The rule, exactly. Before an election each citizen chooses: to vote — or to take a payment and not vote in that election. The payment is a percentage of the median income, set by referendum; there is no fixed sum. One ballot is one vote, with no multiplier in the count; the vote is amplified only in that each ballot's share grows as others step out. The budget pays under law; a candidate never pays. Only a referendum of all citizens — simple majority, no quorum — introduces, changes or repeals the rule.
The protocol has been introduced nowhere and no pilot has been run: shares, turnout and outcome figures in the chapters are estimates, and the protocol promises nobody an election victory. If a chapter says otherwise, Exact Answers and the Charter are correct. For a candidate: ten questions and ten steps. For a citizen, a mayor, a finance officer, a donor, a journalist, a scholar, a lawyer: answers by role. Everything in force in one file: llms-full.txt.
Ayn Rand: "Atlas" Under AB-EXIT, and a Supplement to Fromm¶
Chapter: 06 — Structural Hypocrisy and the Elites' Arsenal File: 06_040e · v1 · 15 September 2026 (Gemini dialogue, session 15-09-26) Source: a thought experiment on the plot of "Atlas Shrugged" (1957); Fromm — supplement to §15.26 (006). Not quotations.
1. The plot that would not have happened¶
If AB-EXIT had existed in the world of "Atlas", the book would have ended within its first hundred pages, and Galt's Gulch would never have been needed.
The crowd ("moochers" and "looters") could not have crushed the creators by numbers and "equal opportunity" laws: the mass would have taken its guaranteed dividend and voluntarily left the polls. The populists and lobbyists (James Taggart, Wesley Mouch) would have lost the electorate on which their directives stand.
The Atlases (Galt, Rearden, Dagny), instead of stopping the factories and going underground, would simply have kept their right to vote. The crowd leaves the game — the weight of the creators' vote grows many times. The strike of the mind would have become pointless: the Atlases would legally, democratically and bloodlessly have taken governance, turning the state from an apparatus of violence into service infrastructure.
Rand would not have had to write a tragedy about capitalists stopping the motor of the world — she would have had to write a business case about how they reprogrammed its operating system by compensating the crowd for its exit.
2. Where Rand would strike¶
Objectivism rejects any redistribution as robbery. A dividend from the budget is, for her, a tax handed to "moochers". Two answers from the protocol, both already in the repository: (1) the dividend is not a hand-out but a minority buy-out during a restructuring of governance (§34, 07); a payment so that they do not interfere; for an Austrian it is a market transaction, not socialism — the same argument that removes Milei's objection (see 10-usa/059b); (2) the sum is tied to the median earnings (§1) — that is, to production, not need; the more the Atlases create, the larger the dividend, and vice versa. Rand would probably accept the mechanism as the lesser evil and reject it as a principle.
3. Supplement to Fromm (§15.26)¶
§15.26 covered the escape from freedom and the commodification of the vote. The dialogue adds two formulas absent there.
The "having/being" sorting machine. AB-EXIT is a mathematically exact separator of the two modes of existence: the "having" group takes the money (for Fromm — capitulation to consumerism); the "being" group refuses for the sake of influence — a pure act of being, requiring awareness and sacrifice, i.e. the mark of an unalienated personality. Fromm would hate the first and admire the second — in one and the same mechanism.
"A quarantine for political madness." The verdict of Fromm the sociologist who saw frightened masses bring in Hitler: AB-EXIT is not salvation of the human soul but a brilliant quarantine; "you have not cured society of alienation and greed — you have used them as fuel to save the machinery of the state from destruction. The most honest, the most cynical and possibly the only working solution for an era in which the 'having' mode has won." This is exactly the "triage plus treatment" that §15.26 describes as Fromm's condition.
4. Weak point of the answer¶
Rand is the most convenient ally and therefore the most dangerous: if the protocol publicly "belongs to the objectivists", it loses the left flank, for whom the dividend is the main value. Positioning must remain neutral: Rand and Fromm accept the mechanism for opposite reasons — that is the proof of its consensual nature (§39, 07). 🟡
Related: §15.26 in 006 (Fromm) · §34 (07, the state as a corporation) · §39 (07, opponents) · 040b (Hanson: creative vanity) · 059b (10-usa: Musk and Milei)