Abstract
Economic institutions built around scarce human administrative capacity are being asked to govern a system in which coordination is abundant and mechanical. This paper proposes a constitutional response, and it is constrained throughout by what the four preceding papers of this series actually established. Paper I established that the obligation is the primitive and that the money an economy requires is a vector of per-currency, per-window settlement requirements determined jointly by the promise structure and a legal partition of obligations; the partition is therefore a policy variable. Paper II established a conditional, and the condition is binding on everything downstream: artificial agents are not independent economic principals today, and the paper says what would have to become true for them to become so. Paper III tested the proposition that production should not be a taxable event and found that it survives as an immediate programme financed from final consumption, with public capital reducing the required rate instead of gating the abolition; replacing the 18.51 per cent of GDP the United States raises from production requires a public endowment of 3.70 times GDP at a five per cent draw and 7.40 times under a rule that preserves the fund's share of the economy, the latter exceeding the entire net worth of the American household sector. Paper IV established that contracts and clearing are specifiable, that one of seven identity components is deployed, and that the central efficiency parameter is endogenous, since agents facing near-zero transaction costs can manufacture the circular obligations that inflate it. From these we construct twelve articles covering economic personhood, the right to produce, open participation, property and claims, freedom of contract, monetary neutrality, productive-tax neutrality, competition, human sovereignty, political pluralism, universal protocol access and intergenerational stewardship. Each article is stated as constitutional text and then argued against the specific result that grounds it and the specific cost it imposes. We state a priority ordering among the articles, run them against the paper's own constitutional test, and report that four of the twelve fail it: three that a government of the drafter's own persuasion would inherit with pleasure, and one, the access guarantee, that fails in the opposite direction. The organising claim is that the machine economy should be financed at the point of consumption, not by a claim on work: a claim on work is measured at a realisation event that the netting perimeter helps define, while final consumption is a terminal act that cannot be manufactured by reorganising a graph of obligations. The claim is addressed to the constitutional stage, and the paper is explicit that a rule of this kind degrades if it is keyed to a measure and handed to a system that optimises against it.
Key equations
Carried from Paper I: the Residual Settlement Principle
The synthesis mapping — eight substitutions
The organizing claim
The twelve articles
Human beings are natural persons and remain so. An artificial system may be granted economic agency — defined by its authorizations, its capacity to hold and discharge obligations, and a registered chain of responsibility terminating in a natural or legal person — but such a grant confers no political personhood and no standing in the constitution of public authority.
Every person may create, own, operate and employ lawful productive systems, including autonomous agents. Production is presumptively free; a restriction requires a stated public purpose, drawn narrowly, and may not be imposed by an infrastructure operator as a condition of access.
Access to fundamental economic infrastructure — identity, contracting, clearing, settlement, and the markets for computation and energy — shall not be conditioned on ideology, nationality, incumbent membership, or the approval of any particular AI supplier.
Legitimately acquired property and contractual claims receive predictable legal protection. Neither a government nor an autonomous system may extinguish, reassign or freeze a claim except under a general, advance rule, subject to contest, and compensated where applied retrospectively.
Humans, and agents acting under a traceable authorization, may negotiate the terms of their economic relationships, limited by protections for third parties, competition, public safety, and unwaivable rights. Every obligation must specify how performance is verified and what recourse follows if it is not.
No particular representation of value is constitutionally privileged as the economic primitive. A public authority may designate a settlement asset for public obligations, but may not thereby prohibit the creation, transfer or lawful cancellation of claims denominated in other units.
Taxation of labour and of productive income is scheduled for abolition. Final consumption is the primary base that replaces it to the extent of its yield, with rents on land and scarce natural resources, resource royalties, and the return on publicly held capital carrying the balance. A public authority shall publish annually the share of its revenue raised from production and the trajectory it intends for that share. Where a fiscal shock, an armed conflict, a demographic transition or a technological displacement makes the schedule unaffordable, a public authority may depart from it by a measure that is announced, reviewable and limited in time.
No corporation, government or artificial system may obtain unrestricted control over the economic protocol. Interoperability of identity, obligations and contracts, and the ability to depart with one's assets and record, are structural protections that bind public and private holders of a controlling position alike.
Economic optimization is subordinate to human constitutional authority. No artificial system may be the sole determinant of a participant's admission to economic infrastructure, decide an appeal against its own determination, or alter the rules under which it operates.
Capitalist, socialist, Georgist, cooperative, mutualist, religious and other voluntary economic arrangements may coexist and compete for adherents. No public authority may condition access to infrastructure on participation in a single arrangement, or prohibit a peaceful one on the ground of its ideology.
Every human person shall have access to economic identity, contracting, ownership and transfer of claims, settlement, markets for computation, and the deployment or delegation of autonomous economic agents — Universal Basic Agency. The guarantee binds to the extent of available public capacity.
No generation may finance its prosperity by placing unbounded liabilities on its successors. Environmental depletion, sovereign borrowing, unfunded public commitments and irreversible resource consumption shall be recorded on a consolidated obligation ledger, published, and carried in the same accounts as financial liabilities.