Introduction to:
A Shared Market Economy: A Classical Liberal Rethinks the Market System

By Dwight D. Murphey

Calling all “conservatives and libertarians”!

A Shared Market Economy with a universal basic income (UBI) is consistent both with a vigorous market system and the well-being of people in general. This book, A ‘Shared Market Economy’: A Classical Liberal Rethinks the Market System (2009), is unique in that it offers a conservative, market-oriented solution to the rapidly developing substitution of technology for human labor. The incoming jobless technology simultaneously offers both untold abundance and the displacement of many millions of people that in effect destroys the middle class. How can the technological revolution be made consistent both with a vigorous market system and a prosperous population? Unlike many of the proposals that make government the center of the solution, this book proposes an answer.

Because it brings much to the discussion that others do not — such as a reexamination of the conceptual premises of free-market theory and a proposed structure for income distribution that enhances the role of the market and keeps government intervention into peoples’ lives to a minimum — Murphey is republishing the book here. You can find the work, also, as a Kindle book. Subject only to the liberal limitations relating to “Permission to Reproduce and Republish” spelled out on his collected writings website, the book is “in the public domain,” available free of charge for opening, downloading and copying.  As an important supplement, we have included here Murphey’s article on monetary reconstruction, Capitalism’s Deepening Crisis: The Imperative of Monetary Reconstruction. It addresses how the monetary and banking systems can be reconstituted to support a shared market economy.

The discussion around technological displacement

Readers will want to read the works of a good many other people who have written about the problem/promise of technological displacement. An excellent book on the subject is Peter Barnes’ With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don’t Pay Enough. He tells how Alaska has since 1980 had a system or income distribution, and that as long ago as 1797 Thomas Paine “proposed something quite like it.” Andrew Yang, as a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020, has given prominence to the issue of a universal basic income (UBI). Among those he cites as supporting the idea of a basic minimum income, or something like it, are Milton Friedman, Richard Nixon, Martin Luther King Jr., Stephen Hawking, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. Although he also lists Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders, it is well to keep in mind that the awareness is not the exclusive property of the Left. We see this when such a strong conservative as commentator Lou Dobbs calls for “an American Trust” as a vehicle for income distribution.

A Shared Market Economy
Table of Contents

Another Book by Murphey on the Future of Capitalism

In 2011, Murphey compiled a book entitled The Great Economic Debacle — and Beyond: Reviews and Commentary, consisting of a number of his articles and book reviews on the American economic plight in the context of the financial crisis.  It continues the discussion of the points raised in A Shared Market Economy.