Comprehensive Liberalism

Basic Freedoms
Freedom from interference consistent with the same freedom for all. Freedom to use natural resources consistent with the same freedom for all. Freedom to protect these freedoms.

Justification of Basic Freedoms
We are all people living in nature. Suspend for a moment current social assumptions. Then no one has any inherent authority over anyone else. Without this authority, no one has the right to interfere with others. We each need to use natural resources to live. There is no inherent right to exclude others from using natural resources. Conversely, if someone is currently using some natural resources to live, no one has the right to interfere with that use. Since some will try to interfere or exclude, we need to protect ourselves, either directly or in association with others. This situation applies to all of us equally. The basic freedoms are another way of describing this situation.

Resource Use Inventory
We each have a resource use inventory associated with our life. This is the land, materials and energy we use or exclude others from using. It also includes our share of the resource use inventory of any associations we have ownership in. This inventory should be complete, including resources we sometimes forget like clean water and clean air.

Resource Values
It is useful to assign resources a numeric value. This helps us deal with individual preferences in resources. The relative value of resources is best determined, in most cases, by the voluntary exchange price. But in our exchanges we sometimes fail to recognize all of the resources being used. The true resource value must cover all these resources, including the cost of sustaining the resources for future use by current and future generations or of coming up with alternative resources when the resource is not renewable.

Allocation of Resources
So one way of thinking about our equal freedom to use natural resources is to say that all the people in a natural environment at any point in time have equal ownership of the resource value of the natural resources in that environment.

People Are Not Resources
By resources are meant natural resources. People are not resources. People should be free from interference. This means that their life, mind, body, time, and labor are their own. They should not be used by others. However, we can get great advantage by exchanging our labor. People can specialize and take advantage of their natural talents.

Products and Services
Products have a natural resource component and a labor component. Some resources can be used directly. For example, we can just breath the air. But in most cases, labor is required to make natural resources useful. This could be as simple as the labor to gather nuts or fruit. So a product is a resource that has been transformed in some way by our labor. A service is labor we exchange directly with others. As with resources it is useful to give products and services a numeric value as determined by voluntary exchanges. Again, this helps take into account different preferences people have for products and services.

Product Values
We can't own services because people are not resources that can be owned. We can only exchange for services. Products though have a resource component and a labor component. The resource value of the product can be determined in theory by its resource inventory, all the land, materials, and energy that went into its production. But the labor value is hard to separate out. The only practical approach is to simply give the product a numeric value determined by voluntary exchanges. Subtract from that the resource value. The value left is the labor value. It is what we would have exchanged for the service of producing the product.

Industrial Production
When products are sold by their producers, then there is little problem with labor value. The producers are getting the labor value. This is close to being true for worker owned businesses. The problem there is allocating the labor value to the individual owners based on the true value of their services. But when the business is not owned by the workers, there is a question about where the profits come from. If the owner is also a manager, then part of their income comes from their skill as a manager. But the profits are payments over and above these services. There are two main components of profits, risk value and labor value. The risk value is how much we all want to reward owners for their risks in funding the business. By taking these risks they enable others to offer their services and they enable us all to buy products we want. This can be very useful to all of us. The problem comes when the owners take more than the risk value and are therefore taking some of the labor value. It is hard to know exactly where this line is, but we know it is often crossed. Capital gains taxes are a way to ameliorate this problem as long as the taxes are used in some way to compensate people for their lost labor value.

Legitimate Taxation
In general taxes should be used to pay for products and services that we need but that are not or cannot be provided privately and to compensate citizens for some loss of their labor value or of the resource value of their share of natural resources. This suggests two legitimate taxes. One is on capital gains. The other is on the use of natural resources beyond an equal share. It is hard to justify an income tax to pay for transfers to others, especially to the wealthy through corporate subsidies, but even from the poor to the poor because it can create a freeloading problem. Using an income tax or a tax on the use of our share of natural resources could be legitimate to pay for essential products and services. Resource use taxes could include land taxes and taxes on the revenues from selling natural resources. To simplify this, it could be argued that a progressive income tax is legitimate because higher incomes correlate with greater use of natural resources, public services, and undercompensated labor and it is too difficult to sort out all these factors, but it would be more ideal to tax these factors directly.

Basic Income
We each have as our birth right the resource value of our share of the natural resources in our environment and the value of our labor. We should be compensated for any appropriation of our labor value in profits by having capital gains taxes either distributed directly to us or by reducing our taxes for common products and services. We may not literally have possession of our share of natural resources because of what we do in the economy. Farmers need more direct possession than computer programmers, for example. One way to deal with this is to have a market in natural resources. This will likely result in unequal ownership. We may want to allow this because the owners may be able to make more productive use of the resources. But we are still due our share of the resource value. This could be handled by distributing resource use taxes directly or again by reducing our taxes for common products and services. It is difficult to know exactly what our share is and therefore at what level the resource use taxes should be set. But we can argue that it should at least be enough for each us to have the opportunity for a decent life and to have an equal opportunity go beyond this.

Self Government
We will likely always need to form associations to protect our freedoms. Opting out and forming alternative associations just starts the process again. These associations either become defacto governments or they try to influence governments. The point is to reduce the harm the associations can do through checks and balances and more citizen control. We need to make practical choices of what associations to support based on how well they work in protecting our freedoms.

Policies
Given our current situation, we should support policies that approximate a basic income and equal opportunity for all funded by capital gains taxes and a progressive income tax. We should support moves to shift from income taxes to resource use taxes. We should also use these taxes to add back in the true costs of resources. Government expenditures should be used to protect our freedoms and to provide essential products and services that are not or cannot be provided by the market. We should encourage a true free market. Government should not be used to subsidize corporations or the wealthy. We should respect the freedom of people all over the world and work to reduce conflict. We should support fair trade agreements, not those that give an unfair advantage to global corporations. We should not have wars intended to support corporate interests. We should support moves toward greater self government and we should support those associations that best protect our freedoms. In the longer term we should try to shift opinion more toward a recognition of the full basic freedoms outlined here, although the important thing is that they are recognized in practical terms, for whatever reason.

Conservation and Correction
This approach is very much in the classical liberal tradition going back to Locke, with the exception that whereas Locke suggested that original acquisition of natural resources is justified by mixing labor, this approach keeps ownership of labor and natural resources separate. Our labor is strictly our own, but natural resources are left in their "original state", equally owned by everyone. On the other hand, private property is acknowledged to have some pragmatic justification as long as we realize that people still have a moral claim to their common share in some form. This approach is also in the classical conservative tradition in the sense that it works toward this moral ideal in a conservative way by a process of conservation and correction. We need to start where we are and make needed corrections in a way in which our associations can adjust. No radical vanguard has the right to force a particular vision, but also no central authority can prevent people from experimenting with new forms of association that might prove themselves in practice and become the tradition of the future.

Revolution and Resistance
The overall attitude so far in this outline of direct liberalism is to work within the system. This can make this look like just a slightly different formulation of state liberalism, because, despite rhetoric, self government will never come as long as the state is there. It is therefore argued that we should not vote, we should criticize any state action, and we should either opt out into a life of perpetual resistance and building alternative institutions or actively work toward the destruction of the state and hope for some "miracle happens here" event in the future. Only the ideal can be accepted. This is the classic reformist versus revolutionary argument. For example, we could take direct action at the local level to build up alternative associations with direct democratic control and withdraw all our support from the state. But these alternative associations themselves would become defacto mini states. Life in their narrow confines could be incredibly stifling. Or not. It is hard to say what they would become. But remember the rebellion against small town pettiness and conformity. And destructive behavior does not often really strike a blow against tyranny. It just hurts those dependent on the current system for survival. Liberalism has made a lot of progress. Maybe continuing the conserve and correct approach can take us a ways further, or far enough. We may never reach the moral ideal.