[This review was published in the Fall 2014 issue of The Journal of Social, Political and Economic

Studies, pp. 376-386.]

Book Review
With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Dont Pay Enough
Peter Barnes
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2014
There is a weather pattern that is common for summer days in Denver, Colorado. The morning
will start with a clear cobalt-blue sky, most often with only the smallest of clouds appearing over the
mountains to the west. Clouds begin to build up as the morning progresses, so that by mid-afternoon
there are thundershowers, some of quite ominous appearance, spotted over portions of the plain. This
reviewer remembers the pattern well: as an eleven year old in the spring of 1946, he loaded his bike with
Denver Posts and headed out to throw them door to door. It rained every afternoon at exactly that time.
It was a day and age when the newspapers didnt provide plastic sheaths for their carriers to place over
each paper, so we can well imagine that homeowners had to dry out their papers in their ovens.
The expression a cloud on the horizon is often used when referring to a portent of much larger
developments to come. In With Liberty and Dividends for All, Peter Barnes is dealing with a subject that
is of the highest importance for American society and for which the first clouds appeared long ago. We
see this when he cites Thomas Paine as someone who more than two centuries ago made essentially the
same points he is making now. Since their early beginnings, the clouds have been building up,
accumulating backers who have grasped the same concepts. A forecaster now might well say there is a
high chance of rain, with conditions ripe for the ideas to reach fruition.
There have been socialists who have long endorsed the same ideas, but now the increasing
polarization of wealth and income, the decline of the American middle class after almost a half century
of stagnating wages, and the alliance of politics and business to form what many see as crony
capitalism are conditions that are bringing a growing number of non-socialists supporters of limited
government and a market economy to believe that the ideas will be vital to the successful operation of
capitalism itself.
What are those ideas?
The concepts are simple. The first is a recognition that there are many beneficences enjoyed by
people that have not come about through anybodys effort, having been created by nature or society as a
whole. Much of what surrounds us in daily life is of this sort. As the nineteenth-century economist
Henry George emphasized, the improvements made to land are the products of someones effort, but the
land itself is already there. This reviewer has made the point in his own writing on the subject that when
Mike Tyson earned $30 million for his infamous ear-biting prizefight with Evander Holyfield he was in
effect plugging into an immense social mechanism that he had not created, but on top of which he had
added his own skill and brawn. Earnings at that level were the product of a set of worldwide marketing
institutions made possible by advanced communications. Did Tyson create that? Certainly not. Did
anyone in particular? No. It was the product of the accretion of vast scientific-technical-entrepreneurialeven governmental effort by countless people.1
Dwight D. Murphey, The Great Economic Debacle and Beyond (Council for Social and Economic
Studies, 2011), p. 147. This book is available without charge on the Internet at www.dwightmurphey1

By now, a good many people on both the Right and Left in the United States have come to see the
importance and validity of this perception. Barnes cites economists Robert Theobald, James Tobin, Paul
Samuelson and John Kenneth Galbraith and reports an exchange between Fox News commentators Bill
OReilly and Lou Dobbs both on the Right, so to speak agreeing that we the people own the gas
and oil discovered in America Land and water are the domain of we the people.
The inference from the presence of so much unearned increment is that it rightfully belongs to
the population at large. Without violating anyones legitimate property right, some of it can be taken to
provide for the common benefit. (We say some of it because much of it must be considered to serve as
the commons within which individuals exercise their freedom; to take all of it would be to deny them
the space within which to carry out their lives. An example would be the air we breathe, which is, in
effect, common property. If each of us were charged its full value, whatever that might be, for
breathing, all individual activity would be enormously encumbered, and that is not the intent of those who
take the concept seriously.)
The conditions that are so vitiating capitalism today impel the conclusion that a market
economy would be well served if some significant portion of common property were made the basis for a
stream of non-labor income in equal portions to everyone. To the conditions weve already listed (i.e.,
the polarization, etc.), we should add the onrush of non-labor-intensive technology, which is capable of
producing heretofore unthought-of abundance while at the same time stripping hundreds of millions of
people of the traditional means of self-support through remunerated employment. Barnes points out that
jobs alone wont sustain a large middle class in the future, a fact that is apparent when we consider that
there will be many millions of people competing for income in the non-technical parts of the economy.
There is a major conundrum if the potential for incredible productivity is combined with peoples
inability to buy it. Without consumer purchasing power the productivity will have no means to continue
or the population to live. One need not have exceptional prescience to see that such a situation has
explosive potential, and that in itself gives those who are highly successful in todays global market a
very personal stake in putting the market economy back on the right track.
With Liberty and Dividends for All is a lucid, easily readable, highly intelligent discussion of all
this. Clarity of exposition is Barnes hallmark. If we were to seek to classify him ideologically, it
wouldnt be far off to place him on the American Left, although with the caveat that the Left and some
parts of the Right have been coming to have a fair amount in common on several issues. He has been a
correspondent for Newsweek and the New Republic, the co-founder of a worker-owned solar energy
company; and, as an environmentalist, has served on the board of Greenpeace International. His
compatibility with the Right comes when he says I want to fix capitalism rather than scuttle it, I
strongly believe in markets [and I] just as strongly believe in private property, tempered by a certain
amount of community property.2

collectedwritings.info. The second and third paragraphs of that website tell how to access the books
content on the site.
2
We should note, of course, that similar support for a market economy and private property has been
voiced by the social democratic parties in Europe ever since German socialists adopted the Bad
Godesberg Program in 1959. This suggests that there is considerable room for disagreement about just
what it is that a market economy and private property entail. An extreme example of how the terms
can be misused comes to mind. The American advocate of employee-ownership Louis Kelso wrote of a
plan for what he called capitalism that called for a total equalization of incomes, which necessarily is
altogether incompatible with a market economy. This was, in effect, a ruse, effective with the many who
didnt read him carefully. We dont assign too much significance to Barnes speaking well of Kelso,
since Barnes is by no means calling for a George Bernard Shaw-type of socialist levelling of all incomes.
For a discussion of Kelsos ruse, see this reviewers article Selling Socialism as The New Capitalism

The quick explanation we have just made of Barnes central thesis leaves a number of particulars
to be discussed. Here are some of them:
He cites figures that are by now well known on the matter of polarization. Speaking of the
United States, he reminds us that the top 1 percent currently owns 35 percent of all wealth, while the
next 19 percent claims 53 percent. The spread has been developing for several decades: Since 1970,
the incomes of men in their twenties and early thirties have fallen by 30 percent, a fact that has been
masked, he says, by three factors: womens income to produce two-income households; overtime and
second jobs; and the expansion of consumer debt. We might add that the fall in income has also been
masked, and significantly offset, by the cheap cost of vast quantities of imported consumer goods.
When he examines the reasons for the decline in income, he points to four relatively recent
developments: deindustrialization (the hollowing-out of American manufacturing by off-shoring, outsourcing and importation); globalization (which through vastly improved communication and low-cost
transportation is the setting for the factors just mentioned); automation; and deunionization. These are
central, of course, but dont fully tell the story. Barnes doesnt take into account the flood of tens of
millions of immigrants competing with Americans for work and most often willing to take less in pay;
and he places little stress on the imports, through which workers elsewhere in effect compete with
Americans, again at much lower wages. While he lists automation among his four causes, the brevity of
his book doesnt allow him to give it the attention it needs for readers fully to grasp the impact, already
existing and bound to increase immeasurably in the near future, of robotics and other non-labor-intensive
technology.3 It was this last factor, even more than the growing polarization since 1970, that a few years
ago caught the eye of this reviewer and caused him to see that profound changes were occurring that
made necessary a rethinking of just how capitalism will need to work.
When Barnes includes deunionization among the reasons for the fall in wages, he is accepting the
theory that unions were a cause of higher-than-otherwise wage levels in the United States. This thesis,
while common on the left, is not shared generally by free-market economists, who argue that wage levels
are the product of the supply and demand for labor. They agree with the obvious fact that unions have
been able to increase wages for their members, but they make the point that this comes at the expense of
others who are not then able to compete for those jobs. This is not the same thing as to say that unions
have served no useful purpose; there are a number of facets involved with the conditions of
employment that are not clearly a result of supply-and-demand, but rather depend on how things are
organized within a given firm or industry.4
It isnt surprising that because common property is so ubiquitous, Barnes reasons there is no
final answer as to what specific sources a society, through its law-making organs, might choose for the
money with which to pay the common dividend. He is, of course, able to name several. One of these, he
says, might be a financial transactions tax, a small levy upon each transaction (advocated by a number of
economists as a way somewhat to tame the ocean of financial flows in global finance), Another might be
for the United States to adopt a Value Added Tax (VAT), also endorsed by many economists, that would
match what most other nations have. Or the government could issue new money itself rather than have
the banking system do it through the present system of fractional reserve banking, and some of the
in the June 1990 issue of Conservative Review. The article is available as Article 25 (A25) on Murpheys
website identified in Footnote 1 here.
3
For an extensive description of the new technologies and their effects on work, see this reviewers
books The Emerging Crisis of Economic Displacement and A Shared Market Economy, each available
without charge on his website identified in Footnote 1 here. They are books B8 and B12, respectively, on
the site.
4
These issues of workers wages and conditions of employment are discussed at length in Chapter 12 on
Theories of Exploitation in this reviewers book Socialist Thought. The book appears as Book 4 (i.e.,
B4) on his website.

newly created money each year could fund, or help fund, the dividend. Barnes mentions that the United
States government issued money directly itself in the form of Greenbacks during the Civil War, and
that several economists in the 1930s urged such a monetary system. Along these lines, we would bring
the readers attention to the work of the American Monetary Institute (mentioned by Barnes) in support of
monetary reconstruction; and to the article by this reviewer discussing the AMIs proposal, the Chicago
Plan put forward by University of Chicago economists and others during the 1930s, and his own
recommendations, which differed somewhat from AMIs. (See Footnote 5 here.)
Barnes includes a passage discussing this reviewers shared market economy proposal, which
calls for creating a national trust that will hold index mutual fund shares (thereby investing across the
entire stock market), receive dividends from the shares, and pay a common dividend to the American
public from that money, which will have been generated by the economy. When Barnes says briefly that
the capital to acquire the holdings would come from the US Treasury, which would borrow it from the
Federal Reserve, that is a too succinct and not altogether accurate description of the sources this
reviewer discusses in Chapter 18 of his book A Shared Market Economy and in his article on monetary
reconstruction.5
One of the sources this reviewer cites comes from the fact that a common dividend, depending
upon its sufficiency, can replace the multitude of social welfare programs, amounting to expenditures of
hundreds of billions of dollars, that exist today. Barnes tells us that in Europe the initiatives that are
proposed for a guaranteed minimum income do not contemplate such a substitution: Such income
would be in addition to, not in lieu of, existing social programs. But he says a trend among major
developing countries [is to have] direct cash payment programs as alternatives to traditional aid. For
his own part, Barnes says the new pipes wouldnt replace our existing ones like social insurance.
This is consistent with his as-yet rather limited aspiration: The long-term goal is to pay
dividends that modestly supplement labor income for everyone. This should be seen as insufficient,
though, for the impending future in which non-labor-intensive technology so greatly displaces labor
income. The limited aspiration comes perhaps from being too centered, as most people still are because
that is all theyve ever known historically, on jobs as the means of livelihood. A modest supplement
may be valuable as a politically feasible first step because it fits into everyones current mindset, but the
future will demand more.
It seems apparent, too, that whether the common dividend can replace the existing programs will
depend on how ample the dividend is. One of the things that can make it ample is for the money that is
now spent on social security, Medicaid, food stamps and countless other supportive efforts to go, instead,
into the fund from which the dividend is paid. It is interesting that Henry George argued that his
proposed land tax should cause the abolition of all other taxes now levied.6 (This, of course, was
speaking of taxes, not social programs; but the idea is similar.)
This has a direct bearing on an issue that will be of especial interest to libertarians on both the
Left and Right: how to minimize the role of government itself in the matter of income distribution. Those
who wish to keep an active government role, including a vast stage for politics and ideology, will not
want the common dividend to take the place of the multitudinous programs. For his part, Barnes sees it as
a good thing for money to go directly into the national trust fund and then on to the population through
dividends: This means the revenue bypasses government coffers and all the battles that surround them.
As a classical liberal, this reviewer agrees with Barnes, and sees the bypassing of government as a major
advantage to be gained from creating an independent trust fund to pay a common dividend.7 It would be a
The article is Capitalisms Deepening Crisis: The Imperative of Monetary Reconstruction, published
in the Fall 2011 issue of this Journal, pp. 277-300. It appears as Article 105 on Murpheys website.
6
Henry George, Protection or Free Trade (Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1966), p. 283.
7
It would seem to this reviewer that Barnes has misconstrued Henry Georges intent when he says (on
page 51) that unlike [Thomas] Paine, who would have returned recaptured rent to everyone, George
5

mistake to think of it as a socialist program rather than as a far-reaching enhancement of limited

government.
Another issue has a bearing on this. This reviewer has proposed a national trust that will hold
index mutual fund shares, paying the dividend from the earnings. Is this better than alternative formats?
The Alaska system, Barnes tells us, has the money from the oil pipeline revenue go into a trust that
invests the money and pays the Alaska dividend from the investment earnings. This is almost the same
thing as this reviewers proposal, but without the requirement that the investments be in index mutual
funds. If we consider how the trust, even though independent, will almost certainly be subject to
pressures from interested parties and even ideological or political factions with regard to where it invests
its money, we come to understand that the index mutual fund idea has the advantage, to those with a
libertarian bent, of removing the trusts role in selecting investments. By definition, index funds are those
that invest broadly across the market.
Barnes includes a very brief discussion of the lifestyle effects of a common dividend. He
observes that well have more time to devote to family, friends, communities, and other interests. An
ever-larger number of us will be able not only to pursue happiness but to enjoy it. No doubt that is true.
There is, however, a dystopian possibility that society will have to take seriously about a (relatively)
jobless future. Will tens of millions of people use their leisure well, as we might hope they will? Or
will Jonathan Swifts horrific vision of the brutish Yahoos seen by Gulliver on his voyage to the land of
the houyhnhnms rather set the tone? Our expectation will, of course, be colored by whether we are
optimists or pessimists; but the truth is we dont know what that future will bring. We can anticipate,
however, that civilization will face unprecedented psychological, spiritual and cultural issues.
As we noted earlier, Barnes is a committed environmentalist. This has caused him to have
global warming and a perceived need for the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions play a central role
in his thoughts about how the common dividend system should work. He devotes a chapter to cap-andtrade, with a very considerable reduction over time of the extent of permits issued. He tells how President
Obama has called for a descending cap on carbon that will cut U.S. emissions 80 percent by 2050.
Barnes favors combining an auctioning of permits with a distribution of the revenue from the auction to
the public (as part of the common dividend), resulting in what he calls a cap and dividend system. The
dividend would greatly increase the political palatability of the permit program and would offset the
increased fuel costs the public would incur because of the limitation of fuel supplies.
For those who are convinced by the global warming thesis and as to its scientific foundation,
his inclusion of limits on carbon will be most welcome. It should be apparent, though, that this is an addon that is by no means integral to the books main theme. A recognition of unearned increment and of
how this justifies a common dividend to maintain a middle class and undergird a market economy does
not depend upon such an added feature. A marriage of the two will be unfortunate if it complicates the
picture by introducing highly controverted issues of science and ideology. And if the skeptics toward
globaI warming turn out to be right, the marriage will be doubly unfortunate.

would have left it in governments hands. In Protection or Free Trade (p. 285), George wrote of a fund
in which the tenant himself [which in the context of Georges discussion we can take to mean everyone]
would be an equal sharer with the richest. As to this fund, he mentioned (p. 284) a large and constantly
increasing fund [that] would be provided for common uses. Were those uses to be determined by
government? Not necessarily. All schemes for securing equality in the conditions of men by placing the
distribution of wealth in the hands of government, George wrote at p. 305, presuppose pure
government; but it is not government that makes society. It was in keeping with this that George quoted
with favor (p. 312) a suggestion that there be a pension to everybody. George wrote a great deal,
though; and Barnes basically relies on a different book of his than this reviewer does, so it seems best to
leave the question open, simply citing the foregoing quotes as some evidence of Georges views.

Readers who have had the intellectual fortitude to grapple with all we have considered in this review
and we have confidence that most readers of this Journal are of that sort will easily appreciate that Peter
Barnes has produced a remarkably valuable book. It deserves earnest attention.
Dwight D. Murphey