# A radical centre constitution, rules 6–10: fiscal realism, losers, subsidiarity, trials, power

> Rules 6 to 10 complete our radical centre constitution, ten rules for deciding policy before deciding any policy. They say: put a price and a payer on every proposal; compensate the people a reform hurts, as part of the deal; decide at the lowest level that can do the job and move up when scale demands it; test before rolling out nationwide; and apply rights and responsibilities to everyone, including the powerful. They come from Matthew Miller's The Two Percent Solution, Anthony Giddens's The Third Way and Donald Warren's The Radical Center.

- URL: https://www.radicalcentre.eu/en/articles/radical-centre-constitution-rules-6-10
- Language: en
- Publisher: radical centre / centro radical
- Published: 2026-10-13
- Topic: Ideas & history
- Author: radical centre
- Licence: CC BY 4.0

## Key points

- Rule 6, from Matthew Miller: every proposal names its cost and who pays it.
- Rule 7, also from Miller: compensate the losers of a reform, and make the compensation part of the bargain.
- Rule 8, from Anthony Giddens: decide at the lowest level that can do the job, and move power upwards only where scale is needed.
- Rule 9: test reforms in trials before rolling them out to a whole country.
- Rule 10, from Giddens and Donald Warren: rights and responsibilities apply to everyone, and no concentrated power, public or private, gets to capture the result.

Yesterday we published the first half of a short constitution for the radical centre: [rules 1 to 5](/en/articles/radical-centre-constitution-rules-1-5), drawn from Isaiah Berlin, Amartya Sen, Mark Satin, and Ted Halstead and Michael Lind. They cover pluralism, comparison, evidence, a fair start with choice, and public decision. The exercise, set by the programme for the end of week 1, is ten rules for deciding policy, with no policies in them.

The second half has harder edges. It comes from three writers who each, in their own way, dealt with money and power: Matthew Miller, the former Clinton budget aide who wrote *The Two Percent Solution* (2003); Anthony Giddens, whose *The Third Way* (1998) gave New Labour its vocabulary; and Donald Warren, the Michigan sociologist whose *The Radical Center* (1976) described a middle class squeezed from above and below.

## Rule 6. Every proposal names its price and its payer

A proposal is incomplete until it says what it costs, every year, and who pays.

Miller built his whole book on this. His title is his budget: devote about 2% of America's national income, some $220 billion a year at the time, to universal health coverage, better teachers in poor schools, a living wage for the working poor and cleaner campaign finance. Chris Lehmann's review for the *Washington Post* shows how seriously he took the bill. Some of the money came from spending his plans made redundant, such as the hospital subsidies for treating the uninsured. The rest required what Miller called actual sacrifice: a 60-cent-a-gallon petrol tax and the repeal of a large tax cut.

That is the discipline the rule asks for. Name the unpopular part along with the popular part. In Spain, where every budget negotiation tends to become a list of promises, this rule would force each party to publish the line it is willing to raise or cut to pay for what it wants. Fiscal realism here is a condition of ambition. Miller's goals were large precisely because he could show how to pay for them.

## Rule 7. Compensate the losers, as part of the deal

When a reform makes most people better off and some people worse off, the people who lose get real compensation, and the compensation is written into the bargain.

Miller's school plan is the model. As Lehmann describes it, he proposed roughly $30 billion to raise the salaries of urban teachers by half, with further merit rises for the best, in exchange for making it easier to dismiss poor performers. Miller called this institutional bribery, and he meant it as praise: the people whose security a reform threatens are paid, openly, to accept it. The teachers get more money, the pupils get better teaching, and the reform survives because those who could block it have a stake in it.

Economists have long said that a reform is worth doing if the winners could compensate the losers. This rule drops the "could". Compensation that stays on paper turns those who lose into the reform's permanent enemies, and they are usually right to be angry.

## Rule 8. Decide at the lowest level that can do the job

Give each decision to the smallest unit that can take it well, and move it upwards only when the problem crosses borders or needs scale.

Giddens set this out in a 1998 article for *Times Higher Education* that summarised his book. The new democratic state, he wrote, should rest on the devolution of power in two directions: downwards to localities and regions and upwards to transnational agencies. That double movement is what Europeans call subsidiarity. Housing permits, school timetables and local transport belong close to the people who live with them. Carbon markets, migration rules and defence procurement need the scale of the European Union. The rule cuts both ways, and that is its value: it refuses both the instinct to centralise everything and the instinct to keep everything national out of habit.

## Rule 9. Test before rolling out nationwide

Try reforms on a small scale, measure what happens, and then generalise what works.

Miller already built trials into his bargains. Lehmann notes that the same teacher deal would fund a serious set of voucher trials across the country, so the argument about vouchers could be settled by evidence. Giddens, in his own way, called for experiments with democracy itself, including referendums and constitutional reform, under the slogan that democracy needs to be democratised. Spain has done some of this already, with randomised pilots attached to its minimum income scheme. A rule makes it the default. When a ministry wants to change how a benefit, a school programme or a job service works, it starts with a pilot, publishes the evaluation and only then legislates for everyone.

## Rule 10. Rights and responsibilities apply to everyone, and nobody captures the result

No one is exempt from obligations, and no concentrated interest, in business or in the state, gets to take the gains of a reform for itself.

The first half is Giddens's motto for the third way: no rights without responsibilities. He applied it to the unemployed, whose benefits came with a duty to look for work. In the same article he added that the principle should also apply to business. That second sentence is the one later governments tended to forget, and it is the one this rule keeps.

The second half comes from Warren. His surveys, as John Judis summarised them for the Carnegie Endowment, found a large group of middle-income voters who felt the middle class was under siege from above and below. They were the most likely to say corporations had too much power, and they distrusted Washington too. Warren's book estimated that as many as one in five Americans shared this outlook. These voters later went to Wallace, Perot and Trump. A radical centre that wants to keep them has to show that it is equally tough on capture by a company, a lobby, a union or a ministry. Every reform should state who might capture it and how that is prevented.

## The ten together

The full set reads: name the good each side defends; compare real alternatives; judge by results; build on a fair start and a floor delivered through choice; decide in public and protect a minimum of liberty; name the price and the payer; compensate the losers; respect subsidiarity; test before rolling out; and apply rights and responsibilities to everyone, including the powerful.

The second five carry ideas from several traditions at once. From the left comes the insistence that losers are owed real compensation and that companies carry duties just as claimants do. From the right and the liberal market tradition comes the demand that every proposal show its price and its payer. And from neither camp comes a theory of power that works through where decisions are taken and through small trials before big changes. From week 2 onwards, every policy on this site will be tested against all ten.

## FAQ

### What are the ten rules of the radical centre constitution?

Name the good each side defends; compare real alternatives; judge by results; build on a fair start and a floor delivered through choice; decide in public and protect a minimum of liberty; put a price and a payer on every proposal; compensate the losers; respect subsidiarity; test before rolling out; and apply rights and responsibilities to everyone, including the powerful.

### Why does radical centrism insist on fiscal realism?

Because a promise without a price is a slogan. Matthew Miller showed that ambitious goals become credible once you say what they cost and where the money comes from, including the unpopular parts.

### How does the radical centre deal with concentrated power?

It treats big business and the state with the same suspicion. Rules apply to both, decisions sit as close as possible to the people affected, and reforms are designed so no organised interest can quietly take the gains.

## Sources

- [New Deals (review of The Two Percent Solution)](https://mattmilleronline.com/pdfs/washingtonpost_2percent.pdf), The Washington Post Book World (2003)
- [The Two Percent Solution](https://mattmilleronline.com/twopercent.php), Matthew Miller (2003)
- [We're in the family way (Anthony Giddens on the third way)](https://timeshighereducation.com/node/18484), Times Higher Education (1998)
- [The return of the Middle American Radical](https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2015/10/the-return-of-the-middle-american-radical), Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (2015)
- [The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation](https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268015954/the-radical-center/), University of Notre Dame Press (1976)