The Monetary Ground and the Life-Ground: Toward a Plural, Corrigible Economics of Viable Freedom

Monetary institutions coordinate production and distribute claims on resources, yet financial success can coexist with deprivation, deteriorating infrastructure, and ecological damage. This conceptual white paper develops a common framework for investigating that divergence without proposing a comprehensive economic theory. It distinguishes monetary accounting, causal explanation, institutional authority, real provisioning, and normative evaluation. A selective synthesis brings endogenous money, functional finance, financial instability, stock-flow consistency, and institutional and ecological economics into dialogue with John McMurtry’s life-value onto-axiology and the companion Viable Freedom framework. The governing sequence is LIFE → VIABLE FREEDOM → CORRIGIBILITY: life conditions provide the evaluative ground; viable freedom concerns effectively accessible and jointly sustainable possibilities; and corrigibility requires theories and institutions to remain answerable to evidence and affected persons. The Daoist concepts of ziran and wu-wei inform attention to actual conditions and proportionate enabling action. A hypothetical water-infrastructure example distinguishes financing barriers from engineering, capacity, distributional, and ecological constraints. The paper’s contribution is a disciplined interface among explanatory traditions, not proof that any particular monetary architecture will improve outcomes. Its research programme specifies competing mechanisms, observable consequences, and conditions under which proposed interventions should be revised or rejected.