An Economic Constitution of Possibility: Producing Real Freedom, Settling Contributions, and Renewing Authority

Whether a person who receives an income can actually leave, rest, care for others, create, and begin again depends on services, routes of access, maintenance, and relations of power beyond income itself. This paper takes practically actionable futures as the distributive object of an economic constitution and distinguishes four institutional entitlements, each requiring its own grounds: basic participation, contribution claims, claims on scarce resources, and governance authority. Its central principle is that participation does not require a prior contribution; contributions earn returns that can be settled; claims on scarcity bear the costs of their present use; and continuing control requires continuing authorization. The paper connects this normative argument to established formal results. Equal positive exit capacities can support different complete combinations of life conditions; even a readout covering all domains can lose the provenance needed for effective repair; two successive rounds of innovation can each pay for investment, evidence, subsistence, and maintenance; cumulative receipts attributed to one contribution source, summed over all successor slots, are bounded by its original issuance; labor saved by a public method preserves every previously legal continuation; and the replacement of public services, the inheritance of responsibilities, and arbitrary finite continuation can hold together. These results connect basic provision, a knowledge commons, joint clearing, self-directed time, polycentric governance, and ecological responsibility through a set of institutional arrangements that can be checked. The capability approach identifies what should be evaluated; this paper further asks how capabilities are produced, who pays for them, and who may determine the next rules. The technical appendices supply complete proofs, conditions, and correspondences to the original declarations. New interfaces for generative money and bounded auditing are presented as explicit designs.