If the Third Way's failure has ultimately been a moral one, and the evidence of this lies in its incoherence in the face of the global economic crash, what might be a morally persuasive policy response to this new situation? In the final part of this book I turn from analysing the shortcomings of the Third Way to proposing alternative approaches.

The ideas to be discussed in this and the next two chapters are a mixture of general principles which have been around for many years, and whose moment may finally have come in the present crisis, and specific proposals by politicians and think-tanks, which recommend immediate steps to address current issues. In this chapter I aim to show how a set of recommendations for reorientating the tax-benefit system, in order to correct specific failures and unintended consequences, might be a first step towards a long-term shift in the way public institutions shape the distribution of wealth, income and work, as well as deploy state power in relation to citizens.

Interviewed in the New Statesman magazine on 29 October 2009, the controversial and high-profile Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek talked about the response to the crash as follows:

In the first two parts of this book I argued that the Keynesian response to the crisis has been a desperate attempt at damage limitation, by both neo-liberal governments (for example, George W. Bush's administration in the US) and Third Way and Christian Democratic ones in Europe and the other affluent countries. I therefore propose to focus on the second proposal, a basic (or citizen’s) income – the idea that each individual person should be entitled to an unconditional income, without means test or work requirement.