The concept of the common good lives in the background of our world today, but is rarely explicitly discussed. Perhaps it is not discussed because bringing the concept to the forefront of thought would challenge too many ideologies and mythological assumptions behind today’s rivalries and power struggles, both within and between nations. However, more and more thinkers are pointing out the uncertainty facing the future of humanity itself. Are we a species rushing headlong toward self-extinction? Perhaps it is time for a renewed reflection on the common good.

The concept of the common good begins, but does not end, with economics. Even the mainstream news today brings forth major economic issues facing our world. The global hegemony of the United States, which came into its full power in the decades following World War II, has been rapidly declining, led by the spectacular growth of China after it entered the World Trade Organization in December 2001 and its conscious growth-planning toward becoming the industrial heartland of the planet. China has been developing infrastructure for global trade through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), connecting nations and peoples worldwide with rapid, convenient port facilities, highways, high-speed rail, low-cost development loans, and payment systems ultimately designed ultimately to replace the US dollar as the planet’s reserve currency.

On the global stage, the hegemony of the United States with its “free market” ideology is being challenged by the rising nations of the coalition of nations known as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). This coalition has been rapidly growing and today includes Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia, with many more nations signaling interest in joining. These eleven nations alone have a combined GDP of nearly 40% of the world’s productivity and represent more than half the world’s population.

China’s system has often been termed “state capitalism” in which investment and development planning are coordinated through an authoritarian central government rather than, as in the USA, where the mantra intones that investment and development must largely come about through “private enterprise” in which government can either serve as a regulator on the development with an eye to the common economic good and preventing economic downturns (“Keynesianism”) or simply as a facilitator that largely gets out of the way to let the self-correcting “free market” of private entrepreneurs compete with one another for financial success and the accumulation of private wealth.

It is important to note that neither the USA models nor the BRICS model appears to ask the question as to whether there is a common good for humanity in general. Neither do they ask the question as to what a common good might look like that takes into consideration other factors besides the economic ones. Is there more to life than economic flourishing with food, housing, healthcare, education and the rest? If this is the starting point, are there other factors to consider, such as a meaningful life, a vibrant community, or reasonable equality with others? And is capitalism the best economic system for fostering the common good in general, both economic and beyond? Both the BRICS model of state capitalism and the “Western” model of “free enterprise are premised on the possibility of endless growth on a finite planet. We need to begin thinking seriously about what a common good for all humanity might look like.

These important questions are rarely raised in part because the world’s players (nation-states) are obsessed with national development, power struggles, and economic hegemony. Do such struggles take into account the common good of the planet and its peoples? Clearly not. What about socialist theory? What about human spirituality and the meaning of life? Does any nation ask about a fulfilling human life in general, for everyone on the planet? Historically, it has often been socialist theory that has raised these questions, as I will discuss below.

In the USA today, the problem is acute in that the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands has deformed democracy almost beyond recognition. Since the demise of the New Deal that had been brokered by President F.D. Roosevelt after the Great Depression of 1929-33, the sharing of productive wealth in the USA by the population in general has seriously diminished. With the Presidency of Ronald Reagan after 1980, the New Deal had already been challenged by a rising class of super-wealthy persons and corporations. Today, the government has been largely colonized by this super-wealthy class who buy politicians, pack the courts in their own interests, and spend vast sums of money putting in place a Presidency that serves their interests at the expense of all other considerations.

In the USA, questions of the common good have been resurrected by some thoughtful politicians in the face of this obvious perversion of the so-called “American dream” of everyone being able to have a house, family, and decent life prospects for one’s children. Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy’s 2026 book Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America raises important issues about the meaning of the common good in relation to both economics and democracy.

Murphy covers six key “cults,” 1. The Cult of Profit, 2. The Cult of Everywhere (globalization), 3. The Cult of Technology, 4. The Cult of Consumption, 5. The Cult of Credentialism, and 6. The Cult of Corruption. Unlike the ideologues of conservative economics and politics who argue that “big government” must be reduced to stay out of the way of “free market” business and enterprise, Murphy recognizes that government is responsible for a generalized common good requiring its presence in many walks of life. Without government protecting the common good of the people, predatory capitalism remakes culture, traditions and family life in its own image. It cares nothing for the common good.

For this Senator, the common good means that life is more than a struggle for private wealth accumulation. It is more than a life of endless consumption. It need not involve an accumulation of useless college degrees along with unsustainable personal debt, nor families going bankrupt because of medical debt, nor getting lost in the endless seductions of AI-driven technology that promotes isolated and meaningless lives. All these mis-directions have culminated in the “cult of corruption” that now dominates the White House and the lives of the super-rich who own 90% of the wealth in the USA.

These cults distort a fulfilling life that involves, in various combinations, community, family, reasonable prosperity, loyalty to meaningful places and people, quality schools, healthcare, and childcare, all within a framework of meaningful, productive jobs, along with a shared effort to expand this democratic common good for all. A fulfilling life involves citizens serving their communities and one another with compassion and commitment. It means families that are part of larger social units with common concern, and these are part of a social whole in which a democratic polity of integrity, solidarity, and commitment fosters the good of all. However, just as “socialism” in one country is a near impossibility within the present world system, so democracy in one country is also nearly impossible.

Democratic government, involved in promoting all these dimensions of the common good, is the key to reversing and overcoming the “free market” ideology that has driven America to its present ruinous condition. Jobs have migrated overseas, communities have been fragmented and impoverished, small local businesses have been driven out of business by huge corporate enterprises replacing them with lower prices, along with anti-union policies, minimum wages that are not living wages, refusal to supply decent healthcare coverage to employees, and remote stakeholders far removed from the communities in which they operate.

Even high school and college sports have been turned into community-destroying commercial enterprises. Many 20th-century philosophers of law, from John Finnis to Ronald Dworkin to Lon Fuller to Alan Gewirth, have also understood that legitimate democratic government must necessarily address the well-being of citizens and not simply their “freedom.” For Gewirth, in The Community of Rights (1996), government is only legitimate if it addresses not only the freedom of people but their “well-being,” their health, housing, income, and other factors that make freedom possible. If democracy entails “liberty, equality, and community,” the first of these in the form of a so-called “free market” must be regulated in such a way that it does not destroy the others—equality and community.

Today’s markets, of course, do destroy equality and community. Their “freedom” to unlimited accumulation without significant government regulation destroys the last two pillars of democracy. The founders of the American vision, such as John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early 17th century, embraced this vision of a larger common good. Winthrop called for “a community organized around mutual obligation and shared sacrifice.” I affirm that these are indeed worthy goals. However, we need to understand exactly what the presuppositions of the system are and why these are ultimately impossible goals within the current system.

The theoretical foundations of the US system derive from John Locke, who claimed that the function of government formed under a social contract of the citizens was to protect the “life, liberty, and property” of each citizen. For Locke, these “God-given” rights are prior to government, which is then instituted to protect them. Even though this trinity of a priori rights was changed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” the assumption of property being prior to government is retained by the US Constitution. The two places in the Constitution that mention property are the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.

The Fifth Amendment prohibits the government from taking private property for its own (public) use without fair compensation, and the Fourteenth Amendment says that the government can take a person’s property only through “due process of law.” Hence, it appears that the Constitution offers no official way to regulate private accumulation of property by citizens or their corporations. It can only give “just compensation” when it seizes property using due process. Private wealth is assumed, prior to governmental authority, as an a priori right.

The US Constitution does not say that the government must define what property is. It does not say that the government creates money and defines property or wealth democratically in order to promote the common good of society. It does not say that property can be defined in ways that promote the common good and that government can also avoid defining it in ways that are harmful to human communities and to nature. It does not say that any reasonable governmental policy will both define different forms that property can take and will put a limit on the private accumulations of “personal” property by anyone. It does not point out the utter absurdity and destructive consequences of anyone having, for example, 100 million dollars in personal wealth, let alone the utter corruption and immorality of anyone having a billion or more dollars.

In his Second Treatise on Government, Locke asserted that, with the invention of money, all moral and rational limits were lifted on the private accumulation of wealth. And this (precarious) metaphysical assumption continues in the background of the US Constitution. Today, all thinking people understand that money and property are social phenomena and not God-given rights prior to government and society. Money is a social tool, socially created, and in need of governance by public authorities in a democratic society.

Many have praised Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness” clause (that replaced Locke’s “property” as an a priori right) and it as pointing to a common good that is the responsibility of government to encourage and protect. However, few ever question capitalism, which is an amoral system of investment in productive enterprises with the goal of extracting a profit from these enterprises and reinvesting at least part of the surplus created back into the system in order to generate a continuing accumulation of private wealth in a cycle that has no end, and that places no limits on the amount of private wealth that can be accumulated.

Senator Murthy and others do not question the dogma, intrinsic to capitalism, that “endless growth is possible on a finite planet.” As I showed in my 2021 book The Earth Constitution Solution: Design for a Living Planet, an entire chorus of advanced environmental thinkers has advanced this fundamental ecological principle. Our planetary ecology manifests balances and integrative systems from the tiniest ecological niche to the macro-processes of planetary heating and cooling. Ecology thinks in terms of harmonies, balances, and integrations. Endless growth of any one dimension, like cancer, kills the entire system.

None of this appears to have restrained the growth of a system of billionaires who have the power to buy up media as well as elections so that they control the entire process of public information and public power in the service of their own interests. This is not a recent phenomenon, but it defines much of the history of the United States and global economics. These assumptions were challenged by socialist theory in the 19th century and by ecological principles in the 20th, but to little avail. The concept of “socialism” itself has many interpretations and a number of possible market or non-market arrangements within its scope, but all of them recognize the falsity of capitalism. Socialism does not mean “government ownership of everything,” which is the propaganda slogan invented by the rich to deter people from seeking out the deeper meanings of socialism.

Many of the definitions of socialism, insofar as they claim to intersect with “democracy,” also have in common the understanding that government and society should be directed to the common good of all citizens within a framework (first formulated by the French Revolution in the 18th century) of liberty, equality, and community (i.e., fraternity, common concern for others). This means that property and money should be defined, regulated, and empowered with a view to liberty, equality, and community, and that it is a self-contradiction to posit a prior economic reality called “capitalism” that government must then regulate under the heading of “accountable capitalism” in trying to protect the common good of all. Capitalism enslaves the rest of us to the super-rich. Most basically, socialism means that economics should work for the common good of all.

The system of capitalism has always offered the illusion of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” to cover up its predatory nature: “If capitalists are free to be as greedy as the system allows, then magically the common good will be promoted as a side effect of this system directed to the endless accumulation of private wealth.” But all rational persons see that this “trickle-down theory” is actually a “piss on them” reality. The entire history of the past 400 years of capitalism refutes this empirically false assumption. Nevertheless, the ideology of the USA from its very inception has been a dogmatic affirmation of this system of private accumulation that is prior to government and the good of society, an ideology so powerful that neither Democratic nor Republican members of the US government are able to think beyond it. Philosopher Michael Luntley puts our situation in the following terms:

Socialism is not a moral theory that offers a particular version of the good life; instead, it is a theory about how the good life is possible. It is, in short, a theory about the conditions necessary for creating a society in which our lives are shaped by moral values—we defer to the authority of the good—rather than a society in which our moral traditions have been erased by forces inimical to the moral life. And part of this theory about the conditions necessary for the good life provides the leading critical aspect of socialism. That part is the claim that it is capitalism which has been largely responsible for the destruction of the conditions necessary for the good life (1990, 15).

Capitalism assumes a social atomism in which individuals (or their corporations) compete within a “free market” for the accumulation of private profit. As Chris Murphy points out in the above-mentioned book, this assumption is wrong. We are not individual atoms prior to society, but are social beings integral to society. Capitalism does not put our moral relationship to one another first. It puts a system of atomized private accumulation first. This system destroys the very foundations of moral relationships (our liberty, equality, and community). Nevertheless, it is those moral relationships that are the proper basis of both society and government.

Philosopher Leonard Nelson, in his System of Ethics, calls capitalism “economic despotism” and observes that it is “a form of extortion, since it exploits the spiritual distress of some people for the purpose of securing rule over their conscience” (1956, 242-43). Capitalism distorts people’s moral conscience, demanding loyalty to its criminality on the pain of losing one’s livelihood. One thinks of the many members of the US Congress whose consciences are ruled by this “economic despotism.” Economist Duncan Foley, in Adam’s Fallacy, concludes that “the social division of labor through commodity exchange and wage labor systematically inverts the ordinary logic of human relationships” (2008, 85). Human relations begin with our moral concern for one another, with our universal human dignity demanding mutual respect and concern for the common good of all. Capitalism inverts all this.

Even Karl Marx, who famously critiqued “bourgeois morality” as an illusion generated by the capitalist economic system, saw that society must be oriented to promote our shared “species-being,” that is, our common human welfare, rather than bourgeois “rights” such as the a priori “right” to private property. Mexican scholar José Miranda, in his books Marx and the Bible: A Critique of the Philosophy of Oppression (1974) and Marx Against the Marxists: The Christian Humanism of Karl Marx (1986), shows in great detail that Marx’s work and thought were steeped in the biblical morality of justice and the equality of all people before the universal moral law. Also, John C. Cort, in his book Christian Socialism: An Informal History (1988), traces the long history in which the Bible inspired many socialist movements among Christians.

Under democratic socialism, society and government define money and property and allocate these tools for the common good of all (liberty, equality, and community), which may well include the use of markets for certain purposes. Thus, this moral ground, embedded in a Constitution embracing all humanity, results in a civilization that remains morally grounded (precisely because it begins with a Constitution, law, and the morally grounded social matrix). If you begin with the assumption of the unlimited right to the private accumulation of wealth (amoral social atomism), then the result will inevitably be the nightmare of exploitation, manipulation, deception, and misery that the world has faced for the past 400 years.

This is what it means to embrace democratic socialism, as was also pointed out by American social thinker Michael Harrington in his seminal book Socialism (1972). This book recounts the history of the idea of socialism and its impact. I have long supported the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), ever since we lived in Manhattan (where it was headquartered) during the 1970s and early 80s. In a healthy reaction to Donald Trump’s extreme capitalist corruption, Democratic Socialists like Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie Sanders are winning elections in the USA. I have heard current spokespersons for the DSA speaking about DSA’s belief in organizing, social solidarity, etc., but they are mainly missing the point. The real point is the ethical foundation of socialism.

Without much contrast to the DSA as it represents itself in the United States, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren also promotes an idea of “accountable capitalism” that might mitigate some of the misery caused by a runaway economy of billionaires and their corporations. But this can never solve the problem. (Similarly, such a starting point can never end wars globally, nor effectively address the climate crisis.) Capitalism, like “sovereign” nation-states, is based on 17th and 18th-century metaphysical assumptions long since transcended by 20th and 21st-century social sciences, natural science, ecology, and evolutionary culture. The point is that democratic socialism is based on the fundamental moral principle of human dignity as the foundation of good government. Capitalism is not based on any moral principles. It is simply a system of wealth extraction premised on assumptions that ignore and therefore violate human dignity.

We need to wake up fully to our human situation instead of continuing to limp along with the thoughtless concept of the a priori atomist right to the unlimited accumulation of property or the equally absurd concept of a system of atomized, militarized sovereign nation-states that can somehow get along on this tiny planet with its interdependent human and environmental matrices. The fact that Chris Murphy and Elizabeth Warren include “military service” among their examples of a self-sacrificing service to the community and the greater good shows that their thinking remains within this unquestioned ideological framework. Training to kill people in other societies and destroy their life-support systems can never be authentic “community service.”

It is inherently immoral, and the system that demands this must be transformed. Such “progressive” politicians see “community” as meaningful employment, the ability to survive with a one-income family, civic participation, local and family involvement—all fine, but very narrow. We don’t need to include training to destroy the communities of other people around the world in the concept of our “common good.”

The false presuppositions of of these political ideologies go unrecognized—the prior right to unlimited accumulation of private wealth, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the possibility of one militarized nation-state creating a decent life for its citizens in the face of other competing nations armed with weapons of mass destruction and competing equally for the planet’s resources (regardless of, and in complete disregard for, the more than one billion people living in hunger and misery around the planet). We don’t need “the indispensable nation.” We need the “indispensable planet Earth” embracing all humanity.

In my view, to begin thought concerning political economy with the moral dimension, as we saw above in the work of Luntley, Nelson, Foley, Harrington, and Marx, leads us straight to the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. The Constitution can solve the world’s most fundamental problems (climate collapse, human rights violations, massive poverty, war and terrible weapons of destruction and death) precisely because it founds government and civilization on human dignity and the moral dimension. Democratic world government cannot result from a set of “reforms” of a UN Charter that is entirely premised on both these egregious errors.

World government begins and ends with human dignity. The Earth Constitution sets up a Democratic World Parliament within a system of transparency, agency interaction, checks, balances, and universal human rights to unite humanity in brotherhood, solidarity, and common vision directed toward the only authentic common good, which is that of all humanity and the other life forms that inhabit the Earth. Neither “capitalism” nor “socialism” are mentioned in the Earth Constitution. However, the power of the Earth Federation to define property and to place this concept within a large framework of human dignity and flourishing makes it “socialist” in this broad sense.

The people of the United States have universal human rights, not just the first 10 amendments of their Constitution (see the Earth Constitution, Articles 12 and 13). But the system of sovereign nation-states structurally denies them access to their universal human rights. We limp along with these mere 10 amendments. People in the USA share these universal rights with all other human beings.

The Earth Constitution, in Article 8.7, gives us global public banking and a “debt-free” Earth Currency that is defined and regulated by the world government for the common good of all. Corporations are also defined and regulated for this common good, and the Provisional World Parliament, operating under the authority of the Earth Constitution, passed World Legislative Act 22 that limits the amount of personal property any one person can accumulate relative to those with the least property. There will be no more people on Earth with no personal property (and no one with an obscene amount of personal property), for everyone has a right to a decent standard of living: good food, housing, clothing, healthcare, education, a clean environment, etc.

The only way to establish universal respect for these universal rights is through a democratic world government under the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. All else is just smoke and mirrors in the face of a human civilization that is well on the way to planetary omnicide. Concerned politicians and their ideas can serve as a jumping-off place toward thinking about a universal common good. But to be truly “common” is necessarily to be “universal.” Now is the time for all of us to make that leap.