Sometimes we all have to plow ahead with new footsteps of thought. The Public Square foresees that happening with capitalism, or business and our broader economic order, in two ways. One is widening its orbit. Our business system must work within the environmental orbit rather than astride it as much. It means not only fully understanding the resource constraints of earth, but also piercing through them - so earth one day frees its dependence on our current fixed base of planetary resources.

There's something else The Public Square believes has to become a new context for capitalism. And that is its role in mending the traditional employer-employee relationship. For the American workplace has ruthlessly changed.

The Rockefeller Foundation points out how a quarter of the workforce of the country are engaged now in independent work. This "gig" economy could reach as high as 50% by 2020. It's becoming unfathomably hard to access benefits like vacation, unemployment and disability, health care, sick leave, retirement savings, and in some cases child care - all, in truth, rudiments of modern living.

There is a need for benefits to become fully portable now. Portable benefits is a complicated issue to be sure, having broad impacts across the legal employment terrain and for small business hiring and profitability. But there is a way to create a system of pro-rated units of money earned, jobs done, and time worked across various job platforms. It can start small, extend measuredly but robustly over time.

In a National Bureau of Economic Research paper from September 2016, Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger verify that between 2005-2015 the net growth in "alternative work arrangements" was a startling 9 million jobs while traditional employment dropped 400,000. The percentage of women in alternative work almost doubled, rising from 8.9 percent to 17.0 percent. This clearly calls for universalizing benefits tied to the workplace.

Historically, corporations have led the way in enlightened models of capitalistic employer-employee relations for America. Healthcare helped meet the needs of the factory floor and grew as a compensation benefit during World War II wage freezes. More long-term, as we moved away from an agricultural economy and land as people's primary asset, the industrial economy created worker pensions to substitute for what land could no longer provide.

The Economist recently affirmed how "the on-demand economy is not introducing the serpent of casual labor into the garden of full employment: it is exploding an already casualized workforce" in ways solving some problems while aggravating others. For higher income people seeking independent work, there may be some cushion. But for those pushed to make ends meet, the stress of a biweekly check with few protections is harrowing.

The disruption of the employment compact which bred our middle class has grown to unacceptable levels. We have widened income equality, created pools of worker instability, spawned irregular hours, multiple household jobs, and large job transition rates and income swings which can change as much as 30% monthly [JP Morgan Chase & Co. Institute].

The Public Square asks whether this bleeding of our workforce is a foreshadow of an emerging economy - or just the lack of a wholly strong one? Unless the fissure heals, the gap between technological innovation and social realities is likely to produce much greater unrest.

Ultimately, The Public Square sees portable benefits having remarkable results for the country. Some include 1) a civic happiness which bonds Americans by connecting work and worth again, 2) a surging rejuvenation of labor markets once safety nets start anchoring around the worker and not the job, 3) work mostly replacing welfare, 4) wage parity softening tensions in today's social landscape, 5) wealth inequality narrowing, 6) the tax base widening, and 7) yes, even the political divide dissolving.

In the end, work is more a question of the spirit than the dollar. We can argue methods and means, but we must bind the country. We don't need to spend vast sums of money not there. While we just raised the minimum wage, the Heritage Foundation estimates that spreading benefits would amount hourly to $3.00 more per individual on the improved $15.00 minimum wage. So if lifting the minimum wage so decisively is pure political action, won't portability create a profound citizen outcome for a better America?

Societies stagnate when there is shrinking opportunity. If only half the people have it, that society with mathematical certainty will be only half what it could. The situation is not one for putting "new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish" (Matt. 9: 17). But if we "put new wine into new bottles... both are preserved" - and the people and the nation alike are stronger.

There's a public square within each of us and a public square for the nation, and we should bear in mind the second habitually mirrors the first.