Should capitalism be a choice?
My two kids were on the rug yesterday afternoon, each defending a small world. One had legos. One had magna tiles. They spent about ten minutes trying to recruit each other. The lego kid wanted a partner for a castle. The magna-tile kid wanted help on a bridge. Neither of them could close the deal. Then they went back to building separately, and twenty minutes later they were quietly fitting magna-tile walls onto a lego floor without a single negotiation.
What my kids had on the rug, and what I do not, is the right to not compete. Either of them could walk away from the other’s game and still be fed, housed, and safe. Neither had to agree to terms to keep going. Growing up in America is the process of losing that option. You can choose your job. You cannot choose whether to be inside the cash economy at all. There is no other room.
This is not a fact of nature. Capitalism in America did not win the argument against the alternatives fairly. It was installed, and the alternatives were closed one at a time. The closures are reversible. We already protect natural wonders the market would otherwise eat. We can do the same for economic ones.
Capitalism wasn’t won, it was installed
The story Americans usually tell themselves about capitalism is that it competed with other systems and proved itself. The historical record is closer to the opposite. The market did not appear in a vacuum. It appeared on top of land, labor, water, and seeds that had to be removed from other systems first.
England fenced off the commons
In England, between 1604 and 1914, more than 5,200 enclosure bills passed Parliament. They fenced off roughly 6.8 million acres of common land, about a fifth of the country, and turned them into private property. The earlier informal enclosures, going back to about 1450, were carried out, in the words of one history, through “private agreements, questionable evictions, and occasionally outright intimidation”. One detail from an 1869 enclosure bill stuck with me: of 6,916 acres scheduled for enclosure that year, three acres were set aside for recreation and six for allotments for the displaced. That is roughly the ratio at which the project cared about the people it was dispossessing.
Karl Marx, looking back at this in Capital, called primitive accumulation a process “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire”. His point was simple and uncomfortable: wage labor is not natural. People had to be stripped of any other way of staying alive before they would line up to sell themselves by the hour.
America ran the same playbook
The American version of this story is the Homestead Act of 1862. Between 1862 and 1934 the federal government granted 1.6 million homesteads covering 270 million acres, about 10% of the entire United States. That land was, almost without exception, the traditional or treaty land of Native nations. Most of the acreage did not end up with small farmers either; it went to speculators, cattle barons, and railroads. The Dawes Act of 1887 then broke up the reservations themselves into individually owned allotments, extending private-property logic onto communal Indigenous land. The “free land” of American myth was a wealth transfer with a body count.
The other half of the American enclosure is chattel slavery, which built the cash economy by converting Black labor itself into property and then, after Emancipation, converting Black freedmen into landless wage workers, and then, through the Black Codes and convict leasing, back into forced laborers. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime.” Southern states took the hint: they criminalized unemployment, loitering, and breaking curfew for Black people specifically, then leased the convicts to mines and railroads. In 1898, 73 percent of Alabama’s state revenue came from convict leasing. The exception clause is still in the Constitution. Black landownership in the United States peaked at around 16 million acres in 1910 and has fallen to roughly 1 million acres today. The same enclosure machinery that took the commons from English peasants and the land from Native nations also stripped most of the property that newly free Americans had managed to acquire in two generations.
The same era outlawed the gift economies that were running openly. In 1884 Canada banned the potlatch, the Pacific Northwest ceremony in which Kwakwaka’wakw, Haida, and Tlingit nations redistributed wealth by giving it away. The United States enforced the same prohibition under its 1883 Religious Crimes Code. An economy that could not be taxed had to be made illegal.
What Polanyi saw
The cleanest statement of what was actually happening came almost two centuries later, from an economic historian named Karl Polanyi. In The Great Transformation (1944), Polanyi argued that the self-regulating market is not natural; it is an artifact of deliberate, sustained policy. His one-line version is the cleanest demolition of the “spontaneous market” fairy tale I know:
Laissez-faire was planned; planning was not.
From many modes to one
In America, the same pattern repeats every few decades. In 1790, almost everyone in the United States lived on a farm; today almost no one does. Self-employment fell from 18.5% in 1948 to 7.5% in 2003. The number of US farms peaked at 6.8 million in 1935 and stands at 1.88 million in 2024. The top 1% of US households now hold about 32% of total wealth and the top 0.1% hold roughly 14%, against ~22% and ~10% in France.
Each of those numbers describes a door closing somewhere. The point isn’t that capitalism is wicked. The point is that it didn’t outcompete the alternatives. The alternatives were enclosed, taxed, regulated, or out-priced until what remained was the cash economy and the wage relation. By the time most Americans got around to asking whether they wanted wage labor, there was no farm to walk back to.
Water is the cleanest test
If you want to know whether your country still treats survival as a right or as a purchase, look at water. You can’t live without it, and for most of human history you could walk to a river or creek and drink. In the United States, almost every direct route from a thirsty person to a drink of water has been closed, priced, or permitted in the last hundred and fifty years.
Water used to be a commons
For most of American history, water was something you walked to. Towns named themselves after their wells and springs. New York City didn’t get a piped municipal supply until the Croton Aqueduct opened in 1842. Before that, residents drew from hand-dug wells, springs, cisterns, rain barrels, and water carriers, all of it free or near-free, all of it accessed by labor rather than by money.
The West privatized first
In the arid West, this changed quickly and decisively. The prior appropriation doctrine grew out of California Gold Rush mining claims and applied a single rule: first in time, first in right. Water rights were severed from land ownership, so you could sell your water without selling your farm. Subsequent users got whatever the senior rights-holders left. Within twenty years most arid Western states had adopted some version of it. A homesteader who claimed water from the Colorado River in 1880 still has priority in 2026 over every household, farm, and city that came later.
In 1922, seven states signed the Colorado River Compact, dividing the river between an Upper and Lower Basin and effectively turning a continent’s most important watershed into a property allocation. Two facts about the compact still shape the West today. First, the river was overallocated from day one; the baseline used to estimate “average” flow turned out to be one of the wettest stretches on record. Second, the tribes whose lands the river crossed were not given seats at the table. The Supreme Court would reaffirm that exclusion a century later.
Rain is someone else’s property
Today, in much of the country, you cannot legally collect rain off your own roof. Colorado made limited rainwater harvesting legal only in 2016. Households there are capped at two barrels totaling 110 gallons, must use the water on the same property, and may not use it for drinking. Utah requires registration for anything beyond two 100-gallon containers. Nevada only legalized non-potable rainwater capture in 2017. The legal logic is internally consistent, in a grim way: rain is part of the prior-appropriation system, so catching it before it reaches a stream is theoretically diverting water that belongs to a senior rights-holder downstream. The sky is someone’s commodity.
The “just dig a well” alternative is what it has always been in theory and almost nothing in practice. A residential well now costs $3,000 to $15,000 to drill, plus permits and water-quality testing. In Texas, groundwater is governed by the rule of capture, which means whoever has the deepest well and biggest pump wins, and a corporate operator can drain a neighbor’s well dry and owe nothing.
Poisoned, metered, shut off
The municipal water that replaced it has its own arc. Combined US household water and sewer bills have risen roughly 43% over the last decade, faster than every other utility. The Environmental Protection Agency’s December 2024 Water Affordability Needs Assessment found that between 12.1 and 19.2 million US households now lack affordable access to water and sewer service. From 2014 to 2019, Detroit shut off water to more than 141,000 households for nonpayment, the largest residential water shutoff campaign in US history. A 2023 PMC study documented “invisible water insecurity” in Detroit, including households hiding shutoffs to avoid having Child Protective Services called on them.
Nestlé, Flint, and the Navajo Nation
Across town, in Osceola County, Nestlé pumps up to 576,000 gallons a day of Michigan groundwater for its Ice Mountain brand, paying the state $200 a year in paperwork fees, roughly 210 million gallons annually for the price of a used bicycle. When the state held a public-comment period on the expansion, around 81,000 people opposed the permit and 75 supported it. Michigan approved it.
A two-hour drive away, Flint residents were poisoned by lead in their tap water starting in 2014, continued to be billed for the water they were afraid to drink, and faced shutoffs for unpaid bills after the state ended its reimbursement program in 2017. The same state that charged a multinational $200 a year to take pristine groundwater charged its own poisoned residents premium retail rates for the contaminated tap.
What replaced free water at the kitchen sink is bottled water, a roughly $47 billion annual US market. And about 2.2 million Americans live in homes with no running water at all, a population concentrated heavily on Native reservations. In June 2023 the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in Arizona v. Navajo Nation that while the 1868 Treaty of Bosque Redondo “reserved necessary water” for the Navajo, the federal government has no affirmative obligation to actually deliver it. Roughly 30 to 40% of Navajo homes still have no running water.
A child born in 1850 in Ohio could drink from a creek. A child born in 2026 in Flint cannot drink from the tap her parents are billed for, cannot legally collect rain in many states without a permit, cannot afford to drill a well, and lives in a country whose Supreme Court has ruled that even treaty water comes with no obligation to deliver it. Every door out of the cash economy is closed on this one substance. That is the test I want to apply to everything else: can you still get to the thing without a paycheck?
Land, food, and the closed loop
Try to feed yourself off the land in modern America without buying anything, and you discover that almost every traditional method of doing so has been individually fenced.
Walking, gathering, fishing, hunting
Walking comes first. In Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Scotland, Switzerland, Austria, and a handful of other countries, you have a constitutional right to roam across uncultivated land. Sweden’s allemansrätten has been part of the constitution since 1994. Norway codified the Outdoor Recreation Act in 1957. Scotland passed its Land Reform Act in 2003. Americans had something similar, informally, until about the Civil War. The Trust for Public Land puts it well: “Americans had been hunting and fishing and traversing each other’s lands since colonial times. People thought of land that was unimproved and unenclosed with a flexibility and nonchalance that many of us today would find unimaginable.” That informal commons was killed by post-Civil-War game laws, fence laws, and the privatization of grazing. The “no trespassing” regime is roughly contemporaneous with Jim Crow.
I tried this. About twelve years ago I packed a pound of nuts and a bottle of water and walked from San Francisco toward Yosemite. Ferry to Alameda, south through the Altamont Pass toward Tracy, then east. Past the ferry landing, the infrastructure for foot travel mostly disappeared. Almost no public land to stop on, almost no public water, and road shoulders built for cars to pass, not for a person to walk. Every mile assumed I would be driving and sleeping in a paid room. By Manteca, the central valley was 110 to 120 degrees and the next stop was twenty miles of open road with no water source. A five-day walk ended as a two-hour drive home. The paths that would have connected a walker from one valley to the next had been abandoned once the car made them unnecessary, and the land on either side went private.
Gathering food is the next thing you cannot do. About a quarter of US national parks ban all foraging, and most of the rest impose strict quantity limits. Arkansas and California prohibit nearly all foraging on state-owned lands. Typical fines run $500 to $2,100. In Sweden, picking blueberries on land you do not own is a constitutional right. In California, picking blueberries on land the public owns can get you a ticket.
Fishing for food is next. The average resident fishing license now runs about $25 a year, with non-resident licenses around $62, plus stamps and special permits stacked on top. Subsistence fishing as a recognized legal category in the US exists almost exclusively in rural Alaska. In the lower 48 it is not a defense. Fish you catch to feed your family are governed by recreational rules and bag limits. The 1855 treaties guaranteeing Pacific Northwest tribes “the right of taking fish at all usual and accustomed places” became the basis of the 1960s and 1970s “Fish Wars,” in which Indigenous fishermen were arrested, beaten, and had their boats seized for fishing on rivers their treaties guaranteed.
Hunting is the same shape. The Lacey Act of 1900 made it a federal crime to transport game across state lines that had been taken in violation of state law, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service credits it with eradicating market hunting in the United States. That is the part conservationists celebrate. The other half of the same sentence is that “market hunting” means selling wild meat, and after 1900 a poor hunter can no longer convert wild protein into rent. Today, a non-resident bull elk tag runs about $665 in Arizona, $712 in Wyoming, and $1,112 in Montana, and seven of ten western states are lottery-only. The big game on public land is allocated by raffle.
Farmland and seed patents
Then there is farming. Farmland was around $20 an acre in 1900 and $4,350 an acre in 2025, with about 40% real growth in the last decade. Four firms, Bayer-Monsanto, Corteva, Syngenta, and BASF, control roughly 60% of the global commercial seed market and 75% of plant-breeding research. In the 1980s the top ten seed companies controlled less than 15% of the market. In 2013, the Supreme Court held unanimously in Bowman v. Monsanto that saving and replanting patented soybean seeds is patent infringement, even when the seeds were bought legally on the open market. Monsanto has filed 145 lawsuits against US farmers since 1997 and won every case that went to trial. The act of saving seed, agriculture’s founding gesture, twelve thousand years old, became a federal tort.
Celilo Falls
The Columbia River is the case I keep coming back to. Before the dams, it was the largest salmon system in the world. Salmon supplied 60 to 65% of the diet of Columbia Plateau peoples. Bonneville Dam was completed in 1938, Grand Coulee Dam in 1942 with no fish ladder at all, and The Dalles Dam in 1957. On March 10, 1957, the floodgates of The Dalles closed, and within less than five hours, Celilo Falls, the oldest continuously inhabited site in North America and a fishery used for at least fifteen thousand years, disappeared under the rising reservoir. The villages of Wyam and Sk’in drowned with it. The federal settlement was $26.8 million for “loss of traditional Indian fishing sites.” Snake River wild Chinook collapsed from about 90,000 in the mid-1950s to roughly 10,000 by 1980. The 1855 treaties guaranteeing fish “at all usual and accustomed places” were never repealed; they were submerged.
In late 2023 the Biden administration formally acknowledged the federal government’s “devastating impacts on the salmon and our people” and committed to a ten-year restoration partnership with the Columbia Basin tribes. In 2025 the Trump administration withdrew from the agreement.
Each closure has a local justification. The Lacey Act saved the bison. Fishing licenses fund wildlife management. HOAs preserve property values. Patents incentivize seed R&D. Camping bans address sanitation. The Homestead Act was supposed to democratize land. Stack them all together, though, and there is no longer any legal path to feeding, sheltering, and clothing yourself in America that doesn’t run through a cash transaction.
Shelter, animals, sleep
If you imagine someone trying to live the homestead pastoral that the 1862 Homestead Act was supposed to enable, every step of the daily routine runs into a permit window.
Sleeping outside
Start with sleep. In June 2024, the Supreme Court held 6–3 in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that an ordinance criminally punishing people for sleeping outdoors on public property does not violate the Eighth Amendment, even when the city has zero shelter beds. The Grants Pass ordinance starts at a $295 fine, escalates to a 30-day park ban, and lands at criminal trespass with up to 30 days in jail and a $1,250 fine. Justice Sotomayor opened her dissent with a single sentence: “Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime.” The majority, she wrote, leaves the most vulnerable people in the country with “an impossible choice: either stay awake or be arrested.” Within the first year after the ruling, the National Homelessness Law Center counted 260 new local laws criminalizing homelessness, with about a third of them in California.
Gardening and keeping chickens
Now suppose you do have a roof. In much of the country, that roof comes with a homeowners association. About 74 million Americans live under HOA rule. HOA covenants routinely ban backyard chickens, front-yard vegetable gardens, clotheslines, and “non-conforming” landscaping, even where the surrounding city explicitly permits them. Hermine Ricketts and Tom Carroll were forced by a Miami Shores ordinance to dig up the front-yard vegetable garden they had grown for seventeen years. Florida passed a 2019 state law preempting most municipal vegetable-garden bans, but HOA bans remain enforceable.
Raising animals and sharing milk
You can sell a live cow but not a steak. Federal law requires that all meat sold commercially be slaughtered and processed in a state- or federally-inspected facility, and the narrow exception is “custom-exempt slaughter,” in which a farmer has an animal killed for the animal owner’s own use, and the meat must be stamped “Not For Sale”. The loophole most direct-to-consumer beef operations rely on is selling a live animal, or a quarter share, and having it custom-slaughtered for the buyer. You can buy a steer for around $900 to $1,800 a year in inputs and finish it for somewhere between $3,500 and $5,500, and when you are done you are not legally allowed to sell your neighbor dinner. There are only a couple dozen USDA-inspected mobile slaughter units operating in the entire country, and many small producers wait twelve to eighteen months for a fixed-facility slot.
Raw milk is its own patchwork. Selling raw milk for human consumption is unrestricted at retail in only eight states, illegal entirely in roughly eighteen, and somewhere in between in the rest. Raw “pet milk” is legal in all fifty states if you label it “Not for human consumption,” which is the kind of legal fiction that tells you exactly what is being protected and what isn’t. In April 2010, the Food and Drug Administration executed a 5 a.m. armed raid on Dan Allgyer’s Amish dairy in Pennsylvania, with US Marshals and a state trooper, after a year-long undercover sting in which an FDA agent posed as a buyer. The crime was shipping raw milk via cow-share to a buyers’ club in Maryland. Allgyer shut the farm down rather than fight on. Amos Miller, another Amish dairyman, has been fined $250,000 in federal contempt for continuing to sell raw dairy through a private membership food club.
Public grazing, private billionaires
There is also the federal grazing program, which is worth seeing for what it actually is. The Bureau of Land Management administers around 18,000 grazing permits across roughly 155 million acres of public land. The federal grazing fee in 2025 is $1.35 per animal unit month, about one-seventeenth the private market rate of around $22.60. The program collected about $14.5 million in fees in 2015 against $36.2 million in administrative cost. To even apply for a permit you must own deeded “base property” with a historic tie to the allotment, which means new entrants are effectively locked out unless they buy their way in. Roughly two-thirds of Bureau of Land Management grazing is controlled by 10% of permittees, including billionaire ranchers like Stan Kroenke and Rupert Murdoch. The system that locks small farmers out of public land is, in practice, a subsidy program for the people who least need it.
None of these rules, taken on its own, looks insane. Public health, property values, and conservation are real things to defend. The trouble is the stack. The same person who can’t sleep on the sidewalk also can’t grow tomatoes in the front yard, can’t share milk with the neighbor, can’t sell a steak from the steer she raised, and can’t graze a cow on the public land that a billionaire pays $1.35 a month to use. At some point the stack stops describing a dozen rules and starts describing what kind of person the country is willing to treat her as.
The discard pile
When the stack of closures leaves someone with no legal way to earn, eat, or sleep, the country does not leave them alone. It spends money on them. The question is what kind of spending.
The United States incarcerates 1.8 million people, which is 5 percent of the world’s population holding 20 percent of its prisoners. The 2024 Point-in-Time Count found 771,480 people experiencing homelessness, the highest number since the government started counting. Add the two together and roughly 2.6 million Americans are either locked in a cell or sleeping outside on any given night. The country does not lack the resources to house and feed them. It lacks the will to do it in any form other than punishment.
The upper class: keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class: pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class.
How the pipeline works
The route from poverty to a cell has not changed much since the Black Codes. The crime that convict leasing monetized was vagrancy, which meant not having a white employer. The modern equivalents are trespassing, loitering, public intoxication, and the 260 new local laws criminalizing homelessness passed in the year after Grants Pass. People who are unhoused are 11 times more likely to be arrested than people with a roof. Once arrested, three-quarters of released prisoners are rearrested within five years. More than half are rearrested in the first year. The door back out barely opens before it closes again.
The school end of the pipeline is as mechanical. Black students are suspended at three times the rate of white students. Suspended students are nearly three times more likely to enter the juvenile justice system the following year. Black youth are incarcerated at roughly five times the rate of white youth. None of this is because Black children are more dangerous. It is because the system that is supposed to prepare them for the labor market instead prepares them for the one institution that will always take them.
What happens to their kids
Nearly half of the 1.25 million people in state prison are parents of minor children. On any given day, roughly 2.7 million children have a parent in a cell. Half of them are under nine. One in nine Black children has an incarcerated parent, compared to one in fifty-seven white children. Those children are six times more likely to be incarcerated themselves.
When the incarcerated parent is a mother, the child often enters foster care. The United States has roughly 329,000 children in the system. The word for leaving it without a family is “aging out,” which makes it sound like wine. The outcomes are closer to milk left on the counter. Over 40 percent of foster youth are incarcerated by age 20. Between 31 and 46 percent experience homelessness by 26. Youth who have been through five or more placements enter the justice system at a rate above 90 percent. The discard pile is collecting adults while it manufactures the next generation of them.
The country that spends $132,000 a year to cage one person in California offers $2,000 a year per child in tax credits. A single mother raising those children earns a median of $41,305, against $132,959 for a married-couple family, doing work that Salary.com values at $184,820 a year and the federal government compensates at zero. The United States is the only country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development without a national paid parental leave policy.
In 2021 the country ran the experiment. The expanded Child Tax Credit paid families $250 to $300 per child per month. Child poverty dropped 43 percent, to a record low of 5.2 percent, approaching the rates that Denmark and Finland maintain as a matter of course. Congress let the expansion expire. 3.7 million children fell back into poverty. An NIH-funded study called Baby’s First Years had already shown that $333 a month to low-income mothers changed infant brain activity in ways associated with cognitive development. We knew what the money did. We stopped sending it.
The mental health void
In 1955, state psychiatric hospitals held 558,922 patients. President Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act in 1963, promising to replace custodial institutions with community treatment centers. Only half of the proposed centers were ever built. None was fully funded. States closed the hospitals anyway. By the early 2000s, 90 percent of the beds were gone, and the community system that was supposed to catch those patients had not materialized.
The patients did not disappear. The three largest mental health facilities in the United States are now the LA County Jail, Cook County Jail, and Rikers Island. Forty-four percent of people in local jails have a history of mental illness. Nearly two-thirds of them receive no treatment. The country emptied the hospitals, did not build the clinics, and then arrested the patients for being symptomatic in public.
What the discard pile costs
The Prison Policy Initiative tracks $445 billion flowing annually through policing, courts, corrections, and immigration enforcement. Of that, less than 8 percent goes to actual care: public defense, healthcare, food, and utilities. The rest is system operations and staffing. Families of incarcerated people pay another $27.7 billion a year in fines, fees, bail, and commissary.
The median state spends about $61,000 per prisoner per year. California spends over $132,000. That is more than tuition at any university in the country. And we know what education does to recidivism: prisoners who participate in education programs are 43 percent less likely to reoffend. A bachelor’s degree drops the rate to 5.6 percent. Every dollar spent on prison education returns four to five dollars in reduced incarceration costs. We know what works. We fund what doesn’t.
The two accent bars are the discard pile: what we spend per person on incarceration and homelessness management. The remaining bars are what we spend per person on the systems that could prevent both. Corrections ($116B) is the public corrections line from the PPI 2026 report and excludes policing and courts. Homeless per-capita is an average of California ($42K), New York ($40K), Oregon ($60K), and Washington ($21K) using state+local+federal spending. Mental health uses California's per-client figure because the federal-only SAMHSA number ($740/person) understates actual treatment spending. Sources: PPI (2026), NCES, HUD, SAMHSA, LAO, NYS Comptroller, BJS, KFF.
When every alternative to the cash economy has been closed and some people still cannot participate, the country does not reopen an alternative. It builds a $445-billion apparatus to manage the people who fall through, and it calls that apparatus justice.
The common defense of this arrangement is that the people on the discard pile could have worked harder. The economist Raj Chetty has spent two decades testing that claim with tax records. A Black child born to parents in the bottom fifth of earners has a 2.5 percent chance of reaching the top fifth. A white child born to the same quintile has a 10.6 percent chance. Move the Black child to a different zip code and the number changes. The child did not change. The zip code did. Across all races, the United States transmits roughly 40 to 50 percent of its income inequality from one generation to the next. Denmark transmits about 7 percent. The country with the loudest meritocracy story has one of the weakest meritocratic outcomes among wealthy democracies.
I saw this at close range. A classmate of mine in college was one of the sharpest people I have met. He was adopted, grew up poor, and was starting with less than nothing. Every dollar out seemed to weigh on him. He could never do things with us. I came from an upper-middle-class family; my parents covered my base costs, and I left school net-positive. That cushion let me take a startup job that paid less than market, because I could manage the risk. He could not manage that risk. He took the safe route, stayed in school for a master’s, went into medicine, and when I last spoke to him a decade after graduation he was still building himself out of debt. Same institution, comparable ability, different starting capital. The zip code shaped us both.
The dignity test
The stack of closures has a shape, and the shape has a name. It is a word the United States Constitution does not contain. The word is dignity.
The German Basic Law of 1949, drafted in the rubble the Third Reich left behind, puts it in Article 1: “Human dignity shall be inviolable.” The post-apartheid Constitution of South Africa puts it in Section 10: “Everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights opens with it. The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights opens with it. Countries that have recently watched their own citizens treated as things tend to put the word in Article 1. The most economically punishing democracy in the world is the only one whose founding document never says it.
Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) drew the line:
In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. What has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; what on the other hand is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity.
Things have prices. Persons have dignity. The two are mutually exclusive categories for Kant. An economy that puts a price on whether you eat is, in his frame, treating persons as if they were things.
The strongest American statement of the same idea came from Franklin Roosevelt, in his 1944 State of the Union, proposing what he called a Second Bill of Rights:
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men.
He proposed a right to a useful job, to enough income for adequate food and shelter, to medical care, to protection from the economic fears of old age and unemployment, to a good education. None of it became law.
My parents came to the United States from Iran before I was born, arriving through Great Britain after the 1979 revolution. They built successful careers as doctors. They still felt, for most of their working lives, that Americans were trying to hold them back. They had valid concerns, but it is hard to prove a feeling. Dignity, in their experience, was promised broadly and dispensed unevenly.
Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach lists ten things any decent political order has to secure if lives are to be “worthy of human dignity.” Practical reason fails when every waking thought is about food. Affiliation collapses under constant humiliation. Play disappears entirely. The grid below marks the three that destitution forecloses in a single paragraph.
If the only alternative to wage labor is sleeping on the sidewalk, the consent that someone gives to wage labor is not the consent of a free person. It is the consent of what Roosevelt called a necessitous one. Whatever else you want to call that arrangement, it isn’t a choice.
By the US Census’s own conservative count, about 1 in 10 working-age Americans already has a documented physical or cognitive disability that limits work, and roughly half of that group receives federal disability benefits after passing the Social Security Administration’s strict medical review. A right not to compete already exists for them as a matter of public record. The question is whether dignity extends further.
And here is the part that surprised me most when I went looking for it: for everyone else, the answer is already built.
The alternatives are already running
The alternatives to capitalism are not theoretical. They are running, in real countries, at real scale, with real balance sheets, often older than the cash economy that surrounds them.
Commons that outlast nations
The oldest one I know of meets every Thursday at noon in Valencia, Spain, in a square outside the Cathedral’s Door of the Apostles. The Tribunal de las Aguas has been resolving disputes over irrigation water from the Turia river since at least the tenth century. Eight farmer-judges, elected by their communities, hear cases in Valencian. Decisions are oral, immediate, and unappealable. There are no lawyers. UNESCO recognized the tribunal as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2009. A democratic institution older than every modern nation-state still issues binding judgments every Thursday at noon, on its own terms, without ever having needed a market.
Valencia is not alone. The economist Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, the first woman ever to do so, for documenting more than 800 working commons around the world. The Swiss village of Törbel has managed its alpine meadows communally since at least 1517 and its irrigation channels since 1483. Maine lobstermen self-organize into “harbor gangs” that enforce informal territorial rules; in 1995, Maine formalized lobster zone councils giving fishermen authority alongside the state agency. The fishery has been productive for over a century while many other fisheries collapsed. Ostrom’s empirical contribution was to demolish, with hundreds of case studies, the idea that the “tragedy of the commons” is a universal law. The commons can be governed. They were outlawed instead.
The longest-running commons on this continent are Indigenous. The Land Back movement, led by Indigenous nations across the US and Canada, is the active version of this argument. Recent transfers under it include the Esselen Tribe’s recovery of 1,199 acres in Big Sur in 2020, the return of the National Bison Range in 2020 to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, and the Yurok Tribe’s reacquisition of 47,000 acres along the Klamath, the largest Land Back deal in California history. Each is a working example of how land moves from concentrated ownership back into community governance, by purchase, by treaty, and by federal action.
Cooperatives at scale
If commons feel too pre-modern, look at cooperatives. The Mondragon Corporation in the Basque Country was founded in 1956 by Catholic priest José María Arizmendiarrieta with five workers making paraffin heaters. In 2024 it had around 70,000 employees across 81 cooperatives and €11.213 billion in sales, making it the fifth-largest private employer in Spain. Pay between the highest- and lowest-paid worker in the industrial co-ops is capped at about 9 to 1, against a US S&P 500 ratio that runs roughly 200 to 350 to 1 depending on methodology. The federation-wide picture is messier than the headline: not every Mondragon employee is a member-owner, the retail subsidiary Eroski has its own labor disputes, and the appliance giant Fagor went bankrupt in 2013. The model is real but it isn’t a postcard. Mondragon is also unusual in that worker ownership and union representation reinforce each other instead of substituting for each other, which is the right lesson for any country where unions are the existing institution most workers already understand. The Italian region of Emilia-Romagna runs an economy in which roughly two of every three residents belong to a cooperative and co-ops produce about 30% of regional GDP. In the city of Imola the figure approaches 60%.
Americans participate in cooperatives too, often without knowing it. REI has over 25 million members and returned $189 million to its members in 2024. The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association represents 897 customer-owned co-ops serving roughly 42 million people in 47 states, with about $45 billion in annual revenue. They electrified rural America when investor-owned utilities wouldn’t. Roughly one in eight Americans gets their electricity from a customer-owned co-op. Most don’t know it, which is fine, because the system works whether or not it has a brand.
Housing, mutual aid, open source
Decommodifying housing is also possible. The first community land trust in the United States was New Communities Inc., founded in Albany, Georgia, in 1969 by the civil rights organizer Charles Sherrod and his wife Shirley Sherrod, modeled on Israeli kibbutzim and Tanzanian ujamaa villages. The Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington, Vermont, founded in 1984 under Mayor Bernie Sanders, was the first CLT started by a city government and is now the largest in the country, with about 2,500 apartments and 650 shared-equity homes. A CLT holds land in perpetuity and sells homes on 99-year leases with resale price restrictions, so the land cannot reenter the speculative market. In 2009 the Champlain trust won the UN World Habitat Award.
When the formal economy fails, mutual aid takes over. The Mutual Aid Hub tracked a jump from about 50 mutual aid groups in March 2020 to over 800 in 48 states by May 2020, in the eight weeks during which the federal safety net was visibly inadequate to a public health emergency. Groups handled grocery delivery for the immunocompromised, prescription pickup, rent funds, and meal prep. None of this is new. The first known Black mutual aid society in the United States, the Free African Society, was founded in Philadelphia in 1787 by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones. New Orleans benevolent societies operated continuously for over 150 years, providing burial insurance, medical care, and food assistance.
Open source software is the version programmers will already understand. Eric Raymond’s 1997 The Cathedral and the Bazaar called it a gift culture: contributors get reputation, the code belongs to anyone who wants it. The Linux kernel started at 10,239 lines in 1991 and now stands at around 40 million, written by tens of thousands of contributors with no central paymaster. A 2024 Harvard Business School study by Hoffmann, Nagle, and Zhou put the labor cost of producing all of open source at about $4 billion. The replication cost, if firms had to rebuild it independently, came to $8.8 trillion. That is roughly two thousand dollars of value for every dollar of labor. The Synopsys OSSRA audit puts the share of commercial codebases containing open source code at around 96%. When companies try to close their open source, the community forks them within weeks: Elastic became OpenSearch in 2021, Redis became Valkey in 2024. The gift economy enforces itself.
Each of these has its own problems and its own internal politics. Each has payrolls, founding dates, court records, audited financials, and members you can meet.
What government is for
There is a question hiding under all of this. What is government for?
If you believe a government exists to protect property and enforce contracts, the country we have is more or less the country you would design. The rules I have been describing make sense as a system for keeping the cash economy running. Every fence around the commons, every license requirement, every camping ban, every seed patent, is doing the job an economy-protecting government would do.
It helps to be clear-eyed about why that mode keeps expanding. Capitalism is a game, and the people winning it are doing what rational players in any game would do. They are trying to make their winnings useful in more places and to make their position more secure. The desire for more places to put your money and more insulation against losing it is the same desire that leads ordinary people to buy a house and lock the front door. Stack that desire across a few thousand large fortunes for two centuries, and you get a government in which money buys policy and a land-use map that has no room for anyone trying to live outside the cash economy. Nobody had to be wicked for this to happen. The rules of the game gave everyone what the rules gave them. I helped build a company that sold for a quarter of a billion dollars and walked away with nothing, because the cap table was set before I understood what a cap table was. The game distributed according to leverage, not contribution, and it did so legally and without malice.
If you believe instead that a government exists to protect the dignity of the people who live under it, almost none of those rules survive. A government in that business does not bill a poisoned mother for the water she is afraid to drink and then arrest her if she sleeps on the grass outside the house she can no longer afford. It does not offer her, as her only alternative, a labor market she has no leverage in. It gives her another room to walk into.
The simplest version of this question is a family. Picture a household that wants healthy children, a safe place to sleep, reliable food, and an education for their kids strong enough that those kids can choose either life later. The list is not extravagant. None of it requires a paycheck if the country wants to provide it, and all of it requires a paycheck if the country prefers not to. The whole essay reduces to one question: should we be willing to design a country that lets that family choose?
The missing right, by name
The frame you’ve been carrying has a name. It is the right to not compete. We have a right to free speech, a right to assemble, a right to vote, a right to bear arms. We have no right to step outside the cash economy and still eat, and every right on that list shrinks to paper the moment an employer can fire you for exercising it. The right to not compete is the one that makes the others real.
I have seen what happens when exit is closed. A colleague at a previous company was applying for a green card and could not accept a promotion or leave the company, because either action would have restarted the immigration process. The company was not being cruel. There was simply nothing anyone could do. The colleague stayed, waited it out, and left the day the paperwork cleared. That is what a labor relation without exit looks like, and it is not an edge case. It is the everyday reality of anyone whose ability to remain in the country is tied to a single employer.
The political economist Albert Hirschman, in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970), argued that the two ways citizens change the institutions they belong to are leaving them and speaking inside them, and that the two work together. A union strike is voice. A sabbatical into a community land trust is exit. Either one alone is weaker than both together, and a country that forecloses one starves the other. The right not to compete is what makes voice credible at the bargaining table.
What that right looks like in practice is concrete and unglamorous, which is a point in its favor. Someone who wants a roof and does not want a mortgage should be able to get one from the government, on land it already owns and in a building it already paid for, the way a child gets a desk in a public school. Someone who wants to build their own shelter on public land should be able to apply for a plot and a permit, the way the Homestead Act was supposed to work and never quite did. Drinking the water that falls on your roof should be legal. Fishing, foraging, hunting, gardening, and sharing milk with a neighbor should not require a lawyer.
None of this requires abolishing the housing market, the labor market, or the bottled-water industry. It requires building the other room and protecting it. The same way Yellowstone was carved out of a frontier full of railroads and mining camps and is still there, surrounded by railroads and mining camps, more than a century later. Yellowstone is not a failure of real estate development. It is a deliberate decision to take certain land off the market because the market would have eaten it. We did that for geysers. We can do it for shelter, water, food, and time.
National parks for economic systems
A community land trust is Yellowstone for housing. The land is held in trust forever, the homes are sold at affordable prices, the resale formulas keep them affordable, and no one is forbidden from owning a normal house down the road. Open source is Yellowstone for code. The code is given away, contributors earn reputation rather than money, and no one is forbidden from selling proprietary software next door. Maine’s lobster zone councils are Yellowstone for a fishery. Mondragon is Yellowstone for a manufacturing economy. A herdshare, a time bank, a mutual aid network, a foraging-legal forest, a public water utility, a freedom-to-roam corridor, a worker co-op, a seed library, a co-managed grazing commons: each is a fenced space in which a different logic gets to operate. The job of the government in a pluralist economy is to protect each system from the others, so that capital cannot enclose the commons and the commons cannot conscript anyone who would rather be inside the market.
Concrete policy asks
The concrete asks fall out of that frame. Build and maintain public housing as a permanent option, not as a stigma. Allocate parcels of public land for self-built shelter on the model the Homestead Act was supposed to follow, only smaller and current. Provide water, transit, healthcare, and broadband as universal services, the way we already provide schools and roads. Make rainwater capture legal, untaxed, and unmetered up to a household ceiling. Decriminalize sleep on public land where there is no shelter bed within walking distance. Re-legalize seed saving for non-commercial use. License small raw-milk dairies on the Pennsylvania model instead of raiding them at five in the morning. Restore co-management of fisheries to the tribes whose treaties guarantee it. Build mobile slaughter capacity as public infrastructure. Fund community land trusts the way we fund the mortgage interest deduction. Adopt some version of right-to-roam on uncultivated land. None of this is utopian. It is closer to zoning than to politics, and several countries already do most of it.
Why this is good for capitalism
The part of this that should appeal to people who like capitalism is that it would make capitalism better. The labor relation in America today is not voluntary in any meaningful sense, because the alternative to wage labor is the sidewalk. Make the alternative real, and the labor relation becomes voluntary. Wages have to rise to draw people in, hours have to get more humane, and bosses have to ask. Only two things have ever raised worker welfare in America: tight labor markets and labor law. Tight labor markets have usually come involuntarily, from war, plague, or closed borders. The one exception is the late 1990s, when the Fed manufactured the same conditions on purpose. Unions are the existing mechanism by which workers manufacture this tightness on purpose, one strike at a time, and they remain the most effective form of voice the country has invented. A right to not compete creates the same tightness from the other side, without anyone having to die to produce it. Capitalism inside that economy would be a system people chose, and on average a better one than the system they were trapped in.
If the worry is that people will stop working when survival is no longer at stake, the empirical record is lopsided against it. Roughly a dozen large cash-transfer studies on three continents over fifty years have tested the prediction. The results look like this:
Employment up slightly, wellbeing up sharply
2017–2018: 2,000 unemployed Finns received €560/month unconditionally. Employment rose modestly versus the control group. Life satisfaction, trust in institutions, and mental health all improved significantly. (Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs, 2020)
Work shifted, not reduced
Long-running UBI experiment in rural Kenya. Recipients shifted from wage labor into self-employment and small business. Total hours worked did not fall. (GiveDirectly, 2023 interim results)
Cash changed infant brains
NIH-funded RCT: $333/month to low-income mothers. Infants showed higher-frequency brain activity associated with cognitive development. The money did not reduce parental employment. (NIH, 2022)
Seven countries, same answer
Reviewed seven developing-country cash-transfer RCTs across three continents. No systematic evidence that unconditional transfers reduce work. (World Bank Research Observer, 2017)
The couch-potato prediction is the forecast the data rejects most cleanly.
The obvious objection to all of this is “how do you actually get there?” That answer deserves its own post, and I am writing one. The short version is that nothing in the closure I have described is irreversible. The commons have been shrinking in the United States for two centuries, and the whole time we have been measuring GDP, housing starts, and stock prices without measuring the thing that was disappearing.
The first move is to start measuring it. A country that has lost the salmon it ate for fifteen thousand years, the creek it could drink from, and the ground it could legally sleep on has experienced a real loss. The number is large, and the number is knowable. The second move is to change direction. Rivers that have been dewatered get rewatered all over the world. Aquifers can be filtered at the source, communally and on a shared bill, the way municipal water is already filtered for the people who can pay for it. Public land that has been leased to billionaires for $1.35 a month per cow is land we already own. Houses can be put under community trusts on the Champlain model, and zoning laws that currently mandate single-family homes on land that could legally house ten times as many people can be rewritten. The closures in this essay are policy choices that other places have already reversed. The follow-up post will name the levers and walk through the math.
The room
I went back into the playroom last night. The legos and the magna tiles were combined into one structure I would not be able to describe even with a diagram. Both kids were on the floor, not fighting and not negotiating. Each had a pile of their own materials and was occasionally borrowing from the other’s pile, and the whole thing worked because nobody had the power to force anybody else to commit to a single system. Nobody was hungry, and nobody had to ask permission.
The grown-up version is harder to engineer, but it is the same shape. Keep capitalism. It is good at the things it is good at, and almost nothing else can do those things. Just stop running the entire human project through it. Build the other room, fence it, and let people walk in, out, and back again.
We are about to try. This summer we are pulling our kids out of school, listing the house, selling most of what we own, and leaving in a van. The plan is to co-learn with them on the road, to let them solve real problems alongside us instead of watching us leave for work every morning from a suburban living room. We have already had mornings in the Columbia Gorge, barefoot with coffee, the kids watching boats from a blanket, and those mornings taught all four of us more than the week that surrounded them.
The kids didn’t have to pick. We shouldn’t have to either.
