Chapter Three of A Just Solution
Political and Economic Justice
The issues of political and economic justice arise because people can affect others without ever having any direct contact with them. These influences are manifested through the functioning of what we can call the foundational social processes of the community. Every community has two such processes. They are its political process and its economy. They can be called “foundational” because they are ubiquitous with respect to communities and because they are ubiquitous with respect to the members of any given community. They are ubiquitous with respect to communities because it is impossible for a group of people to be a (formal) community without engaging in the functions of those two processes. The foundational processes are ubiquitous with respect to individuals within a given community because they include every member of a community, whether or not one would choose to be included. The ubiquity of the political process and the economy forces the issue of justice with respect to them upon us, and also explains why ‘social justice’ is limited to them. All of this will require rather more explication, and a good place to start would be “community.”
A community is basically the same thing as a society; ‘community’ just seems warmer and fuzzier to me. At any rate, in the broader sense of that word, all of us are members of many communities. Most of us in the
A community need not be a geopolitical unit. A family is a community. Also, the workplace is a community of a kind, and there are communities even within it, and we may be a member of more than one of them. Church, school, and any other organization of which we may be a member all are communities, and each of them may be subdivided into communities. We can be in less formal, even completely unstructured communities by virtue of shared interests or experiences, such as the community of people concerned about the degradation of the environment, or for that matter the people on one side or the other of any social or political issue or the community of single parents, or parents of children with this or that problem, disease, or impairment, etc.
Shared interests and experiences generate what might be called natural communities. Any formally organized community becomes in a sense an artificial community, in that some of the shared interests result from issues related to the community itself, as an organized entity, which issues would not exist in the absence of that formal organization, such as the rules that must govern it, how to support it financially, etc. All of the characteristics of artificial communities apply to any formally organized group, and communities as geopolitical units are no exception.
Any formally organized community necessarily has a political process. Indeed, the very act of getting organized is a political act. No specifically geopolitical community can exist without being formally organized, to some extent and in some fashion. (Hereinafter the word “community” will refer to geopolitical units unless otherwise indicated.) This is true of every community that has ever existed, regardless of time or place, even the earliest, sociologically simplest, or least technologically oriented. Even people who have lived by hunting and gathering have had to effect choices for the community as a whole: when to stop and when to go; what direction to go in; etc. So, with a tip of the hat to Samuels, we can define the political process as the process of effecting choices for the community as a whole.
The political process of a community can be thought of as consisting of two shells, with the outer shell subsuming the one to the ‘inside’ of it. That is, the outer shell includes as part of itself all of the inner shell, whereas there is some part of the outer shell that is not included in the inner shell. This model of the political process is valid for every community of human beings that has ever existed, from the least technologically advanced to the most. One implication of all this is that the political process, in whole and in part, is not a necessary evil; it is simply necessary.
In any geopolitical community the inner shell of the political sphere is the political system. The political system is composed of the set of institutions by which and through which choices are effected for the community as a whole. According to my dictionary, an institution is “a significant practice, relationship, or organization in a society or culture.” With respect to the political system specifically, then, political parties, generically, can be institutions. That the political system includes the institution government—itself made up of more than one institution—is obvious, and the system of government includes a system of criminal and civil justice. A constitution, comprising the set of rules governing governmental organization and setting out political rights, also is an institution. As will be seen, it is particularly important that what we call political rights are also institutions.
The ‘distribution’ of (actually, the set of restrictions on) political rights can be a means of identifying the various political systems that have existed. In a personal tyranny all political rights are bound up in the tyrant, to be doled out to individuals or groups however the tyrant chooses. In an aristocracy political rights are controlled by property owners (and ostensibly property is only transferable by inheritance or to other aristocrats, though every aristocracy has had some means for new members of the aristocracy to be ‘made’). In an oligarchy rights are controlled by those of a certain level of economic power. In the case of party dictatorships, political rights are controlled by the party. It is interesting to note that the right to vote is the least important political right, based on the fact that merely going to the polls to punch a button, or whatever, for the ‘candidates’ is consistent even with the political system of the old Soviet Union, home of perhaps the most notorious party dictatorship ever (so far). Indeed, those unfortunate citizens were required by law to cast a vote. Otherwise, not voting would have been a de facto vote of ‘no confidence’. This in turn suggests that not voting in a democracy may be considered similarly. Though this is getting a tad ahead of ourselves, we can say at this point that a democracy is a political system in which political rights are justly distributed.
The issue of free speech, which is central to any theory of political democracy, creates a problem of logical consistency for any such theory if free speech is taken to be a ‘mere’ right. This is borne out by a very real problem which was solved in the colonies that would become the
The proper status of speech in the political process is given by the minimum condition of mutual respect in effecting choices. Since justice requires that all choices, including choices being effected for the community as a whole, be effected in the absence of coercion or manipulation or the preemption of the wills of others, that suggests that the political process must operate on the level of rational persuasion. Even so, if freedom of speech in that process, political speech, is a right, and rights can only be determined by rational persuasion, and rational persuasion necessarily rests upon freedom of speech, which is itself a right, that circularity of logic is with us yet.
All this suggests that freedom of political speech must be something more than a mere political right. If we revisit our spherical model of the political process in the context of mutual respect in effecting choices as it applies to the political process, for that process to be just the part of it that exists beyond the political system must be freedom of political speech. Actually, what is required is liberty of political speech. Freedom is the absence of ex ante restrictions though ex post restrictions are yet present. In other words, there is no rule limiting what can or can’t be said before opening one’s mouth, but if one were to say the wrong thing, certain penalties could apply. That’s freedom of speech.
Historically, in the original thirteen colonies, prior to their opting for independence and organizing their own political system, there did indeed exist a prolonged period of lively political speech. The colonists were well and fully engaged in a political process. During that time there was frequent, widespread, and vigorous debate about the issue of justice and how to achieve it and maintain it through government, including all issues pertaining to Rights and their enumeration. That those colonists ended up taking freedom of speech to be one Right among others rather than recognizing its prior status with respect to rights hardly detracts from their accomplishments. Besides, at that time Rights-based ideas about justice, including God as the source of Rights, were still the best available to them.
I stated above that justice requires that the political process function on the basis of rational persuasion. That is too important a point to leave alone at that, however obvious it may be within the context of mutual respect in effecting choices. Rational persuasion becomes the necessary condition of justice in the political process. This implies that speech that’s meant to intimidate or manipulate is more than just ‘dirty politics’; it’s a serious offense against justice. Speech meant to intimidate is probably more readily thought of as being unjust, but manipulative speech is every bit as bad. Yet, I’ve made the point that the democratic process requires liberty of political speech, meaning there can be neither ex ante nor ex post restrictions on it. That means there can be no possibility of recriminations regardless of what one might say, even if coercive or manipulative. In this effort to illuminate political justice we can cast some light on that murky area by distinguishing between what can be called primary political speech and secondary political speech.
Primary political speech would be limited to the enunciation of proposed choices for the community to effect. In this all members of the community must be granted liberty, with no restrictions or limitations whatsoever and no threat of any reprisals of any kind no matter what choice might be proposed. One could propose absolutely any choice whatsoever.
Secondary political speech would be speech for or against one or another proposed choice. There must be no prior restrictions or limitations on what one might say in that respect, but it should be subject to criminal or civil penalties should it be found (in court) to be coercive or manipulative. Those protections should not only be available to individuals as such, but anyone who was a member of a group that had been the target of such statements. While many might decry the potential for litigation such rules would create, I maintain it would encourage those participating in the political process to clean up their acts. It would serve as a welcome antidote to the venom that, we have seen, the political process can create.
Taking this bifurcated view of political speech has another benefit for the community. It helps make sense of a whole range of issues that are referred to in the
The issue of political speech illustrates how mutual respect in effecting choices makes more sense than the idea of basing justice on rights (or Rights) ever did. In that case there were always at least two tiers of rights, even though such a hierarchy was never formally recognized, much less explained. The Declaration of Independence enumerated the (God-given) Rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (perhaps best interpreted in today’s parlance as ‘self-fulfillment’), and simply declared that these were among the Rights God had given man. In the Bill of Rights appended to our Constitution more rights are enumerated, and again it is explicitly noted (in the Ninth Amendment) that these do not exhaust the rights people have. Here, though, no mention is made of the source of any rights, much less any distinction regarding their source and the ‘God-given’ Rights of life, liberty, etc. The problems in theory and practice are obvious, but have never been formally addressed in the institutions of the
The effects of this muddle have been ignored or looked at blindly. It is often said that such behavior suggests practicality. Practicality itself isn’t a bad thing, but logical consistency in such matters is a good thing. Ignoring in practice gaping holes in theory in the long run means that practice has no justification. This will eventually erode respect for those practices, and when that happens there is nothing to point to in order to shore up that respect. There is a tendency in such circumstances to rely on appeals to ‘patriotism’, ‘common bonds’, common values’, and the like. Sound familiar?
The absence of logical consistency in the philosophical foundations of the institutions of society is too powerful a problem for sentiment to overcome, however. Indeed, engaging in ‘practical’ practices while ignoring logical inconsistency in the philosophical foundation that supposedly supports those practices actually encourages challenges to those practices to arise. In the
Now, one might suggest that coercion is necessarily a part of any political process, in that no member of any community is going to agree with every choice effected for it, yet every member of a community must abide by all of those effected choices (or face the consequences). In a political process which is consistent with mutual respect for the mutually independent wills of all people in effecting all choices, though, everyone has the freedom to participate in that process on the basis of rational persuasion. Therefore, if a choice is effected (according to just rules of procedure in the political system—see below) which is contrary to one’s will for the community as a whole, one’s will has been thwarted, but one has not had one’s will subordinated to the will of any other. It’s like any other contest decided in accordance with a set of just rules, as we saw in looking at Samuels’s idea of social power in the context of mutual respect in effecting choices. At the same time, (as will be seen) justice does require that all choices effected for the community as a whole apply to every member of the community. Since they apply to everyone, no one is at any relative advantage or disadvantage to anyone else as a result of those rules. (Another advantage of political democracy is that it is the most successful form of the political process at having those who make the laws be as subject to them as anyone else.)
Besides speech, the political system as a whole is the other part of the process in which choices are effected for the community as a whole, so let’s turn our attention to the issue of justice in it. We have seen that the political system exists within the political process, and that the necessary conditions for a just political process are liberty of primary political speech and freedom of secondary political speech. Like political speech, political rights are a source of social power, a resource to be used in effecting the personal choice of participating in the process of effecting choices for the community as a whole. Those rights, however, exist as institutions within the political system.
As the political system is the set of institutions via which choices are effected for the community as a whole, all members of the community will necessarily be effected by the choices effected for it ‘whether one likes it or not’. This is how and why participation in the political system becomes a right. It is not a Natural Right somehow existing prior to the establishment of civil society; rather, it arises in the context of the emergence of a formal community of human beings. The nature of the relationship between the members of a community and its (inevitable) political system creates a ‘default value’ for every member of the community to be in possession of all political rights: They are the necessary source of social power essential for participation in the political system of the community of which one is a member. One can be blind, or deaf, or mute, or penniless, yet still not be barred from participating in the political system (though these conditions would certainly affect that participation). To participate in it, though (as opposed to acting outside the system in hopes of influencing it), one must have the rights associated with participation in it.
We see that, actually, there is but one political right, the right to participate in the political system. That right of participation can take many forms, such as the right to vote, the right to run for political office, the right to peacefully assemble, the right to petition the government, etc. As it is habitual for us to think of the various forms that such participation may take as rights in themselves, they will be referred to as political rights herein, but it should be kept in mind that they emanate from that fundamental right of participation which is itself immanent within the requirements of mutual respect in effecting choices given the impossibility for members of the community to ‘opt out of’ the consequences of the choices effected for the community as a whole. (To say that anyone who so desired could move out of a given community would not resolve the problem of achieving political justice, which is a universal human problem.) If any members of the community are not allowed that participation on the basis of unjust restrictions, their wills are thereby preempted, and the system is unjust.
All of this means that to be justly distributed political rights must be distributed in accordance with a just principle. In the absence of a just distributive principle, political rights can only be distributed either according to the arbitrary whim of one or more people or according to an unjust principle. An example of the former is a dictatorship; examples of the latter are the Jim Crow laws of the American South and apartheid in
To be consistent with mutual respect in effecting choices any restrictions on political rights must be objective, universally applicable, and universally applied. We can restate this formally as the democratic political principle: Political rights must be equally available to all members of the community but for objective restrictions, universally applicable and universally applied. Universality needs no explication; to be objective requires that a restriction be independent of any belief, creed, ideology, etc. (That is the point of Chapter Four.) Political rights distributed/restricted in accordance with this principle can be said to be democratically distributed/restricted.
While the subject of objectivity is at the heart of the ontological/epistemological issues pertinent to mutual respect in effecting choices (Chapter Four), for present purposes I'll go ahead and say that the first test of (sufficient) objectivity is universality. If a restriction is not at least potentially applicable to everyone it cannot possibly be objective, and therefore cannot be just. As race, color, national origin, ethnicity, and gender all represent discriminators that could not be even potentially universal, none of them could possibly be just discriminators for restricting political rights. Age, on the other hand, most certainly is universal. Thus, one just restriction is age. Why use age to restrict political rights? A sufficient answer to that question is that age is a proxy for maturity. While maturity is a difficult concept to objectify, it is objective in the sense that it is something people can and do identify in others, and it is obvious to everyone that children lack the emotional and mental maturity, as well as the experience, to operate on the basis of rational persuasion, especially in matters relating to the community as a whole. Age can thus be used as a proxy for maturity, however imperfect the relation between the two may be, in justly restricting political rights.
Another objective restriction on political rights is that one be a reasonably good citizen, at least to the point of having not been convicted of a felony. A restriction on those who have obviously and significantly departed from the norms of 'reality testing' is also objective (though, like maturity, difficult to pin down). As any of us could potentially become a felon or lose our fingernail holds on reality, these are also universally applicable restrictions. A creed (which term is taken to comprehend both religious beliefs and secular ideologies) is potentially universal, in that an infinite number of people can share a creed, but no creed can possibly be objective. Any restriction on any form of the right to participate in the political system of a community which requires either the acceptance or the rejection of any creed, religious or secular, is unjust. While one's beliefs will certainly inform one's participation in the political process, the just structure and functioning of that process can never be determined in whole or in part by any belief. (Again, all this goes to what Chapter Four is all about.) The democratic principle must also be applied to determining the requirements for citizenship itself.
Applying mutual respect in effecting choices to the political process creates procedural justice, such that any outcome generated within that process would be ‘fair.’ A political process consistent with mutual respect in effecting choices is procedurally just, but also provides standards by which outcomes of the process can still be judged. So, the laws of the community, established in the democratic political process, can also be judged on the basis of the democratic principle: Any law which does not apply to all members of the community (and visitors) is necessarily unjust. Also, for a law pertaining to individuals to be just, the act being outlawed must violate the minimum condition of justice. That isn’t the case for laws pertaining to businesses, as those exist at the sufferance of the community in the first place. Still, a law pertaining to business must apply to all businesses.
So, the political process can be defined as the process of effecting choices for the community as a whole. This implies that every member of the community will be affected by the choices effected for it, which generates as a necessary condition of justice for the political process that all members of the community be free to participate in that process. (The sufficient condition of justice remains, everywhere, always, and in all areas of life, mutual respect for the mutually independent wills of all people in effecting all choices.) That participation must be utterly unrestricted with regard to primary political speech, i.e. proposing choices for the community to effect, whereas secondary political speech, i.e. expressing views for or against one proposed choice or another, should be subject to penalties for coercion or manipulation. This allows the political process to proceed on the basis of rational persuasion. Political rights, as the source of social power necessary for participation in the political system, must be made equally available to all members of the community but for objective restrictions, universally applicable and universally applied. This, the democratic political principle, becomes the necessary condition of justice within the political system. The democratic principle must also be applied to establishing the requirements of citizenship itself. These requirements, these minimum conditions of justice for the political process and the political system, serve to create procedural justice throughout the political process while mutual respect in effecting choices serves as an absolute standard by which outcomes of the process can be judged. The way is now clear to consider how the blessings of mutual respect for the mutually independent wills of all people in effecting all choices can be secured for the other foundational social process, the economy.
The economy, to repeat, is a foundational process because it is ubiquitous with respect to communities of human beings and because within each community it is ubiquitous with respect to the members of it. Every community will have an economy, and every member of every community has no choice but to participate in the economy, whether one likes it or not.
I don't think there is a strict parallel between the relationship of an economic system to the economy and the relationship of a political system to the political process. In the latter case the one evolves out of the other, and there is a clear necessity to have political speech transcending the political system. Any discussion related to organizing the economy is itself part of the political process, as a decision the community would effect for the community as a whole. Still, it would seem that freedom in choosing how—and to what extent—one would participate in the economic system would be a necessary condition to having it be a just system. A just distribution of money would be the other necessary condition of justice in an economic system.
Money is to the economic system as political rights are to the political system. No one can participate in the economy without money, the same as no one can participate in the political system without political rights. Money must therefore be subject to justice in the same way and for the same reasons that political rights are. At the same time, by the way, how the members of a community choose to organize the economy is a legitimate item within the political process.
Certainly, there are stark differences between money and political rights. The latter are even more abstract than our money now is; they are wholly immaterial. What's more, that immateriality makes rights cost-free. That's one good reason why one needn't do anything, materially, to be granted a right. The immateriality of rights means that, theoretically, a right can be exercised or not and it will be the same at any time in the future as it is in the present, with the exact same 'worth' (though in actuality an increasing population dilutes the power of each individual vote, besides the possibility that if enough people fail to exercise their political rights for long enough the possibility of an undemocratic regime coming to power via formally democratic, or at least quasi-constitutional means—as happened in Germany with the Nazis—increases). Moreover, we take possession of rights in whole, once and for all: Though there can be (legitimate) restrictions as to the ages at which we can exercise various rights, they aren't accumulated incrementally over time in the way that, say, money is, in the form of incomes. Basically, as far as the things in our control, we don't have to do anything for our rights except refrain from behavior so bad as to render us unfit to possess them (e.g., commit a felony). Finally, the immateriality of political rights also means that they are a non-zero-sum entity: Any number of people can possess them without reducing the available supply of them for the present or the future. None of these characteristics of rights applies to money. There is one of them, however, that should: to be justly distributed, it must be a zero-sum entity. There are two ways of looking at the zero-sum problem. One is that whenever there is a fixed amount of something divided among people, for it to be redistributed so that one or more people could get more than they have at present would require that one or more others relinquish a portion of their amount of it. Another way to consider the zero-sum problem is to use the average amount as the baseline, and to consider that for anyone to have more than the average requires that one or more others have less than the average. In undemocratic capitalism both of these forms of the zero-sum problem come into play. The latter is the pattern of the distribution of money in the form of incomes within it, and the former is the obstacle raised politically by those who don't want a redistribution of money.
The question arises as to why changing the distribution of incomes is considered to be an injustice while the present distribution of incomes is not. The answer—the only answer I've ascertained, anyway—is that it would mean taking what some have earned and giving it to others. That answer has more than one weakness.
One weakness in proclaiming distributing incomes differently to be an injustice has to do with the word "earned." There is a more philosophical problem contained in it that I'll at least look at in Chapter Five; here I'll keep it on a more concrete level. To earn something means to have rendered the appropriate amount of effort required to take possession of it. Yet the amount of work required of one to get to any particular place in life depends on one's starting point. If you start halfway up a mountain and I start at the bottom, and we both begin climbing, and you get to the top before I do, thereby 'earning' a reward, though I climbed at least as hard and as fast and as far as you did, have you "earned" that reward more than I have? This is the problem of equality of opportunity, which is all but impossible to define, much less to realize in any community. It also brings to mind Rev. Jesse Jackson's immortal characterization, specifically, if memory serves, referring to Dan Quayle, but certainly intended for all those who begin life near the top of the social heap then preen themselves for having gotten a step or two closer to it in their lives, that he "was born on third base and he thinks he hit a triple."
Another weakness in the notion that distributing incomes differently is necessarily unjust is that a different distribution isn't necessarily a redistribution. Taking from one and giving to another is a redistribution. That is not the same thing as changing the distribution for everyone simultaneously. In the latter case, nothing can be said to be taken from anyone, because it is changing future earnings, to which no one can lay claim. One simply cannot be that certain of what the future might hold. No matter what has come before, or what is the state of things at present in one's life, one cannot legitimately lay claim to even one penny based one one's expectations of the future, even unto the very next instant of time. Of course, if incomes are justly distributed in undemocratic capitalism, there is no need for any kind of different distribution of them.
Some people do labor greatly to justify the distribution of incomes in our economy. One such justification is that it is the net result of the dynamics of the labor market. This cannot suffice to define such outcomes as being just, however. The results of free markets are neither more nor less than the net sum of a whole bunch of choices effected by individuals. On a theoretical level this argument runs parallel to the argument that liberty is definitive of justice. On the face of it, people running around doing whatever they will cannot define justice in personal interactions, and a distribution of incomes resulting from random interactions among individuals—in unequal positions, at that—cannot define a just distribution of incomes. The only thing that can define a just distribution of incomes—exactly as was required to define a just distribution of political rights—is that incomes be distributed according to a just principle.
Here again, some people want to argue that in our present economy incomes are distributed according to a just principle, and point to the idea that people are paid according to their marginal contribution to the revenue of a firm. On a practicable level, there is no way any business anywhere has ever calculated the marginal contribution of each position within it to its total revenue. Even if all of them did that, there are always going to be differences in performance that are not reflected in the remuneration of the various people filling the same position; there are any number of people filling the same positions in various firms who earn the same amount of pay, yet whose performances, and therefore their contributions to revenue, vary greatly. There may be future rewards for better performance, in the form of awards, bonuses, promotions, etc.—but then again, as we all know, there may not be.
Besides, on a theoretical level, for such a distribution to be just the competition for every single position would have to be perfectly just, and there is no way that ever has been, or ever could be, achieved in an economy of human beings, even if each and person involved in the process were resolutely well-intentioned. That's why justice requires that incomes must be divorced from particular positions in the economy. As long as human beings are involved in deciding the competitions for positions that carry with them different incomes, those decisions will be influenced by factors that have no legitimate connection to the process, factors such as race, creed, color, ethnicity, gender, how good-looking the applicants are perceived to be, etc. No one can completely rid of all of such prejudices.
The distribution of incomes in undemocratic capitalism is unjust simply because the distribution in each firm is determined by individuals who are in a position to further their own interests at the expense of others. In each and every business there is at least one person in a position to determine the remuneration of all other employees within it. Those people know full well that all such remunerations, including their own, must come out of the firm's revenue. The less that is paid others, the more there will be for themselves, whether their own remuneration is in the form of regular income, bonuses, or simply 'left-over' profits (in the case of proprietorships). This is an unjust state of affairs. It doesn't involve coercion or manipulation, but it does involve preemption: Everyone employed in the business contributes to the total earnings of the firm, but the wills of all but one or a few of them are arbitrarily ignored in the process of determining how the pool of revenue available for remuneration will be 'divvied up.' That makes that process unjust as surely as arbitrarily barring members of the community from the political process makes that unjust.
Many readers may be starting to think that this argument is headed in the direction of making equality in incomes definitive of justice. That is not the case. No difference in incomes, no matter how great, is in itself an injustice. Rather, in considering the justice of the foundational social processes, such as the economy, what matters are the processes themselves and the institutional arrangements of the social systems embedded in those processes. Still, a greatly skewed distribution of incomes is symptomatic of the injustice in undemocratic capitalism. Would anyone, given a truly free choice in the matter, choose to have less than the average income so that others could have more than the average income? In undemocratic capitalism that is the question that must be answered. In democratic capitalism that question does not arise, because no matter how many people may earn more than the democratically distributed income, or how much more than the average any particular person may earn, the incomes of those earning that income cannot be decreased.
As in the case of political rights, what we are talking about here are restrictions on the distribution of money. One issue that arises out of the nature of the economy is that only income from labor can be made subject to a distributive principle. Other forms of income, such as interest and profit from sales of property, could be made subject to various restrictions by law, but aren't to be made subject to a distributive principle. In the case of interest payments, those don't arise out of relationships among people in the sense that incomes do. (Recall that charging interest is barred from the demand economy for reasons related to keeping inflation out of the economy, but not because barring them from the economy has anything to do with justice.) In the case of sales of property the sale is a result of direct negotiations between the parties to the sale. As long as both parties negotiate in good faith, they are abiding by the conditions of justice. Income shared by partners is also negotiated. Therefore, only income paid to employees is subject to the just distributive principle in achieving a just economy.
The principle is exactly the same one as applies to the just distribution of political rights, only here it's the democratic economic principle: An income must be equally available to all members of the community except for objective restrictions, universally applicable and universally applied. An income distributed in accordance with that principle can be termed a democratically distributed income.
I have been able to surmise two legitimate restrictions on the democratically distributed income: (1) one must be willing to make a productive contribution to the community in exchange for the income; (2) the other legitimate restriction would be, as in the case of political rights, age. The former restriction means that the only legitimate reason for earning the income yet not making a productive contribution is to be genuinely too incapacitated to fill any position in the economic matrix (for whatever period of time) The latter restriction refers to setting a legally mandated minimum age to have a job earning the democratically distributed income or to have reached the (legally mandated) age of retirement. To account for differences in longevity among member-nations and over time, the age of retirement could be set at, say, five-sixths of the average life expectancy in each nation (perhaps updated every ten years or whatever).
Ultimately, what is required is a global distribution of the democratically distributed income. It is still legitimate today to speak of the economy of any nation—or any geopolitical subunit of any nation—in terms of statistics like output, employment, income, etc. The same would still be true, for that matter, in a completely globalized demand economy. Yet the economy as a functional unit is truly global. It has been since