The Alt Centrist Approach To Welfare

In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle introduced the concepts of corrective and distributive justice. Corrective justice is the form that we’re used to: commit a crime, and you get corrected with punishment. Distributive justice relates to who justly gets how much of the boons of society. Aristotle believed that people ought to get rewards and honours in proportion to their contribution to society. He was emphatically not a communist, believing that those who contributed more ought to get more. But neither was he a capitalist, preaching that the poor deserve suffering. He promoted the Golden Mean between the two extremes.

Ancient Rome is often characterised as a cruel, sink-or-swim system, but they had an institution known as the annona, or the grain dole. After centuries of military expansion, many wealthy landowners had replaced Roman workers with foreign slaves. The resulting impoverishment led to constant rioting and civil unrest. So Gaius Gracchus introduced the grain dole in 123 BCE, resulting in free food for the Roman citizenry. Later emperors added pork and wine.

The concept of distributive justice barely exists in the modern West. In our system, which can be called whorehouse economics, whoever has the money decides. People are conditioned to believe that a person is entitled to what the money men give them, and no more. Anyone who doesn’t work for a capitalist deserves to starve. This is because the merchantry have long since driven the Establishment Right out of effective control, so concepts like noblesse oblige are long forgotten.

This approach is transparently cruel and therefore is rejected under the Fourth Rejection.

The Establishment Left’s argument for welfare is that it maximises freedom. The logic here is that poverty itself is the first and primary source of enslavement. Poverty makes people desperate, which enslaves them to landowners and other wealthy people in the hope of a paycheck. So raising the floor of poverty through welfare promotes freedom generally.

The Establishment Right counters with the observation that if the masses are allowed to vote themselves infinity free money, they will do it, and the economy will collapse. Tiberius is recorded as stating that if everyone would be granted everything they petitioned for, the treasury would soon be empty, and the state would have to extort or steal money to stay operational.

Therefore, distributive justice needs to find the mean between impoverishing the masses and impoverishing the treasury.

The Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck was one of the first Establishment Centrists. He championed a welfare state as a way of ensuring peace between the various classes of Prussian society, and to forestall the rise of Communism. His reasoning was that if people who couldn’t work had a safety net to fall back on, society would be much stronger.

Over time, other countries adopted similar systems. As decades passed, and more and more was handed out in exchange for votes, these systems became bloated. Tiberius’s warning applies to society in 2026 as well as to his time.

By today, disability insurance fraud in America is estimated by the FBI to cost USD40 billion per year, and in Australia is believed to cost up to AUD4.6 billion per year. These vast sums require further vast sums to investigate and police. This is one of the fundamental problems with the current approach to welfare: if you only give it to the “deserving”, following the belief that everyone is obliged to work unless disabled, it costs billions to determine who is deserving and who isn’t.

A universal basic income is an elegant solution. It maximises freedom and minimises cruelty (as well as expense).

The alternative centrist doesn’t buy the right-wing argument that everyone needs to “earn” a living. For one thing, that kind of moralising is the exact kind of slave morality that alternative centrism exists to oppose. For another thing, the UBI will not provide a high standard of living. Elon Musk’s idea of a universal high income is not realistic, because so much of wealth is about controlling other people, and that’s a zero-sum affair.

The UBI would be low, not generous, and there would be very little government largesse over and above this. Private charity would still be available, as it is today, but there would be no accommodation allowances, temporary additional support, disability bonuses or any other spending over and above the UBI (one might consider paying a half-UBI to mothers of under-18s for nationalist reasons).

The UBI would lead to all of order, freedom and peace for a variety of reasons.

One is because it would enable forward planning. Even if a UBI recipient only got $500 per week, they would know they were getting $2,000 in the next month and $25,000 in the next year, and could plan accordingly. This would open up opportunities for securing rental tenancies or business financing that did not exist previously.

The second is that it would minimise resentment. As of right now, young Westerners working the average job in their locale cannot afford housing. They watch half of their wages disappear in rent and are left with little after food and transport are paid for. It feels like a bitterly cruel rip-off. A UBI would let younger people also feel like they were getting a share of the bounties of modern society.

The third is less pressure on desirable housing. Most young people, upon finishing their education, find themselves forced to move where the jobs are. This is usually the big cities. The enormous demand for housing in urban areas is the prime driver of the housing affordability crisis. A UBI would make it possible to survive in low-cost, low-opportunity areas. This would release pressure on urban housing and make it more possible for younger people to afford the housing they need to raise families in, even if it meant taking a less ambitious job.

The fourth, and perhaps major reason, is that it would remove the desperation that is often the cause of crime. No-one would wonder where their next dollar was coming from: they’ll get $500 next Wednesday evening. This would promote orderly conduct. It would also make it politically feasible to introduce severe punishments for antisocial behaviour, the reasoning being that, absent desperation, people would only commit crimes out of malice. Therefore it’s justified to bring the hammer down on criminals.

It might be argued that a UBI will lead to degeneracy, as it pays people to do nothing, but that is countered in other ways (see The Alt Centrist Approach To Society).

The alt centrist approach to welfare is simple, neat and long-sighted: a moderate amount of distributive justice plus a high amount of efficiency.

This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming work of political philosophy that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

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In Defence Of Mike King, And Of Alcohol

New Zealand mental health awareness campaigner Mike King copped mountains of abuse for saying that “alcohol has prevented more young people from taking their own lives than it makes them take their own lives.” This provoked outrage from the usual wowsers, psychopaths and control freaks. But there is great truth behind this hard-earned wisdom.

I worked as a bartender for eight years. In that time I saw alcohol ruin many people. I was assaulted several times and no doubt the alcohol I sold contributed to countless acts of domestic violence. It might have caused a million dollars of physical health damage, and a million dollars of lost productivity from hangovers or absentee days.

It also had some great effects.

In those eight years I saw a lot of people who were barely hanging on come through the doors. People who were deeply depressed, stressed, anxious, even despairing. And I saw that, for a lot of these people, the promise of getting a buzz from alcohol was helping to keep them going. The daily life was unpleasant, but it could be endured because, after it, a good time could be had with a few drinks.

Some of the patrons would even admit as such. For them, a drink was the finish line of the day, time to celebrate and say Yes to life again. I am certain that the alcohol I sold prevented several million dollars’ worth of depression thanks to providing the sociability that led to great mirth and great memories for hordes of people. The average bartender, in my experience, does as much good for mental health as the average psychiatrist.

Mike King has been close enough to suicide to know that, when you’re on the edge, it’s often small things holding you back, like an occasional moment of mirth.

This might be impossible to understand for anyone who has never been mentally ill. But if you have ever felt enduring suicidal ideation, you may have also discovered that getting drunk can stop those thoughts for a while. I have broken multiple bones, and the suffering of suicidal ideation tops them all. It doesn’t take much of it before one starts thinking about a permanent solution. Alcohol can provide blessed relief from such thoughts.

Sometimes, when your mental health is so low that you know you can’t endure the suffering forever, the promise of the next drink can be what’s stopping you ending your life. Just the simple knowledge that solace can eventually be had, in the form of a pint, can be enough to keep taking one step after the next. Drinking alcohol can reclaim enough power over your own mental health to make you say Yes to life again.

Mike King understands this, because he’s been low enough to need to find reasons to stay alive. He ought to be respected for the insight that he has brought back from the psychiatric underworld. Instead of ripping down someone who has stood so close to the edge, we ought to listen (if with scepticism). This is especially true for people with no personal experience of depression.

This defence is not intended to excuse my own conduct. For many years now, I have hardly used alcohol at all – only for celebrations once every few months, and even then in moderation. I am therefore not a drinker but neither am I an abstainer. I argue that this middle way, plus my bartending experience, makes my opinions more objective.

I also have extensive experience with antidepressant use – I have taken five different ones, off and on, for 30 years. What people need to realise about antidepressants is that they, at best, only mildly alleviate depression, and even then they work as a background substance. You can’t take an antidepressant as an emergency fix for an acute suicidal mood. If you’re going to attempt suicide in the next half an hour, and only an antidepressant or alcohol can save you, alcohol will be by far the most effective short-term fix.

That’s not to say alcohol is a long-term fix; in the long term, drinking alcohol will make you more depressed. Not only is it an actual depressant, but it causes an astonishing range of physical health ailments (see Prof. David Nutt’s Drink? for more).

Alcohol is definitely a second-rate drug. But the popular claim (often repeated in the mainstream media) that it only causes harms, and has no benefits, is ridiculous. In any case, most people who chimp out on it could have been encouraged to use weed or MDMA, if only either were legal. Most of the harms of alcohol would be ameliorated if people had access to less harmful recreational drugs, because those would serve as exit drugs for alcohol users to transition away. It’s hypocritical to complain about alcohol harms while also criminalising all the exit drugs from alcohol.

The ideal arrangement would be a properly-funded mental health system, which would include training people in trauma-based therapy and de-emphasising the biomedical model, and a sensible drug policy based on scientific evidence of relative drug harms.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
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The Alt Centrist Approach To The Law

Law and order are often grouped together in political theory. And for good reason: without the capacity to impose order, there is no capacity to impose law. The first laws were not created by common agreement among equals: they were imposed by kings such as Hammurabi, the Babylonian whose code of laws inspired all Western legal systems that followed.

Alternative centrist theory is no different in this regard. Without the ability to impose law, there can be no civilisation. The majesty of the Roman Empire was only possible on account of the excellence of its laws. The less gifted lawmakers appeared to the Romans as barbarians, and were subjugated accordingly. The best laws belong to the best societies.

If the position of the Establishment Right towards the law could be expressed in one phrase, it would be: ignorance of the law is no excuse. If you give people the excuse to ignore laws because they “didn’t know about them”, everyone would plead ignorance and the contrary would be unprovable.

The Alternative Centre agrees entirely. Everyone is responsible for making themselves aware of local laws. To not so do is deeply stupid.

The difference is, the Alternative Centre appreciates that not all laws are just. Humans write laws, and humans are imperfect, and therefore laws are imperfect. To the extent that they are imperfect, it’s not just to enforce them. This creates all kinds of moral dilemmas.

Back in the day, moral dilemmas about proportional punishment were easily resolved: most criminals were executed. Executing a criminal not only removes the possibility that they will commit further crimes, but it also removes all the subtler ways that criminals lower the standard of living of those around them. A study in the journal Evolutionary Psychology suggested that “by the late Middle Ages, [the courts] were condemning to death between 0.5 and 1.0% of all men of each generation.” Studies have found that the most criminal 1% of the population commits a majority of the violent crime, so this relatively small number of executions would have massively raised the quality of life for the other members of the community.

This worked fine as long as capital punishment was reserved for treason, murder, rape, armed robbery and a few other extreme offences. In medieval Britain, however, it became possible to get hanged for petty theft. This is clearly unreasonable.

The alternative centrist believes in freedom from unreasonable law.

Take the cannabis laws for instance. It has been until recently, and in many places still is, the case that people with medical conditions that could be treated with cannabis were expected to suffer instead of to use it. Here it’s easily possible to see the evils of excessive order.

It’s not realistic to expect people to obey the law when the law is clearly unjust, as per cannabis prohibition. In fact, eminent philosophers such as Henry Thoreau argued it’s a duty to obey unjust laws. Unjust laws are evil, and by defying them people can do good. The tension between order and freedom here is resolved with reference to one’s social class: the higher the class, the more one ought to err on the side of order. The law must serve justice in imposing order.

The Alternative Left is correct when they point out that many criminals have been influenced by poor upbringings. It’s a fact of developmental psychology that most children grow up thinking their parents are normal, and imitate them whatever they do. If the parents are antisocial, the children will become antisocial in imitation (unless they can reason themselves out of that at a later date).

Thus, crime is often truly not the fault of the criminal. Oftentimes they don’t know any better, because they have had selfish and infantile behaviours modelled to them by their parents, and this has taught them to see decent people as weak suckers. It’s cruel to expect people from environments like this to independently develop sophisticated moral reasoning. They have to be taught. If their home environment was too neglectful to teach moral reasoning, they need to be rehabilitated by the State. But if people are too damaged to be rehabilitated, they need to be executed.

Simply executing anyone who cannot be rehabilitated after their first violent crime is the essence of the alternative centrist approach to law and order. Modern psychological analysis is far more sophisticated than it was even 20 years ago. The violent psychopaths can be detected and eliminated.

The money imprisoning them can then be used on something else.

The alternative centre completely rejects the stupidity of prison abolition. The truth is that some people are evil, and these evil people see kindness as weakness. To treat evil people with kindness is to create more misery: as Adam Smith observed, mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent. Execute the career criminals and then mercy can be applied to those who made an uncharacteristic mistake.

Our news media is replete with stories of violent criminals getting out and then killing someone. At time of writing, a murder trial is taking place relating to an incident in my home town, in which the defendant already had a criminal record for violent crime. Had this criminal been executed for his first violent crime, the murder (of a policewoman on duty) would never have happened.

Aristotle argued that good laws prevent tyranny. In fact, he argued in Nicomachean Ethics that laws were the main way that morality was taught (parents don’t have the all-encompassing authority of the State). Bad laws, according to Aristotle, breed immorality, discord and eventually lead to revolution. Complementing him, Plato argued in Republic that bad laws lead to tyranny and then revolution. Good laws are therefore also the guarantors of order, peace and the other Acceptances. But these laws must be just.

Some people (usually on the Right) argue that the law must be used to fight against degeneracy. The Alternative Centrist disagrees: vice laws are the archetypal examples of excessive order. There is no need to fight degeneracy if regeneracy is adequately promoted. Therefore e.g. marriage laws ought to prioritise heterosexual couples. That does not mean to discriminate against homosexual ones, but to e.g. reserve housing grants for couples that can produce the next generation of the nation.

The solution to the moral dilemma of unjust laws is to disobey them, but to make a point of this being an exceptional practice. The more legitimacy the law has, the harsher it can be on actually evil people.

This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming work of political philosophy that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

VJMP Anzac Day Address 2026: It’s Time To Make Good On The Promise Of Gallipoli

As Anzac Day dawns in 2026, the situation in the Western World is exceptionally dire. Our fertility rates have collapsed, and our economies are following them. Populations are in total despair. But, despite the immanent disaster, the ruling classes of the West appear to have no idea about either the suffering their people are in or what to do about it.

It’s time to make good on the promise of Gallipoli.

When the British Empire attacked the Ottoman Empire in World War One, Australia and New Zealand went with it. The reasoning back then was that we were British, and therefore wherever the motherland went we had to go as well. Across all the theatres of World War I we lost over 66,000 killed in action, from a population of just over six million.

While our boys died at Gallipoli, British commanders remained aloof. Some legends have it they relaxed drinking tea while the combat was raging. It was soon apparent to the Anzacs that their lives were worth very little to their overlords. The sentiment naturally arose that we would be better off in charge of ourselves.

What we learned at Anzac Cove, in theory, was that we ought to be making our own decisions instead of blindly following orders from the other side of the world. This learning was the beginning of our ethnogenesis. Thus it was at Anzac Cove that we started to transform into the Anzac nation. This was the Promise of Gallipoli: that we would one day become an independent and free people.

These theoretical learnings were sort of put into practice. During World War II, John Curtin chose to defend Australia with Australian troops instead of defending Britain. New Zealand, unfortunately, broke ranks with Australia and sent troops to defend Britain instead. But the thought was established: Anzac troops ought to defend Anzac territory as a first priority. We ought to put ourselves before Britain or anyone else.

After World War II, Europe and America opened themselves up to the madness of replacement migration. That could have been the cue for Anzac civilisation to plot a different course, like Eastern Europe did. Today, Poland has a larger economy than Australia, and they did it without mass immigration of Third World cheap labour and the resulting crime and misery. We could have done the same.

We still can. Only our will prevents us from doing so. We can take a cue from Eastern Europe – and from other places – and take a path away from Anglo-American neoliberalism and its attendant social chaos. It’s time for us to stand up, as an independent people, and to think for ourselves, and to blaze our own trail into the future.

For instance, we could say to ourselves, as Anzac Civilisation, that there shall be no more mass immigration of cheap labour to the Anzac Empire. Let America, Europe and Britain import all the cheap labour if that is what they wish to do. We don’t need to follow them. We never imported slaves like America did, so why not double down on the tradition of doing our own labour, and refuse to import Third Worlders?

Why not go even further, and get rid of globalist neoliberal immigration policy full stop? We could open immigration up to culturally compatible people if we wanted. We could even make an effort to only attract the high-IQ white people that once made the West great, and who still exist in large numbers, neutered by insane politics. Once we achieve psychological independence, we can do anything!

If the European and North American parts of Western Civilisation are to collapse into ethnic-based civil war, as several professors of conflict studies suggest they will, Anzac civilisation needs to stop thinking of ourselves as merely the juniormost partner in the Western coalition.

We will always be part of Western Civilisation. But, as the Romans once looked at the Greeks and saw a great people weakened by age and degeneracy, we Anzacs now look at Europe and America and see great peoples weakened by age and degeneracy. As the Romans surpassed the Greeks, so too will we surpass Europe and America. We just need to cut ourselves loose.

The Promise of Gallipoli is that we Anzacs are not bound by cultural links to the rest of the Western World. Those links exist and we are pleased for them, but they do not bind us. We are not forced to accept a miserable fate merely because the British decided that it would be that way. We can think for ourselves! We can rise up as one Anzac nation!

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

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