#3 Fix the economy

GDP growth, fiscal sustainability and a single wellbeing index are each useful diagnostics but none describes what an economy is for. This Candidate Solution treats wellbeing, health, education, economic freedom, productive capacity, resilience, opportunity and environmental quality as a joint objective vector subject to physical, social and institutional constraints, deliberately without collapsing them into one weighted scalar — see the Objectives and Constraints and What Is the Economy For? sections. Politics chooses where on the resulting trade-off frontier to sit; this specification only tries to make that frontier visible.

Fixed policy rules cannot adapt when conditions change, and undocumented discretionary intervention provides no systematic way to know whether an intervention is working. This proposal instead compares measured outcomes with democratically chosen targets and adjusts policy signals (see Closed-Loop Fiscal Control) subject to explicit rate limits, smoothing and forward guidance. Fully predictive/adaptive control — forecasting trajectories under candidate interventions and re-planning as data improves — is identified as a plausible future evolution (see Stability and Robustness) rather than something this specification already claims to have solved.

None of this architecture requires central planning of production. Government sets objectives, constraints and incentive signals (taxation, spending, regulation); households, firms, banks and investors continue to make decentralised production, consumption and investment decisions within them. Businesses are expected to discover how to respond to a circularity signal — through durability, repair, remanufacturing, leasing or something not yet imagined — rather than being told how; that discovery capacity is precisely why markets are retained rather than replaced. See Circular Product Lifecycles and Physical Economy.

This proposal does not claim income, consumption and wealth taxation should disappear. It proposes a deliberate, gradual shift in relative weight toward negative-outcome-based taxation — taxing virgin extraction, pollution, unrecoverable waste and premature disposal more, and productive work, enterprise and investment relatively less — while treating the pace and extent of that shift as an empirical question for the evidence programme, not a fixed target. See Tax What We Want Less Of and Physical-Outcome Taxation.

Prescriptive regulation, fixed environmental taxation and carbon pricing all remain part of the toolkit — none is proposed for removal. The distinguishing addition is adaptive, outcome-based fiscal signals on product- and material-level physical characteristics, with weight on that adaptive component expected to grow as measurement and verification infrastructure (Digital Product Identities) matures. See Closed-Loop Fiscal Control.

Departmental silos cannot support the cross-cutting measurement this architecture needs (a product's tax treatment depending on verified characteristics; spending traced from resource to outcome). A single centralised database would concentrate risk and intrusiveness unnecessarily. Federated infrastructure — separate systems for identity, payments, taxation, product information, business registration, public expenditure, infrastructure state and environmental data, interoperating through defined, access-controlled interfaces — supports the same functions while bounding what any single breach or scope-creep episode can expose. See Interoperable State Infrastructure.