The 33rd Amendment (Reconstitution Amendment 6)
A first draft of a proposal for the 33rd Amendment to the United States Constitution (Reconstitution Amendment 6) for your feedback.
Included in this email is a link to the Reconstitution’s Amendment 6. In the comment section of this post, we invite you to critique it with your whole heart, getting deep into the nitty-gritty if you so desire. As always, you may also set up a voice or video call if you wish to speak with us directly about the piece.
Remember that we want to cultivate coherent, deliberative multilogues that emphasize curiosity, empathy, and humility. Your input will inform and transform our framing. What you comment here might have a significant impact on the final version of Amendment 6.
The guiding question for Amendment 6 is this: How does monetary theory transform when abundance becomes more prevalent than scarcity?
Included in the Framers’ deliberations were these sub-questions:
How can we transform the absurd perpetuation of artificial scarcity into a system of distributive justice?
What does an economy look like when the printing of money is not dependent on the creation of debt?
How do we handle property that will forever remain scarce (e.g., waterfront property and invaluable pieces of original art), or that require temporary scarcity in order to generate ex-ante investment incentives (e.g., intellectual property)?
Our conversations included the future of employment (labor, automation, and artificial intelligence), human birthrights (natural resources, inherited wealth, shared capital), and a framework for trading goods and services.
We ended up writing one of our shorter proposals for this one, but it packs a punch. It has essentially to do with the concept of inheritance. We want to ensure that each generation is bestowed with an increasing abundance of shared opportunity and wealth. In other words, we want to secure Americans’ inheritance rights. We think inheritance rights should be defined to include the conveyance of wealth to specific benefactors through traditional wills, trusts, gifts, and estates.
But we also want to introduce a new form of inheritance. We propose that part of everyone’s inheritance should be a minimum income that’s equally distributed to all citizens from a Universal Shared Inheritance fund. We propose to fund it with revenues derived from renting, licensing, or taxing resources that have been removed from the common shared inheritance of the natural world and the history of human achievement. By the way, this is very much in keeping with the basic framing of Henry George.
What do you think of this framing? Do you think the specific proposals sound reasonable? Are there any ways they could backfire?
If you think we missed any big and important aspects, please tell us! If you have quibbles about the wording, let it be known! As history shows, precedent-setting Constitutional interpretations can hinge on the most unassuming of phrases or even the placement of a comma. Every little detail matters.
Without further ado: here is a link to the Reconstitution Amendment 6.
Thank you for your co-creation. We can’t wait to hear what you think.