Part II — The life the design leaves alone

11. What Money Cannot Buy

Price may govern ordinary exchange above the floor. A person may keep, spend, invest and pass on lawfully held wealth. But wealth cannot decide who receives what the floor owes, and owning a service does not give its owner unlimited power over the people who depend on it.

When does lawful control over property become power over another person's rights? The housing cases separate an asset from the floor. Harrow'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. Imperfect title does not erase a dwelling claim. 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. This is 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 is not itself a claim to compensation. Nor are illegal title, unlawful privilege, a valid penalty or remediation liability compensable merely because they have economic value. Inheritance transfers neither public power nor political weight, immunity or guilt, and an heir's estate liability cannot exceed inherited value.

Patents and copyrights are time-bounded statutory incentives. They cannot block the floor or commons duties; the law must provide an effective compatible access route, including a compulsory access licence where justified. The licence is a separate public power, not an unrestricted 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. No enforceable contract may waive the floor, equality, labour rights, core privacy, commons duties, due process or effective remedy. 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. It does not acquire human standing, the floor, a ballot, candidacy or inherent political weight. Limited liability is conditional: fraud, evasion, asset stripping, abusive control, deliberate undercapitalisation and liability dumping can justify withdrawing it. Beneficial control cannot be concealed.

Enterprises may petition, testify and publish attributed views. Their treasuries cannot fund candidates or parties or purchase independent electoral advocacy. An association that fields candidates cannot avoid the rule by relabelling itself. The chapter on the vote explains the finding that brings that conduct within the prohibition.

Public, cooperative, commons, mutual, nonprofit, household and private provision are all lawful. None is guaranteed a market share, profit, rescue, immunity or monopoly. A permitted ownership form is not an exemption from these duties.

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. A small gatekeeper can control access that a large enterprise does not.

Harrow's entries test that distinction. An attestation naming essentiality is recognised as naming a permitted ground. An invented revenue threshold is not. A gatekeeping function class cannot be substituted for a ground. The categories stay separate even when the same witness writes each entry. None of this proves that essentiality or gatekeeping exists in the world; it establishes 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 checks reject the vocabulary pairing for a cross-regional function under regional authority. Supplied entries cannot rewrite these categories by asserting membership directly.

A complete finding identifies the actor, function, affected people, evidence, source, scope, review route and end. 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 cannot be used to impose a score on voluntary life.

When an economic power ends, and what does not

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

Each temporary economic power needs a source, trigger, scope, review and end appropriate to that power. It cannot borrow the custody clock. 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; the alternate's absence supplies neither approval nor an indefinite hold.

The focused counterfactuals remove current independent review from each power and test the affected conclusions. Expiry cases separately show restrictive authority ending while ordinary rights and public continuity duties remain. Enterprise failure cannot extinguish a remedy or authorise interruption of an essential service. A lapsed manager loses authority, not the institution's responsibility to secure continuity. Whether the manager actually stops and the successor actually provides the service requires evidence beyond those conclusions.

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, but not floor essentials or adequate housing. It cannot imprison a debtor or remove standing or remedy.

Taxation, appropriation, spending, guarantees and borrowing each require a legislative source, reporting, audit and disclosure of fiscal risk. One tier cannot borrow another's authority. Public debt cannot subordinate the floor to creditors, erase commons duties or waive constitutional limits. The constitution prescribes neither a balanced budget nor a numeric debt ceiling, and prohibits making either a constitutional requirement.

During budget deadlock, prior authority for essential provision continues without creating new spending power. That rule allocates legal responsibility; it does not establish that funds, staff or supplies exist.

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. Access cannot depend entirely on having a device. 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 chapter 9 also prevent reuse of a contribution record as a standing, worth, risk or political score.

Cash, vouchers and insurance approvals are instruments, not evidence that food, housing or care reached someone. Delivery still requires the receiving-side evidence described earlier.

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 named functions give it no general commerce, spending, taxation or pre-emption power.

Residual ownership, land, enterprise, service and local-development policy is regional or local. Regions may protect more strongly, but cannot lower common floors or minima, obstruct portability, impose waiting periods or property qualifications, or use fiscal competition to defeat equality. The division allows different provision without making a move across regions a loss of rights.

The child with nobody

Nell's record supplies no property, contract, enterprise, debt or account. It still produces the prohibitions on economic gates, payment instruments counted as delivery, presumed household provision and scoring voluntary life. The State owes Nell a dwelling. None of these claims waits for evidence of purchasing power, and the absent financial record proves nothing about Nell's actual possessions.

What none of this counts

A complete power record establishes formal authority, not its exercise. It proves no acquisition, tax payment or functioning market. A permitted ground for regulating private power does not prove the ground true. A prohibition does not establish that a court enforced it. The model values no property, measures no dominance and operates no payment system.

Those limits leave constitutional choices open to assessment: whether the powers are sufficiently bounded, whether the duties protect their intended recipients, and whether a remedy can answer the specified failure. Operational rates, budgets and institutions need further design; they cannot be supplied by calling a formal result complete.

The floor cannot depend on purchasing power, and wealth supplies no exemption from public duties. The next chapter asks how equal access works when the obstacle is something other than price.