What Gives Us the Right to Guarantee the Floor?

In an earlier essay, I proposed a political bargain that I called Universal Security Capitalism: guarantee a basic floor beneath every person, while leaving the economic ceiling completely open. Nobody should be ruined by illness, hunger, homelessness, or temporary economic failure, but neither should extraordinary wealth be treated as intrinsically objectionable. A person who builds a company worth ten billion dollars and a person who earns very little while repairing old radios, writing novels, studying insects, or playing obscure music should both be permitted to pursue their own ideas of a worthwhile life.

I still find much of that argument compelling. What has become less clear to me is whether I properly understood the principle beneath it.

At first glance, guaranteeing healthcare, food, housing, and some basic level of income sounds like a proposal about economic equality. Yet equality was never really the part that interested me. I do not particularly care whether one person possesses a thousand times as much money as another, provided that wealth was acquired through legitimate exchange rather than fraud, monopoly, regulatory capture, or some other mechanism that prevents meaningful competition. Nor do I think a society becomes just merely because its citizens occupy narrower positions on an income distribution.

The concern that motivated the original proposal was different. I was interested in what people are actually free to do with their lives.

Someone may be legally free to quit a job, start a company, become an artist, change careers, open a tiny repair shop, or spend several years pursuing an idea that may produce very little money. But the practical meaning of those freedoms changes when exercising them also means risking the loss of healthcare, housing, food, or the ability to survive an unexpected emergency. A person whose medication depends on employer-sponsored insurance may possess the formal right to resign while having very little realistic ability to do so. A would-be entrepreneur who is three missed paychecks from eviction is free to start a business in one sense of the word, but not necessarily in every sense that matters.

This distinction is familiar in political philosophy. Accounts of negative liberty emphasize the absence of external constraints or interference: nobody is preventing me from leaving my job, starting a business, or expressing an unpopular opinion. Accounts of positive liberty, in various forms, ask whether a person actually possesses the capacity to direct their own life and pursue their purposes. The two ideas are not interchangeable, and both have generated enormous disagreement over what governments may legitimately do in the name of freedom.

The more I think about the problem, however, the more I suspect that another concept may describe my concern even better: exit.

The freedom to leave

A great deal of personal independence comes from having somewhere else to go.

Freedom of religion matters partly because a person can reject an established creed. Freedom of association matters partly because a person can leave one group and join another. A competitive market matters partly because a customer dissatisfied with one business can patronize another, while a worker dissatisfied with one employer can seek employment elsewhere. Political freedom itself is diminished when criticizing a powerful institution carries consequences severe enough that formal rights become difficult to exercise.

This does not mean that every unpleasant consequence makes a choice involuntary. Choices have costs. Quitting a job can reasonably mean losing the salary attached to it. Starting a business can mean losing one's investment. Spending ten years writing a novel that nobody wants to buy may mean having less money than someone who spent those years building a successful company. A society that tried to eliminate every consequence of every decision would have to eliminate much of individual responsibility along with it.

There is nevertheless a meaningful distinction between bearing the cost of a choice and facing material catastrophe for making it.

That distinction was central to my original argument. I described the safety floor as a way of lowering the “activation energy” of independent economic activity. A business producing $20,000 a year may be absurd as a complete means of supporting a modern American life once healthcare, housing, food, emergencies, and retirement are included. The same business might be perfectly viable as an independent pursuit if some catastrophic expenses were no longer capable of destroying the person operating it. Under those conditions, activities that currently remain hobbies or side projects could become small but genuine economic enterprises.

The point was never that everyone should become an entrepreneur. In fact, making entrepreneurship a moral requirement would defeat much of the purpose. A person who wants to work twenty hours a week and devote the rest of life to strange chamber music should not need to prove that the music will eventually create jobs or raise GDP. The deeper freedom is the ability to define success differently from one's neighbors.

Seen this way, the social floor is not primarily an equalizing mechanism. It is an attempt to increase independence. It gives more people the ability to decline arrangements they no longer want and to experiment with alternatives.

Republican political theory provides another useful vocabulary here. Its conception of liberty as non-domination distinguishes being free from actual interference from being free of dependence on another party's arbitrary power. Someone can be left alone most of the time and nevertheless occupy a precarious position if another actor possesses overwhelming power over the basic conditions of their life. Contemporary republican theory therefore treats non-domination as a conception of freedom distinct from, although related to, ordinary non-interference.

This is close to what I was reaching for in the original essay. But once I describe the project this way, a serious problem appears.

Creating liberty through coercion

If the purpose of the floor is individual liberty, then its method cannot escape scrutiny under the same principle.

A government guarantee does not appear from nowhere. Doctors, housing, food, infrastructure, and income all represent claims on scarce resources. Unless the entire system can finance itself through returns on previously accumulated assets, somebody has to supply those resources. A state-funded guarantee therefore ultimately depends upon taxation or some other compulsory mechanism.

From a strict libertarian perspective, this is not a minor technical problem. It cuts directly into the theory's conception of rights. Libertarian theories generally place unusually strong weight on self-ownership, private property, voluntary exchange, and protection against being forced to assist others. Robert Nozick's particularly strong version of this argument treats extensive redistributive taxation as difficult to reconcile with robust rights of self-ownership.

One does not have to accept Nozick's conclusion to recognize the force of the objection.

Suppose a social program gives one person enough economic security to leave an oppressive workplace and start an independent business. Their sphere of practical freedom has expanded. But suppose the program was financed by requiring another person to surrender resources they would otherwise have used according to their own wishes. Something has happened to that person's freedom as well.

Calling the first effect “liberty” does not make the second disappear.

This is where my original formulation becomes philosophically unstable. I was thinking primarily about the liberty produced by the floor without giving equal attention to the coercion necessary to guarantee it. If the argument is supposed to rest on individual liberty rather than equality, then it cannot simply count liberty gains on one side of the transaction and ignore liberty losses on the other.

The challenge, then, is not to decide which of these two forms of freedom is genuine. Both describe something real. One concerns freedom from compulsory interference. The other concerns having enough independence to make choices that are formally available but materially dangerous. Philosophical debates over a social minimum confront this problem directly: establishing such a minimum normally requires coercive taxation and transfers, while its defenders argue that deprivation itself may severely constrain the lives people are able to lead.

The difficulty is that the word liberty does not perform the balancing calculation for us.

Three attractive principles that do not fit together easily

The problem becomes clearer if the proposed social floor is separated into three characteristics.

I would like it to be universal. A person's access to basic security should not depend upon belonging to the correct profession, employer, social group, or political constituency.

I would like it to be reliable. Someone contemplating a risky decision should be able to know that the floor will still exist if the decision fails. Otherwise much of its value as a source of independence disappears.

And, insofar as possible, I would like participation in financing it to be voluntary. If the objective is to increase individual liberty, avoiding unnecessary coercion should itself be part of the design.

There is no law of logic saying that universality, reliability, and voluntariness can never coexist. An enormous charitable endowment, for example, might theoretically fund universal assistance indefinitely from investment returns. But as institutional principles they pull against one another.

A system that is universal and genuinely guaranteed requires some answer to the question of what happens when voluntary resources are insufficient. A system that is completely voluntary can establish organizations, accounts, hospitals, insurance pools, endowments, and administrative machinery, but it cannot promise resources that nobody has supplied.

The pipes can remain in the walls. That does not guarantee that water will come out of the faucet.

This distinction has made me more cautious about the word guarantee. A voluntary institution can provide substantial support. It can become extremely reliable. It can accumulate enough capital that failure becomes unlikely. But if nobody is ultimately obligated to replenish it, then at some point its promise remains conditional on continued voluntary cooperation.

Perhaps that is acceptable. Perhaps I was too quick to assume that economic security must take the form of a sovereign guarantee at all.

Does the state have to provide the floor?

Once the purpose of the system is understood as increasing independence rather than enforcing equality, the identity of the provider becomes an open question.

One could imagine mutual-aid associations, insurance pools, charitable foundations, community endowments, religious organizations, cooperatives, corporations, wealthy individuals, local institutions, or combinations of these mechanisms providing different parts of an economic floor. Some could operate as ordinary insurance. Others could be philanthropic. A sufficiently large permanent endowment might distribute investment income in perpetuity. Institutions could even be designed explicitly around increasing people's ability to leave jobs, survive failed enterprises, retrain, or endure temporary economic shocks.

This approach has an important philosophical advantage: it allows us to ask how much liberty-producing security voluntary association can create before invoking compulsory power.

Suppose people with substantial wealth become persuaded that funding such institutions is one of the most effective ways to increase the freedom of others. They might contribute because they value entrepreneurship, because they value artistic and intellectual experimentation, because they dislike extreme dependency, because they feel charitable responsibility, or simply because they think a society with greater individual independence is more interesting to live in. The reasons need not be uniform.

If millions of people agree, the reservoir fills.

If they do not, it does not.

That outcome is uncomfortable precisely because it takes voluntariness seriously. A voluntary institution cannot respond to disappointing participation by declaring that its mission is sufficiently important to override the refusal. The structure may remain intact, but there may simply not be enough water in the pipes.

At that point, however, we confront the strongest argument for involving the state.

A state is not merely another large organization. Political authority is distinctive because it claims the right to make binding rules and, under appropriate conditions, to enforce them. Philosophers disagree profoundly over what makes that authority legitimate. Some theories emphasize consent, others democratic authorization, fairness, public justification, or the state's ability to secure important social goods. The existence of a democratic government therefore should not be treated as proof that every individual has voluntarily consented to every act of coercion. The more precise question belongs to the philosophical problem of political legitimacy: under what conditions is a particular exercise of political authority and coercive power justified?

That formulation seems more useful for this problem than pretending taxation is somehow non-coercive because citizens participate in elections.

It is coercive.

The question is whether the coercion is justified.

When voluntary support stops short

Imagine that a network of voluntary institutions succeeds spectacularly. It prevents most cases of destitution. It provides emergency healthcare assistance, temporary housing, retraining grants, and enough support that millions of people possess more credible exit options than they previously did.

But it does not reach everyone.

Perhaps donations decline during recessions precisely when assistance is needed most. Perhaps some regions have enormous philanthropic capacity while others have very little. Perhaps an expensive medical crisis overwhelms available funds. Perhaps people rationally prefer to enjoy the benefits of living in a society with greater economic security while allowing their neighbors to finance it.

The question then becomes much narrower than the one posed in my original essay.

It is no longer simply:

Would a universal floor increase human freedom?

It becomes:

Does whatever additional freedom would be created by turning voluntary support into a compulsory guarantee justify the coercion required to do so?

I do not yet know the answer.

That uncertainty is not merely a matter of finding the correct tax rate. It reaches deeper into the political philosophy of the project. If a small compulsory contribution could eliminate forms of catastrophic dependence while leaving an enormous sphere of private choice untouched, perhaps the bargain would appear attractive under some theories of liberty. If maintaining the guarantee instead required high taxation, intrusive eligibility systems, extensive surveillance, price controls, occupational mandates, or a bureaucracy with increasing discretion over individual lives, the institution could begin destroying the very independence it was intended to create.

The floor therefore cannot be evaluated only by measuring how much assistance it distributes.

Its method matters.

A liberty ledger

This suggests a different way of thinking about the problem. Rather than beginning with a favored program and asking whether it can be labeled libertarian, perhaps every proposed institution should be evaluated according to a kind of liberty ledger.

On one side would be the forms of dependence it removes. Does the institution make it easier for a worker to leave an abusive employer? Does it make experimentation less dangerous? Does it allow a person to retrain, relocate, start a business, care for a family member, or pursue work that produces less money but greater personal meaning? Does it weaken monopolistic or institutional arrangements that people currently tolerate mainly because they cannot afford to exit them?

On the other side would be the powers required to sustain the institution. How much compulsory taxation does it require? What information must citizens surrender to administrators? What conditions are attached to assistance? How much discretion does the state acquire over private economic life? Does a program create new barriers to entry or new dependencies even as it removes old ones? Could voluntary institutions achieve most of the same result with substantially less coercion?

The ledger cannot reduce liberty to a neat numerical score. The point is not to claim that three units of economic independence automatically justify two units of taxation. Different kinds of liberty may not be commensurable in that way. The point is instead to refuse to let either side of the argument disappear.

A social program does not become harmless merely because its intentions are humane.

A market arrangement does not become voluntary in every meaningful respect merely because nobody has legally prohibited exit.

Both claims deserve examination.

This framework also changes how I think about the relationship between economic security and economic liberalization. If some kind of public floor were ultimately justified, perhaps it should be understood not as an isolated expansion of government but as one half of a larger bargain: greater protection against catastrophe accompanied by aggressive efforts to remove restrictions that make individuals unnecessarily dependent on large institutions.

That could mean examining occupational licensing, barriers to starting businesses, corporate subsidies, regulatory capture, zoning restrictions that constrain housing supply, benefit cliffs that punish additional earnings, and systems that tie essential benefits to a particular employer. The relevant question in each case would be similar: Does this institution increase the number of realistic choices available to individuals, or does it narrow them?

Such a bargain would not resolve the coercion problem. It would merely prevent the social floor from being treated as an automatic license for indefinite state expansion.

The danger of building another dependency

This may be the most important constraint that libertarian thought contributes to the original idea.

If economic dependence is dangerous because it allows one institution to acquire disproportionate power over a person's life, then replacing private dependence with unlimited dependence on the state would not solve the underlying problem. It would change its location.

A government capable of protecting people from catastrophe may be desirable under some account of political legitimacy. A government capable of defining every acceptable risk, regulating every exchange, supervising every form of work, and continually expanding the conditions attached to material security would be something else entirely.

The same philosophy that makes a floor attractive therefore places limits on the floor's administrator.

That symmetry was mostly absent from my original essay. I considered the security guarantee as infrastructure and asked what people might build on top of it. I did not spend enough time asking what powers the builder of that infrastructure would need, how those powers would be constrained, or whether the institution might eventually make exit from itself difficult.

Those questions now seem indispensable.

From equality to independence

I still think there is something valuable inside the original phrase guarantee the floor, leave the ceiling open.

But I no longer think its strongest justification is that an unequal society becomes fair once everyone receives a minimum quantity of resources. Nor am I certain that the word guarantee can survive unchanged once the coercion required to sustain it is taken seriously.

What I remain persuaded by is the underlying objective: people should possess as many credible ways as possible to construct lives of their own choosing.

Some people will use that freedom to build enormous companies. Others will start tiny businesses that never employ anyone beyond their founders. Some will pursue scientific problems, art, family life, crafts, religious vocations, local institutions, or pursuits for which the market assigns very little monetary value. The purpose of economic freedom should not be to push everyone toward the same destination. It should be to enlarge the number of destinations a person can realistically choose.

That principle points in two directions at once.

It creates skepticism toward government coercion, because a state that can compel peaceful individuals to organize their lives according to collective preferences represents an obvious threat to personal independence.

But it also creates skepticism toward arrangements in which formally free individuals possess so little material independence that saying no to an employer, insurer, landlord, monopolist, or other powerful institution becomes economically catastrophic.

The resulting tension cannot be solved simply by choosing one definition of liberty and declaring the other irrelevant. It requires asking how institutions alter people's actual relationships of power, dependency, choice, and exit.

I am therefore less certain than I was that the state should guarantee the floor. But I am more certain about what the floor was supposed to accomplish.

The question is not fundamentally how equal society should be.

It is how much genuine room each person should have to leave one arrangement and attempt another.

Before using coercion to create that room, we should ask how much voluntary association can create on its own. If voluntary institutions prove insufficient, then the remaining question becomes harder rather than easier: how much compulsory collective action, if any, can be justified in order to increase the independence of the people subject to it?

That is where I currently find the argument.

Not at a finished ideology, but at a boundary.

The original proposal began with the hope that security might produce more freedom. I still think it can. What I had not adequately confronted was that a guarantee of security is itself a form of power, and power does not cease to require justification merely because it is exercised for benevolent ends.

If the goal is liberty, then the floor must pass the same test as the ceiling.

And perhaps the most useful question is no longer simply whether a society should guarantee that nobody falls too far.

It is whether we can build institutions that give people somewhere else to go without creating another institution from which they cannot leave.

Further reading

• “Positive and Negative Liberty” — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  A useful overview of the distinction between freedom from interference and conceptions of freedom concerned with people's ability to direct their own lives.

• “Republicanism” — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  Introduces the republican conception of liberty as non-domination, or independence from arbitrary power.

• “Libertarianism” — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  Surveys libertarian theories of self-ownership, property, coercion, taxation, and the limits of political authority.

• “Social Minimum” — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  Especially relevant to the central problem here: whether guaranteeing minimum material conditions can be justified despite the coercive taxation generally required to establish them.

• “Political Legitimacy” — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  Examines the deeper question of when political institutions possess justified authority to issue and coercively enforce binding rules.

• “Coercion” — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  Useful background for the distinction between recognizing an action as coercive and concluding that it is therefore necessarily unjustified.