The argument from circulation says the owners of automation cannot afford to impoverish everyone, because their wealth needs buyers. As the closed loop shows, that is true only while their wealth depends on selling to the public. A framework that rests on the powerful continuing to need people is resting on something that decays. So the design turns a temporary necessity into a permanent rule.
Do not trust that the powerful will need everyone. Write it down while they still do.
Nine rules that keep the loop open
1. Take the public share while the leverage exists. AI firms still depend on public inputs: grid connections, permits, public data, public research, spectrum, land. The public share, equity stakes and levies on automation rents, is the price of those inputs, secured now, before firms can supply themselves. The floor credit is tied to the share and rises with it, and it never falls back. Leverage that is not used before it fades is simply lost. Natural resources drawn down (water, minerals, soil) are public inputs too, and pay a share. So does the right to sell in a country (the global loop). How the share and the other charges pay for the floor, in the transition and the full state, is in where the money comes from.
2. Put a floor under demand that no one can withdraw. Floor credits reach every person every month, priced in real goods by the floor measure. They cannot be seized, made conditional, or sold. That makes purchasing power a standing fact rather than something the owners of production grant or withhold. Even a closed elite loop cannot switch it off.
3. Pay for what the market cannot price. Commission funds carry money into care, mentoring, stewardship, and local research: work that circulates value through people the market would otherwise leave out. Their size starts with a measured care floor, so it does not shrink when it is politically convenient.
4. Make accumulated wealth recirculate. Ownership returns follow where the money came from, and the lifetime allowance bounds what one person can receive without earning it. A great holding does not leave the circle for generations; at each passing, what exceeds the allowance returns.
5. Keep essential layers routable. Compute, energy, payment, identity, and communication are the layers everything depends on. The closed-field test and routability keep any one holder from becoming the place the loop drains into, and guard against infrastructural monoculture, where apparent plurality hides one shared dependency. Where one builder already holds such a layer, its duties are attached when its public inputs come up for renewal: see when a builder holds an essential layer.
6. Recognize property within limits. Ownership is not a physical fact; it is a claim others honor, backed by courts and law. That recognition is the public’s most durable lever, because it does not fade when owners bring their own power and security in-house. The framework honors ownership fully as a claim on returns and never as sovereignty over who participates. Recognition can carry conditions: the public share, routability, and the claims that run with the land.
7. Act early, and bound the enforcers. Concentration is prevented while it is still small, because the cure for a large concentration becomes one. Enforcement is spread across several independent bodies, each with limited powers that expire unless renewed.
8. Watch the loop. Circulation gets its own measures, published like the floor measure:
| Measure | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Share of revenue reaching people | whether spending still becomes income through the four channels |
| Concentration in essential layers | whether the loop is draining into a few holders |
| Scarce-asset prices against the floor | whether idle money is bidding up what cannot be made |
| Regional leakage | whether a region’s spending leaves and does not return |
| Idle holdings at the top | whether money is standing still |
| Leverage remaining | how much the public’s hold on essential inputs has decayed |
9. Keep standing real, not just paid. A population that is paid and kept out of every consequential decision is protected irrelevance, the most stable form of the dystopia. Circulation of money is not enough. Jurisdiction over one’s own life, a real voice in decisions that touch you, and a path into contribution have to circulate too.
Safeguards against capture from inside
The nine rules assume the people who write and enforce them stand on the public’s side. Capture from inside is what happens when they do not: concentrated wealth and sympathetic officials using the state together, rewriting, starving, or turning around each rule without breaking it. Six safeguards place the rules where no single coalition can reach them.
10. A floor beyond reach. Floor credits are unconditional, unseizable, and impossible to program. No government may limit what they buy, attach conditions, reduce them for anyone, or use them to watch people. The floor is protected at the constitutional level and paid by a body outside ordinary politics. A floor that can be switched off is not a floor; it is a leash.
11. Public inputs that cannot be given away. The grid, spectrum, public data, public research, and public land can be leased on terms that carry the public share, never sold or licensed permanently. Permanent alienation of a public input becomes a red line in the irreversibility register, because once given away the leverage does not return.
12. Measurers beyond capture. The bodies that measure the floor, the care gap, concentration, and circulation are several, with staggered terms, budgets protected from annual cuts, and published methods. No single government can appoint them all, starve them, or silence them. They are paid for doing the work well, never for agreeing; each cycle the counted set is drawn at random; and no controlling group, funder, or government may make up a majority of it (who measures).
13. Emergency powers that expire. Any suspension of these rules ends on a fixed date unless renewed by a public vote, and no emergency may touch the floor or the measurers.
14. A test for the loop itself. Monitoring for money and authority converting into each other in both directions: officials moving into the industries they oversaw, rules that spare only the largest firms, public contracts concentrating on one provider, measuring bodies losing independence. The signs are published like any other measure, so the pattern is visible before it is entrenched.
15. Public money creation under public rules. Who creates new money, and on what terms, is where economic and political capture meet. It cannot be left to a captured few. New money is issued by a published rule as sustainable output grows and enters through the floor and commission funds; bank credit is steered away from buying existing scarce goods (who creates money). How the rest of finance works under the same rules, from buyouts to banks to trading apps, is in what finance is for.
When each rule has to start
| Rule | Must start | Why then |
|---|---|---|
| Public share | now | the leverage is fading |
| Floor credits | now, partial | a ratchet must begin before the need is acute |
| Commission funds | now, care first | care is already happening unpaid |
| Routable layers and closed field | now | concentration is still small enough to limit |
| Measures of circulation | now | the loop must be watched before it breaks |
| Inheritance allowance | dated now, phased | families need time to plan |
| Property within limits | as each rule takes hold | recognition is the lever that lasts |
| Credit limits on buying existing scarce goods | now | regulators already hold the tools |
| Public issue by rule | last | the measuring bodies need a record first |
Most of the list starts now. That is the point. Every year of delay shortens the leverage that makes the rest possible. Who can start each rule, and how, including safeguards 10 to 15, is worked out in starting now.
What remains open
The four questions this page once left open are answered in who creates money and the global loop. What remains is calibration: the size of the public share, the emergence share, and the thresholds, each set under how the guarantees change.