Rationism is a political theory that advocates benchmarking household outcomes against the median household net worth. Specifically, this doctrine advocates limiting or tethering the wealth of top households to a multiple of median household net worth in order to induce robust middle class growth. A maximum ratio will be set (our proposal is 10,000:1) such that, going forward, no household will be permitted to accumulate more than 10,000x the median household net worth. (Existing household wealth will not be affected.) 

Rationists believe that conditioning future economic gains of top households on the proportional increase of median net worth will incentivize and deploy individuals with the most pecuniary interest and skill to efficiently diffuse earned capital into the middle and working classes without reliance on business regulations, corporate taxes, or subsidies for special interest groups. Rationism applies no absolute wealth cap; unlimited household wealth accumulation is permitted, provided the prescribed 10,000:1 social aspect ratio is preserved.

Rationism starts with the same building block as political society itself: the household. The calculation of household net worth is sensitive to the cumulative impact of all forces affecting the middle class: income, taxes, debt, outsourcing, automation, job-destroying technology, layoffs, unemployment, underemployment, the gig economy, pay disparities, inflation, and wealth concentration. 

By contrast, income-based approaches, such as minimum wage and universal basic income proposals, don’t encourage resolution of any of these problems. They just allocate a handful of table scraps to the least successful economic actors without influencing the behavior of the most successful economic actors. No income-based approaches can incentivize, align, or reconcile the interests of the billionaire class to the middle class. 

We should not seek to benchmark our economy against the top or the bottom, but against the middle. Trickle-down economics leads to the excesses of capitalism. Bottom-up economics produces the excesses of socialism. Only middle-out economics; only rationism, can exploit the energies of capitalism and deploy free market efficiencies, both into the service of the middle class, and toward the common objective of raising the median household net worth.