arbiter of anyone's total contribution, and each is a component of negative subsistence in the framework's own terms: value extracted from the shared structure rather than added to it. Taxing those components, while relieving income earned through genuine contribution, lands the tax structure near the defensible cores of two traditions the chapter has reason to engage on its own terms: land-value taxation (tax the rent, not the improvement) and Pigouvian taxation (tax the harm, not the activity). Both traditions are ordinarily defended piecemeal, borrowed for whatever problem is at hand; here they are two instances of a single derivation, the sources-of-taxes principle applied to two different components of negative subsistence, rather than two independently motivated policy tools. The proportionate-to-stake architecture already established above, and the land-value, estate, and financial-transaction taxation the [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) architecture derives, are further instances of the same principle rather than separate commitments the section happens to also hold.

*The same principle bears on categorical exemptions from taxation generally, of which religious tax exemption is the clearest case.* A categorical exemption, granted because of what an institution is rather than what it generates, decouples an institution's tax status from any accounting of its net subsistence contribution — precisely the coupling the sources-of-taxes principle exists to enforce. Many religious institutions plainly do generate net subsistence: food banks, shelters, disaster relief, hospitals, and schools run under religious auspices are contribution by the framework's own test, and nothing here revises that. What the framework puts pressure on is the mechanism, not the category: current exemption is granted by what an organization is (a religious body, as such) rather than measured against what it generates, and the accounting is weakened further by resting on individual congregants' charitable behavior rather than institutional accountability — an institution can hold an exemption while directing negligible resources toward subsistence and considerable resources toward property accumulation, political activity, or compensation, with no mechanism tying the exemption to the generation the framework would require it to demonstrate. The fix implied is not an identity-based rule run the other direction (tax religious institutions because they are religious institutions), which would repeat the same category error with the sign flipped; it is applying the sources-of-taxes test itself, uniformly, to every institution regardless of category — rent, externalities, resource draw, and harm taxed, genuine contribution relieved, and exemption an accounting status an institution earns and re-earns rather than a status its category confers.

*The dependence on institutional agency is itself the tell.* An accounting gap that closes only when an institution chooses well is not closed at all, on the framework's own terms: a structural fix does not stay contingent on an occupant's goodwill, it changes the arrangement so the outcome no longer depends on who is running it. Charitable relief — religious or otherwise — filling the gap the exemption leaves open is downstream relief for an upstream failure, in the same sense the framework already gives those terms elsewhere, and the more of it a society structurally requires, the less its upstream architecture is doing the job the sources-of-taxes principle assigns it. The measure of the tax structure's success is how little need is left for downstream relief to meet, not how well downstream relief meets the need it leaves behind. A society does not need a specialized institution to root out the poverty its own structure produces — the goal is a structure that does not produce it, so that the institution built to catch what falls through has less, and eventually nothing, to catch.

*The same reframing settles what transparency requires.* [§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>) already derives the obligation this needs, in its own voice: "The right to accurate information has a positive face: what power conceals, it owes." [§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>) names the economic instance of that obligation directly: "the flows of the economy are what [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) (Economy) needs visible for extraction to be detectable rather than concealed in the opacity it feeds on." If net subsistence generated, not income, is the actual unit of contribution, that existing obligation sharpens to a specific content: what an entity owes visibility into is its net contribution — rent extracted, externalities imposed, harm caused — not merely its income, since income is exactly the proxy this section has already shown conceals extraction behind an identical-looking number. The disclosure obligation follows the same substitution the tax structure makes, applied to visibility rather than liability, and it is the stated obligation of [§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>), not a new claim on top of it.

*Legacy un-inversion operationalizes the book's title thesis inside the tax structure itself.* A progressive system, run against the sources-of-taxes principle, makes the accumulated pile an asymptote no one reaches: the pile is what is left after negative subsistence is taxed away, so hoarding it becomes structurally harder the larger it grows, while net subsistence generated is uncapped and keeps counting. Greatness migrates from how much is kept to how much is generated, because generated is the only quantity in the system still free to grow without limit. Legacy and honor are the reward that tracks the uncapped quantity, and the reward is structurally non-rivalrous and non-extractive: one person's being remembered for what they generated forecloses no one else's, unlike a pile, which is finite by construction.

The greatness-drive the book's opening chapters derive can therefore run at full throttle without corroding anyone, because what it now drives toward is not a rival good. Legacy, on this reading, is this section's own opening and closing claims, joined across an individual lifetime rather than a single balance sheet: the opening recoupled success to contribution, "where admiration actually follows," and the closing below inverts the achievement-narrative at the societal scale, measuring a society's legacy "not by the height the highest reached but by what held the lowest." What follows here is the individual-scale mirror of that closing claim, extended across time: an individual's legacy, like a society's, is measured by what was generated for the floor rather than by the height of the pile kept, and the tax structure's asymptote on the pile is what frees admiration to track generation instead of accumulation.

The pattern is already half-true historically: Salk's declining to patent the polio vaccine was declining to convert generated subsistence into a pile, and it is exactly that refusal, not the vaccine alone, that the historical record reveres him for. The guardrail needed here is the same one needed everywhere a metric risks becoming a target: legacy has to stay plural and adjudicated only in the long run, never collapsed into a single "most subsistence ever generated" leaderboard, which would reintroduce the arbiter and Goodhart problem the design-target result above was built to preclude, one level removed.

*The function of the social structure is to put distance between subjects and vulnerability.* Hunger, untreated illness, homelessness, coercive dependence, and physical danger force choices to happen too close to collapse. Maintenance widens the interval: time to think, safety to refuse, stability to compare alternatives, and enough protected standing for action to become choice rather than survival-response. Subsistence is not generosity. It is the resource-condition for the social possibilities the society claims to offer.

The same fact was named ([§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>)) from the inside as modal depth. Precarity does not merely remove external options; it collapses the internal distance between condition and response. A subject acting under untreated illness, panic, hunger, threat, exhaustion, or survival pressure has fewer live alternatives available for reflective mapping before action. Upstream maintenance therefore protects agency itself. It keeps action from collapsing into reaction.

*Benevolence inverts.* This inverts a long-standing picture of benevolence. Generosity, welfare, and care for strangers are usually framed as virtues directed outward, extensions of the self toward others who lie beyond its proper concern. The argument reverses the direction. A person is not sealed off from the conditions around them; the strangers whose conditions they help maintain are part of the world that keeps them alive. Benevolence was never extension but maintenance: what felt like reaching outward was the self recognizing how far its own conditions reach. Healthcare for the uninsured, housing for the unhoused, education for other people's children: these are not acts of reaching past the self. They are acts of tending to the self, whose borders turn out to include more than the skin suggested.

*Subsistence is not assistance.* The vocabulary in which subsistence is normally discussed is the vocabulary of government assistance: a benefactor with discretion, a recipient in need, an asymmetric relation in which something is given by some to others. That vocabulary mislocates the structure. Subsistence is a quantification of what it costs to maintain a person within the shared structure at a given place and time: housing, food, healthcare, transit, communication, the basic conditions of participation. Calling that subsistence rather than assistance is not euphemism. It is the correction of a category error. The political question shifts with the vocabulary. *Should we give you this* is contested moral territory whose contests are not resolvable from inside the vocabulary that frames them. *What does it cost to subsist here* is empirical, administrative territory, decidable by the same regional cost-of-living measures the shared structure already maintains for other purposes. The participation conditions the previous passages identified do not require a benefactor to deliver them. They require a vocabulary that names what they actually are.

*The maintenance floor is not withdrawn as a member earns.* The assistance vocabulary leaves a design signature even after the vocabulary is corrected: a benefit calculated as relief for the needy is phased out as need recedes, so that crossing an income line strips the support away. Read as subsistence rather than assistance, that withdrawal schedule is precluded. If the floor is a structural guarantee of membership rather than a transfer conditioned on continued need, then it cannot be conditioned on a member's not earning: the participation-axis result [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) fixes, that the foundation is neither earned by participation nor forfeited by it, lands here as a constraint on benefit architecture. A means-tested cliff, an eligibility phase-out steep enough to impose an effective marginal rate near or above one hundred percent, or a hard earnings cap is the participation-axis trapdoor in administrative form: the member who exercises capacity loses the maintenance that made the capacity exercisable, so the floor is made to compete with the work it exists to free. The structural requirement is that earning never net negative against the floor: the floor held by membership and earnings added on top of it, with whatever phase-out occurs running gradually and above the subsistence line rather than through it. The healthcare and disability designs are the worked case ([§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>)), where the earnings-cap form of the defect is sharpest; the present result names the general class the case belongs to.

*Subjects subsist one another.* Run intransitively, *to subsist* names what each subject does individually: continue to exist. Run transitively, in the form the argument requires, the verb names what subjects do to one another: act on one another to keep one another in being. *Humanity is a subsistence: the noun-form of what the verb already names.* The chapter root calls this *Subsistence*: humanity is the singular kind of collective entity that mutual subsisting constitutes, the way *a community* or *a commonwealth* names a kind of singular entity its constitutive activity makes. The fund is contributed to by everyone, distributed to everyone, structurally guaranteed to each as a condition of being part of the configuration. The state apparatus is the vehicle of mutual subsistence, not its agent. Subjects are not subsisted by the government. They subsist one another through the mechanism the government provides. Grammar carries the structural fact: there is no asymmetric agent and patient, no benefactor and beneficiary, no giver and receiver. There are co-subsisters doing the same thing to one another.

*The providential function relocates.* This is the inversion shape Chapter 6 develops, applied to its political object. Classical theism projected the providential relation upward: God provides. The present account, applied consistently to its own derivation, returns the function to where it actually structurally lives: *the mutual subsistence of subjects*. Same providential structure, different subject. The providence the tradition was tracking was real (a person's continuing existence depends on conditions no one person produces, conditions that arrive from elsewhere and that one neither earns each morning nor can secure single-handedly), but the mistake was placing those conditions outside the political community. They are inside it. What benevolence-inverts named at the level of the individual agent, that the strangers whose conditions one helps maintain are part of what keeps one alive, *subjects subsist one another* names at the level of the structure: the community provides those conditions, member to member, through the institutions it maintains. The longing to be taken care of is answered by the fact that the community already does, when it is organized to. Subjects do not receive subsistence from above. They subsist one another.

*Liberty aggregates across the shared structural space.* What [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) has been running is the chapter root's *aggregative liberty* applied at the economy register. One person's liberty to accumulate at scale does not compete with another's liberty to remain alive, because the conditions of remaining alive are upstream of the conditions of accumulation rather than in trade-off with them. The threshold maintains the upstream conditions; the discretionary economy above the threshold runs on the maximally-liberty-respecting market mechanisms the classical-liberal tradition correctly defends. The framework aggregates the conditions under which liberty is actual rather than aggregating liberty itself, preserving the separateness-of-persons constraint at the layer where it does its work. The framework does not have to choose between threshold-maintenance and individual liberty above it; the two run on different registers by construction.

*Why the aggregation is positive-sum.* That liberty aggregates rather than competes is not an optimistic premise the framework adds; it carries forward from what [§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>) established freedom to be. Freedom is modal freedom ([§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>)), modal depth plus latitude: the live alternatives a subject can model, compare, and grasp (modal depth), together with the standing room to enact them (latitude). The aggregation runs on these two pillars, and neither is a rival good: they are exactly what liberty aggregates across, and they exhaust what it aggregates across, so their non-rivalness carries to the aggregate. This is not a part-to-whole inference: non-rivalness transfers because each thing aggregated is itself a good whose use by one subject forecloses no other's, not because a property of the parts is being projected onto a separate whole. The first is latitude (the maintained conditions that hold the interval open): subsistence, safety, time; and those conditions are upstream and shared: maintaining them for one subject under shared structure maintains them for everyone who shares it, which is the convergence the chapter root derives. The second is modal depth, the reach of a subject's modal representation, and a representation is extended by coordination with other subjects' specialized coverage ([§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>)), not depleted by it: the surgeon's mapped region, shared, widens the carpenter's field rather than subtracting from it: the structure being shared is non-rival even where the labor of transmitting it (the surgeon's teaching time) is not, an implementation cost the section already assigns to the empirical layer. A scarce material good is rival: one person's use forecloses another's. Live possibility, mapped against a modal structure no one consumes by accessing, is not. This is why the feeding loop runs both ways at once rather than trading one subject's gain against another's: what grows on each side is not a fixed stock being divided but modal freedom across a shared structure: non-rival in exactly the sense Samuelson named (1954), one subject's access foreclosing no other's, though it is that single property of non-rivalry in access, not the rest of the public-goods apparatus, that the analogy carries down to the level of possibility itself. Aggregating the conditions under which liberty is actual is on that account aggregating something non-rival, which expands the field for each subject without conscripting any subject's possibility to fund another's. The denial of conscription is a claim about possibility, not about dollars: what is aggregated is the non-rival conditions, while the rival instrument that finances them (progressive taxation of material goods) is not relabeled as non-rival but handled openly on the tax side under proportionate-to-stake contribution. The separateness of persons is preserved not despite the aggregation but because what is aggregated was never the kind of good that pits one person's share against another's, honored at the layer where the conditions are maintained, not denied at the layer where they are funded. ([§9.14](<9.14 Convergence.md>) carries this non-rivalry forward into the convergence: it decomposes each economic act into a non-rival possibility-expanding component and a rival access-capturing one, reads the accumulation cap derived here as the requirement that the capturing component approach zero, and grounds the political Subsistence of Def 23 in the non-rival structure at its base.) Housing is where this result meets land, the one good in which a rival material asset and a non-rival structural value share a single object; it is developed at section length in [§9.8](<9.8 Housing.md>).

*The question is who can do the most for the bottom, not who can make it to the top.* The legacy of a society, on this framework, inverts the achievement-narrative: it is measured not by the height the highest reached but by what held the lowest. The arrangement is not utopian. At OECD-level productive capacity, the collective investment already made is sufficient to meet the threshold given reasonable redistribution architecture, operationally demonstrated by the Nordic and continental European cases ([§9.7.2](<9.7.2 What is Required.md>)) running the architecture at scale. What remains is the question of how those dividends are distributed: a contestable empirical premise the framework conditions on rather than derives, bounded by aggregate productivity, demographics, and ecological limits. The people and the productive capacity are already there; what remains is the orientation. Conditional on the premise, the arrangement is a live option under capacity already in place: what the premise supports is feasibility under the stated conditions, and feasibility is all the argument asks of it. What remains is integration: the framework integrating into how people actually act, and into how systems actually run. The work is integration-work, not possibility-work.


- [9.7.1 What is Disputed](<9.7.1 What is Disputed.md>)
- [9.7.2 What is Required](<9.7.2 What is Required.md>)
- [9.7.3 What is Predicted](<9.7.3 What is Predicted.md>)
- [9.7.4 What is Confirmed](<9.7.4 What is Confirmed.md>)
- [9.7.5 What is Concluded](<9.7.5 What is Concluded.md>)


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← [9.6.5 What is Concluded](<9.6.5 What is Concluded.md>) | [9.7.1 What is Disputed](<9.7.1 What is Disputed.md>) →
