Part II — The life the design leaves alone

10. What Money Cannot Buy

Price may govern ordinary exchange above the floor. A person may keep, spend, invest and pass on lawfully held wealth. The floor is owed to every person on the same terms, whatever they own, and owning a service gives its owner only limited power over the people who depend on it.

The record refuses an entry saying that Adam is rich, and it holds nothing about Adam's property. Every prohibition in this chapter still follows for Adam from personhood alone, beginning with the bar on price or ability to pay deciding access to the floor. The same bar follows for the child with nobody, whose record is one birth entry, and her shelter is a debt the State owes rather than something a household is presumed to provide.

When does lawful control over property become power over another person's rights? The housing cases separate an asset from the floor. One witness's entries then test the grounds for public duties on a private function. Public intervention, including taxation and the payment system, needs limits too.

Owning without owning the floor

The housing cases begin with two different claims. The floor guarantees adequate secure housing, not ownership or perpetual possession of one building. Rental, cooperative, customary, public, household and private tenure are all lawful, and a dwelling claim survives imperfect title. Eviction or foreclosure that threatens the floor requires legality, notice, a hearing, proportionality, review and a real public continuity route. A high-value asset can be reached while adequate housing and due process remain protected; the cases keep those claims separate.

Alongside that floor, possession, use, transfer and inheritance are protected conditional liberties. Personal possessions, ordinary home use and lawful productive activity receive security against arbitrary deprivation, though not a right to any particular asset.

Compulsory acquisition requires its own public authority: law, a compatible purpose, necessity, public reasons, a hearing, review and compensation calibrated to reliance, actual use and hardship. A publicly created windfall, illegal title, unlawful privilege, a valid penalty and a remediation liability may all have economic value; that value alone earns no compensation. Inheritance passes property and leaves public power, political weight, immunity and guilt behind, and an heir's liability for the estate's debts is capped at the value inherited.

Patents and copyrights are time-bounded statutory incentives, and they yield to the floor and to commons duties: the law must provide an effective compatible access route, including a compulsory access licence where justified. That licence is a separate public power with limits of its own, rather than an open permission to take knowledge.

A promise is not a trap

Control also comes through agreements. Their enforceability depends on more than a signature, just as a property claim depends on more than an asset's value.

People may contract or refuse. Deception, coercion, unconscionable dependency, material non-disclosure or the absence of meaningful exit can defeat the claim that a signature records consent. A contract term that waives the floor, equality, labour rights, core privacy, commons duties, due process or effective remedy is unenforceable. Public-facing services must provide accessible terms, safety, correction, appropriate cancellation and collective redress. Essential service also requires continuity.

An enterprise has functional capacities to own, contract, associate and litigate. Those capacities are the whole of its status: human standing, the floor, a ballot, candidacy and inherent political weight belong to people. Limited liability is conditional: fraud, evasion, asset stripping, abusive control, deliberate undercapitalisation and liability dumping can justify withdrawing it. Beneficial control must be disclosed.

Enterprises may petition, testify and publish attributed views. Their treasuries are barred from funding candidates or parties and from buying independent electoral advocacy. An enterprise stays bound by that bar when it calls itself a civic association or anything else; How Public Power Is Built (Chapter 17) describes the finding that brings such conduct within the prohibition.

Public, cooperative, commons, mutual, nonprofit, household and private provision are all lawful, each without a guaranteed market share, profit, rescue, immunity or monopoly, and each bound by these duties whatever its form of ownership.

When a private power owes public duties

The finding must name why the function carries public duties. The permitted grounds are essentiality, dominance, gatekeeping, dependency, lock-in, network effects, information asymmetry or the absence of meaningful exit. Size and profit alone are not grounds, since a small gatekeeper can control access that a large enterprise leaves open.

One witness's entries test the list. An attestation naming essentiality names a permitted ground; one naming an invented revenue threshold names nothing on the list. A gatekeeping function class belongs to the list of functions, and entered where a ground is required it counts for nothing. The categories stay separate even when the same witness writes each entry. The rules measure nothing themselves: whether a function is dominant, essential or a gate is for the evidence to show, and the test settles which claims the finding can use.

The finding must also concern a public-facing, delegated, essential, gatekeeping or system-steering function. Its tier must match its reach: a function confined to one region belongs to the regional route, while a function crossing regions belongs to the common route. The rules reject the pairing of a cross-regional function with regional authority, and the record refuses any entry that asserts membership of these lists directly.

A complete finding identifies the actor, function, affected people, evidence, source, scope, review route and end, and a reviewer independent of its source must confirm it. An access mandate, public option, structural separation, breakup, receivership, licence withdrawal or public acquisition then needs a separate power tied to that finding. Each must protect workers, users and floor recipients and preserve essential-service continuity.

Intimate dependency alone does not turn a household, friendship or relationship into a public service. Coercion, captivity, violence and obstructed exit there belong to the justice and protection routes. The private-power finding is barred from imposing a score on voluntary life.

When an economic power ends, and what does not

A properly made private-power finding can support an intervention, but it does not make the manager permanent. The expiry cases separate the manager's authority, which ends, from the continuity owed to people using the service, which remains.

Each temporary economic power needs a source, trigger, scope, review and end of its own, and borrows nothing from the custody authorisation's review period. Missing current authority withholds the restrictive or managerial conclusion rather than extending it. Review silence is not approval. A declared alternate must take up review when the ordinary reviewer is certified unavailable; an absent alternate likewise leaves the power unapproved and holds nothing open.

Focused tests remove current independent review from each power in turn and examine the affected conclusions. Expiry cases separately show restrictive authority ending while ordinary rights and public continuity duties remain. A remedy survives the enterprise's failure, and the failure gives nobody authority to interrupt an essential service. A lapsed manager loses its authority; the institution keeps its responsibility to secure continuity.

Public money

The public body has to justify its powers too. A duty to finance the floor does not give every office authority to tax, borrow or spend.

The tax system as a whole must reflect capacity to contribute. Democratic law chooses rates, bases, exemptions and their mixture. Collection may reach income and assets above the floor; floor essentials, adequate housing, the debtor's liberty, standing and remedy lie beyond its reach.

Taxation, appropriation, spending, guarantees and borrowing each require a legislative source, reporting, audit and disclosure of fiscal risk. Each tier acts on its own authority. Public debt leaves the floor ahead of creditors and leaves commons duties and constitutional limits intact. Whether a budget balances, and how much the public body may owe, are for legislation to decide under those conditions; the current text itself bars writing a balanced-budget rule or a numeric debt ceiling into the constitution, a bar that lies outside the protected core and that an amendment could change.

During budget deadlock, prior authority for essential provision continues without creating new spending power. That rule allocates legal responsibility and supplies no funds.

Money you can hold in your hand

The common tier maintains a public unit of account and an accessible settlement system with a nondigital route, so that a person without a device keeps access. The unit of account, settlement system and regulation of complementary payment instruments each require their own authority.

A monetary authority may act independently within a democratically enacted mandate. It must publish reasons and undergo distributional review and audit; its officers may be removed only for cause. It has no veto over lawful fiscal policy.

There is no general entitlement to credit. Credit and insurance decisions must use lawful criteria, give reasons, respect equality, allow correction of the data relied on and provide a challenge route. Private insurance cannot gate a floor service. The purpose limits described in Work, Pay and Contribution (Chapter 9) also prevent reuse of a contribution record as a standing, worth, risk or political score.

Cash, vouchers and insurance approvals are instruments. Showing that food, housing or care reached someone still requires the receiving-side evidence described in Whether It Arrived (Chapter 4).

Which tier decides

The common tier owns the unit of account and settlement system, floor finance and equalisation, portability, interregional commerce and competition, insolvency baselines, cross-regional private power, and common labour and consumer minima. These functions are enumerated, and a general commerce, spending, taxation or pre-emption power lies outside them.

Residual ownership, land, enterprise, service and local-development policy is regional or local. Regions may protect more strongly, while common floors and minima bind them from below; they must keep rights portable, extend their protections without waiting periods or property requirements, and keep fiscal competition from defeating equality. The division allows provision to differ between regions while a person who moves keeps every right.

What this cannot settle

Valuing property and operating payments are tasks the rules leave to others. Whether funds, staff and supplies exist, a manager stops, a tax is paid or a service continues belongs to the second book.

The floor follows from personhood rather than purchasing power, and public duties bind wealth as they bind everyone. The next chapter asks how equal access works when the obstacle is something other than price.

Run it: the companion runs this chapter's cases on your own device, at dhilipsiva.dev/rights-nobody-has-to-earn/cases.

Argument: Ownership under the floor, borrowing under law

The companion states these rules as Article 9.

I keep property, contract, enterprise and public finance conditional on the floor and the other protections because each is a route by which one person's lawful choices come to govern another's life. A landlord's asset is someone's home, a contract signed in dependency binds the weaker party, and a service many people cannot avoid decides what they can reach. If ownership could buy its way past the floor, the floor would become a price. Public debt yields to the floor for the same reason, and I leave the level of borrowing to legislation under reporting, audit and disclosed risk, because a fixed limit and an unconditional floor can collide when revenue falls.

For private power I follow K. Sabeel Rahman, who argues that firms controlling infrastructural goods and services that many others depend on are a form of private power to be regulated through a revived public-utility framework of firewalling, public obligations and public options.^[1] The chapter's remedies take that shape. I tie them to one function and to an independently reviewed finding, because an enterprise may be a gate in one market and one seller among many in the next.

The strongest alternative is designation by size. The European Union's Digital Markets Act designates as gatekeepers undertakings with a significant impact on the internal market, a core platform service that is an important gateway for businesses to reach end users, and an entrenched and durable position, presumed from turnover or market capitalisation and user numbers unless rebutted, and imposes obligations in advance without a finding of dominance.^[2] Its recital gives the reason: existing law did not effectively address gatekeepers "not necessarily dominant in competition-law terms". A threshold is quick and predictable. My finding is slower, and the person who depends on a gate bears the wait. A threshold's cost falls on firms whose size reflects no control over access and on the users of a small gate below it, though the Act can also designate on qualitative grounds such as lock-in and network effects.

On public money the strongest alternative is a constitutional limit on borrowing. Germany's Basic Law, as amended in 2009, requires budgets to balance in principle without borrowing, lets the Federation borrow up to 0.35 per cent of GDP in structural terms, and allows the limits to be exceeded in natural disasters or unusual emergencies by a Bundestag majority with an amortisation plan.^[3] Its case is protection for later taxpayers, and it binds: in 2023 the Federal Constitutional Court struck down a supplementary budget that moved 60 billion euros of unused pandemic emergency borrowing authority into a climate fund for later years.^[4] A limit binds whatever the reason for the borrowing, and when revenue falls its cost lands on whoever depends on the spending it forces out. My choice costs later taxpayers, who pay for debt an earlier majority chose, and the services above the floor, which compete with debt service.

I would reconsider requiring a finding if people who depend on a gate repeatedly waited longer than the harm lasted, while thresholds reached the same gates with few mistaken designations. I would reconsider leaving debt to legislation if disclosed and audited borrowing repeatedly let debt service crowd out commons duties or the services above the floor.