The moral case — natural equity in one page
2026-07-18 · wave 5 · MORAL lane. The one-pager first (what a person reads in 90 seconds, no numbers required); the scaffolding after (where every sentence comes from, and what the case deliberately does not claim).
The one-pager
Nobody made the ground. Everything on it — the house, the shop, the barn, the tower — somebody built, and it is rightly theirs. But the ground underneath was here before any of us. Nobody worked for it. Nobody can make more of it.
Everyone makes the ground valuable. A vacant lot downtown is worth millions; the same lot three hundred kilometres away is worth almost nothing. The difference isn't the dirt. It's everything around it — the neighborhood, the roads, the schools, the customers, the country. Land value is the one form of wealth that is created by everyone and collected by whoever holds title.
So the ground's value is a shared inheritance. If nobody made it, and everybody's presence gives it value, then no one person can have a better claim to it than another. Every person holds an equal share of it by birth — a natural equity. What you build is private equity; what nature and the community provide is natural equity, and it belongs to each of us alike.
Groundshare just settles the account. Add up what the ground of the nation is worth. Divide by everyone. That's your share. Hold more than your share, and each year you owe the difference to those who hold less. Hold less, and you're owed. Renters and the landless are owed the most — they've been paying for everyone else's ground their whole lives. This isn't a tax: the government keeps nothing. It isn't charity: it's income from property you already own. It is the settling of the oldest unsettled account there is.
And everything you earn, build, and save stays entirely, unconditionally yours.
Where every move comes from (the scaffolding)
| Step | Source |
|---|---|
| "Nobody made the ground" / improvements are fully private | Locke, Second Treatise §27 (labor-mixing grounds property in what labor makes) — and his proviso: appropriation is just only where "enough, and as good" is left for others. The proviso is the hinge: land titles fail it; the settlement is the remedy that lets titles stand. |
| "Everyone makes the ground valuable" | The community-creates-land-value argument, documented with evidence at https://www.progress.org/wiki/community-creates-land-value/ ; Adam Smith: ground-rents owe their value "to the good government of the sovereign" and are therefore the most suitable object of peculiar taxation (Wealth of Nations V.ii). |
| "A shared inheritance… by birth" | Paine, Agrarian Justice (1797): the earth is "the common property of the human race"; payments from ground-rent are "not charity but a right." Full text: https://www.progress.org/wiki/agrarian-justice/ |
| "Settling the account" (not tax, not charity) | Barnes (2014): commons dividends "aren't redistribution; they're a way to allocate income fairly in the first place." George (1879): rent is the "unearned increment" belonging to the community — https://www.progress.org/wiki/unearned-increment/ |
| Equal shares with above-share holders paying in | Steiner (1994; 2011), the Global Fund — the equal-natural-resource-share principle Groundshare implements domestically. |
Phrasing choices made deliberately (objection-aware, see objections.md):
"settling an account," never "taxing"; "natural equity," never "redistribution";
"the government keeps nothing" stated early (kills the ratchet fear); improvements'
absolute privacy stated twice (opens and closes) because it is the sentence
property-minded readers scan for.
What the moral case does NOT claim
- Not that owners did wrong. They played by the rules they found; the case
indicts the rules, not the players. (This is why the transition shock in
objections.md§1 is partly conceded rather than dismissed.) - Not that work, savings, or buildings are shared. The case's force comes precisely from the line it draws: made things are private without condition.
- Not that equality of land shares produces equality of outcomes. It settles one specific historic asymmetry; it is not a general theory of justice.
The open moral question: Indigenous title
A Canadian moral case that says "the nation's ground, every person's equal share" walks into a prior claim: much of Canada sits on unceded or treaty land, and "nobody made the ground" does not mean "nobody was here." Two honest points, held open rather than resolved:
- Groundshare is arguably more compatible with reconciliation than the status quo: it dissolves the moral fiction that fee-simple title settles the question of who the ground's value belongs to, and it delivers land-rent income to every Indigenous person as of right — while Crown-land and treaty settlements continue on their own track. The wiki's evidence-based treatment of land justice and Indigenous reconciliation is the starting point: https://www.progress.org/wiki/land-justice-and-indigenous-reconciliation/
- But the equal-share frame cannot unilaterally absorb Nation-to-Nation claims: whether collective Indigenous title to specific territories converts into per-capita shares is not Groundshare's to decide. This section stays open and should eventually be written with Indigenous collaborators, not about them. (Flagged as a Floyd-level scope decision for the academic/outreach lane.)
The case, now measured (w39 addendum)
2026-07-19 · The one-pager above was written before any measurement existed (w5). It is deliberately unchanged — it reads in 90 seconds and asks for no numbers. But three of its sentences have since stopped being philosophy, and the design has grown teeth the page should point to.
"Everyone makes the ground valuable" is now parcel data, twice over. The
two-lots intuition — same dirt, different surroundings, different value — has
been measured across 1.4 million parcels: in Metro Vancouver, where everyone
wants to be and geography lets few in, the ground carries ~75% of all property
value at core, suburb, and exurb alike; in Sherbrooke, ~30%. Same country,
same law, same dirt — the difference is everybody else
(data/land-shares.csv, w9–w29). And when we attacked our own numbers — do
assessors' land values track what vacant ground actually fetches? — both
provinces' allocations passed, within ~10%, from their own rolls (w33–34).
The premise isn't rhetoric; it survived its own audit.
"Renters and the landless are owed the most" has a number. The average renting household's settlement is ≈+$21,400/yr; four of five wealth quintiles are net recipients (NUMBERS #9, #18) — on Statistics Canada's own distributional accounts.
"It belongs to each of us alike" is now protected in design, not just asserted. Two waves put teeth on alike: the settlement counts every resident — children and newcomers included, the whole town square, on the base Alaska's dividend has run for four decades (w37); and receipts are designed non-taxable and invisible to benefit clawbacks (the Canada Child Benefit's legal pattern), so the state cannot quietly take back the poorest recipients' share through GIS, social assistance, or subsidized-housing rent (w38). A moral claim about the poorest that the machinery would have silently broken is now a claim the machinery keeps.
And the case's credibility rests on a practiced habit, not a promise: five self-corrections published to date (farms, MPAC, the metro band, resource flows, our own headline basis), each logged on the site the week it happened. A moral argument that audits itself is the only kind entitled to the word "honest" in its narrative kit.
(The Indigenous-title section above remains open by design; its collaborator-engagement decision is staged as DECISIONS.md ⑤.)
Site distillation
The four bold steps above go onto the site as a numbered argument (numbers are justified: it is a sequence — each step depends on the previous). The scaffolding and the Indigenous-title section stay in the repo until the latter has been properly worked.