Why Political Choice Needs Common Rights Without Uniform Welfare Systems
Imagine three political communities.
One provides extensive public healthcare and education, financed through relatively high taxes. Another has lower taxes and relies more heavily on private services. A third offers generous family support but fewer benefits for people living alone.
If people could meaningfully choose among these communities, many would welcome the opportunity.
But who could actually make that choice?
A wealthy person might move without much difficulty. A low-income family could face expensive housing, uncertain employment, and the possible loss of important protections. Someone receiving continuing medical care might find relocation particularly difficult.
The distinction is not simply between people who want to move and people who prefer to stay.
It is also between those who have meaningful alternatives and those whose alternatives exist largely on paper.
In the previous essay, I distinguished economic mobility from political-community choice. Competition, I argued, should serve political freedom rather than become its purpose.
That leaves another question.
How can political communities remain different without allowing those differences to become new forms of exclusion and inequality?
Equal Political Members Can Have Unequal Lives
Resident Equality is a central principle of the World Citizen Society.
People who become full political members of a community should have equal political standing, regardless of inherited nationality. Their membership should be secure. It should not depend on how economically attractive they remain.
But equal political members may lead very different lives.
One can afford to move to a community with better opportunities. Another depends on nearby employment, public transportation, or essential care.
Both may have the legal right to move. Only one may have a realistic opportunity to do so.
Resident Equality does not mean that everyone must earn the same income or enjoy identical living conditions. It concerns equal political membership.
I use social equality here to examine a related question: whether people have the basic conditions needed to live with dignity and participate meaningfully, despite differences in wealth, health, or location.
I am not proposing one welfare system for the entire world.
Political equality is not economic uniformity. Still, serious deprivation can make formally equal political rights difficult to exercise.
This matters for Hand Democracy, the freedom to participate in governing one’s community, and Foot Democracy, the freedom to choose a political community.
When Choice Conceals Exclusion
Suppose higher-income residents increasingly move toward communities with low taxes and attractive private amenities.
Lower-income residents remain where housing is cheaper or public services are easier to obtain.
Over time, people with similar incomes might become concentrated in different places.
Researchers sometimes call this sorting: the tendency of people with similar characteristics or preferences to settle in the same areas.
Sorting is not automatically unjust.
People may wish to live near relatives, employment, familiar cultures, or others who share their preferences. They may reasonably prefer different combinations of taxes and services.
But choosing a destination is not the same as having no realistic alternative.
Consider a family living in a community with inadequate schools because housing elsewhere is unaffordable.
Its place of residence may appear to reflect a choice.
What could the family actually choose?
The problem becomes more serious when housing restrictions, discrimination, or administrative barriers prevent people from entering more prosperous communities.
A community may formally welcome newcomers while making settlement extremely difficult for those with limited resources.
Not every expensive housing market constitutes deliberate exclusion. Geography, demand, construction costs, and available land all affect prices.
But neither should every pattern of residence be treated as evidence of free preference.
Earlier essays on Charles Tiebout and territorial communities examined how housing and local boundaries complicate the idea of voting with one’s feet.
The distinction here is between voluntary sorting and exclusionary separation.
Freedom of political-community choice cannot be measured only by the number of communities that formally permit entry.
We must also ask who can realistically enter them.
Housing and Effective Entry
Housing makes the problem concrete.
The OECD’s International Migration Outlook 2024 describes obstacles immigrants face in obtaining housing, including discrimination, missing documents, inadequate information, and difficulties accessing assistance.
Using integration indicators published in 2023 by the OECD and European Commission, it reports that across the European Union, 26 percent of immigrants lived in substandard housing, compared with 20 percent of native-born residents.
These figures describe existing conditions. They do not establish that immigration causes inadequate housing or predict what Foot Democracy would produce.
But they illustrate the difference between legal permission and a practical opportunity to settle.
Without suitable housing, someone may struggle to keep a job, enroll children in school, obtain healthcare, or establish lasting relationships.
A home can therefore be important to developing the durable residence on which political membership may eventually rest.
No political order can guarantee everyone a home in every preferred destination.
But a system that seeks meaningful political-community choice must take housing, discrimination, and practical access to settlement seriously.
An open door is of limited value when the conditions beyond it remain inaccessible.
Common Rights, Different Institutions
If competition can create exclusion, should every community adopt the same welfare system?
I do not think so.
Residents may reasonably disagree about taxation, healthcare, education, and the balance between public and private provision.
A World Citizen Society should preserve room for those disagreements.
In The World Citizen Society, I distinguish common rights floors from complete institutional uniformity.
A common floor means minimum protections that every participating community must respect. It does not mean identical policies above that minimum.
The European Pillar of Social Rights offers a useful comparison.
Its twenty principles address matters such as healthcare, minimum income, long-term care, housing assistance, and essential services.
Yet those principles do not, by themselves, create one welfare law that individuals can enforce directly in every EU country. Practical implementation depends on applicable legislation, policies, and institutions.
This difference matters.
Agreeing that people should have access to essential services is not the same as establishing who must provide them, how they will be financed, and what happens when access is denied.
For the World Citizen Society, a common rights floor would need clear responsibilities, adequate resources, and ways to enforce the protections it promises.
Its precise content remains a question of institutional design.
A common floor should protect people against deprivation, not eliminate every legitimate difference among political communities.
The difficulty is making that minimum effective without unnecessarily transferring ordinary policy decisions to common institutions.
How Switzerland and Canada Combine Autonomy with Equalization
Suppose two communities are responsible for providing essential services.
One has prosperous businesses and substantial tax revenue. The other has fewer taxable resources and unusually high costs.
Both may accept the same basic obligations. But the second community will find them harder to finance.
What can be done without requiring both communities to adopt identical policies?
Switzerland offers one example.
Its cantons—roughly comparable to states or provinces—have substantial authority over taxation.
At the same time, Switzerland operates a national system of fiscal equalization, substantially redesigned in 2008.
Fiscal equalization is a way of reducing differences in governments’ financial capacity.
The Swiss system provides support for cantons with weaker fiscal resources. It also recognizes certain unusually high costs associated with geography and population characteristics.
A mountainous canton may face costs different from those of an urban canton.
The system does not require every canton to adopt the same tax rates or welfare programs. Cantons generally retain discretion over how they use equalization resources.
That freedom matters.
Financial support can help a canton carry out public responsibilities without placing every spending decision under federal control.
It does not mean all Swiss residents receive identical services or that social inequality has disappeared.
Canada provides a related constitutional example.
Section 36(2) of the Constitution Act, 1982 commits the federal government to the principle of equalization payments intended to provide provincial governments with sufficient revenue to offer reasonably comparable public services at reasonably comparable levels of taxation.
The key expression is reasonably comparable.
It does not mean identical.
The aim concerns the financial capacity to provide public services, not a requirement that every province impose the same taxes or operate every service in the same way.
Canadian equalization payments come from federal general revenues. Provinces receiving them may use the funds according to their own priorities.
The constitutional provision does not itself give every individual a directly enforceable claim to identical public services.
Neither Switzerland nor Canada is a ready-made model for the World Citizen Society. Their arrangements operate within established federal states and remain subjects of political disagreement.
Still, they demonstrate that financial solidarity does not necessarily abolish fiscal autonomy.
Too little support can leave poorer communities unable to meet common obligations. Too much unconditional support can weaken responsibility for discretionary local spending.
The purpose of equalization should be to make meaningful self-government possible, not to eliminate the differences that self-government allows.
This essay does not need to settle the precise transfer formula.
But effective rights require resources, and fiscal cooperation also requires accountability.
When Cooperation Goes Too Far
Common rules can protect people against deprivation. They can also become unnecessarily restrictive.
Suppose several communities agree that everyone should have access to essential healthcare.
That may justify common minimum standards.
But must every community then organize its hospitals, insurance, and financing in exactly the same way?
Not necessarily.
Different institutions may satisfy the same minimum right.
A common authority should not gain general control over social policy merely because it has been assigned responsibility for a particular protection.
The previous essay, Can Political Power Be Divided Without Creating a World Government?, examined why shared institutions may need binding authority without becoming a World Government.
The same problem arises here.
Too little cooperation can make social rights ineffective. Too much uniformity can weaken democratic self-government.
The question is how far common rules need to extend to fulfill their justified purposes.
Rights Should Not Disappear When People Move
Social protection also affects the ability to change political communities.
Someone may work for many years before moving elsewhere. Pension rights, insurance histories, and essential care needs do not disappear at a border.
Earlier essays, including Can Welfare Survive Political Mobility? and How Can Rights Survive Movement?, examined this problem.
The central point here is that freedom of movement becomes less meaningful when exercising it requires an arbitrary loss of legitimately accumulated protections.
This does not mean every benefit must remain identical in every destination.
It means that social protection and political-community choice cannot be designed independently of each other.
What About the People Who Stay?
Not everyone can move. Not everyone wants to.
Imagine a community where poorer neighborhoods have inadequate schools, unreliable transportation, and limited healthcare.
Residents may have equal voting rights while facing very different conditions for participating in political life.
Foot Democracy alone cannot solve that problem.
People must still be able to organize, vote, challenge decisions, and demand improvements where they live.
That is the work of Hand Democracy.
A World Citizen Society should enlarge people’s alternatives without treating relocation as the answer to every injustice.
Nor can population movements alone tell us which community is best.
People move for work, family, housing, culture, and many other reasons.
Movement provides information. It is not a final judgment on political legitimacy.
The lives of those who stay matter as much as the choices of those who leave.
Equality Without Uniformity
A World Citizen Society will not make every community equally wealthy.
It will not eliminate differences in public services, economic opportunities, or preferred ways of living.
Nor should it make every political community institutionally identical.
People should have meaningful alternatives.
But those alternatives must not be formally open while effectively reserved for people with sufficient wealth.
Full political members must not be treated as inferior because they are economically dependent. At the same time, common institutions should not impose one welfare model merely because they prefer it to other legitimate arrangements.
Social equality requires attention to both problems.
Rights need practical protection. Communities need resources to fulfill justified obligations. Residents must also retain meaningful control over their common affairs.
The question is not whether institutional competition can produce perfect equality.
It cannot.
Political-community choice should expand without turning differences in wealth, public capacity, and mobility into a new hierarchy of political belonging.
Foot Democracy will not automatically protect social equality. There is no reason to expect competition alone to achieve it.
The necessary rights and institutions must be won, established, defended against retreat, and improved through continuing political action.
The World Citizen Revolution seeks to enlarge people’s freedom to choose their political communities.
It must also preserve their freedom to live as equals in the communities where their lives remain rooted.
Further Reading
Books
Related Essays
- What Does Economic Freedom Mean in a World Citizen Society?
- Charles Tiebout and the Limits of Voting with Your Feet
- Why Territory Still Matters in a World Citizen Society
- Can Welfare Survive Political Mobility?
- How Can Rights Survive Movement?
- When Mobility Creates Fiscal Risk
- Can Foot Democracy Discipline Majority Democracy?
References
- OECD. International Migration Outlook 2024. 2024. Source
- OECD and European Commission. Indicators of Immigrant Integration 2023: Settling In. 2023. Source
- European Commission. European Pillar of Social Rights. n.d. Source
- Swiss Federal Tax Administration. Fiscal Equalization NFE. n.d. Source
- Swiss Federal Department of Finance. Swiss Tax System. n.d. Source
- Swiss Federal Finance Administration. National Fiscal Equalization. n.d. Source
- Government of Canada. Constitution Act, 1982, Section 36. 1982. Source
- Department of Finance Canada. Equalization Program. n.d. Source
- Sean Dougherty; Andoni Montes Nebreda; Nerea Urrutia. Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers and Fiscal Equalisation in a Time of Consolidation. 2025-06-30. Source
- European Commission. EU Social Security Coordination. n.d. Source
