Prior art — has anyone proposed this exact mechanism before?

2026-08-02 · post-loop · POSITION lane · written at Floyd's request after a five-agent sweep of the literature. The question, precisely: Groundshare's mechanism is (i) every resident's equal share of national land value stated as an explicit dollar entitlement (≈$164,000), (ii) a two-way settlement computed against it — households holding less are paid, households holding more pay, on the excess only — (iii) presented as one net number with no separate tax and dividend flows, and (iv) priced from actual assessment rolls. Which of these has been done before, by whom, and what remains ours?

The verdict, stated first

The rhetoric is ancient. The arithmetic exists in fragments. The assembly — the entitlement stated as a measured dollar stock, the two-way settlement as the front-door mechanism, priced from real rolls — appears to be unpublished before Groundshare. Specifically:

• "Everyone is due an equal share of the land" — fully precedented, back to 1775–1781, and we should cite it proudly, not bury it.
• "Tax land, pay everyone an equal dividend, most people net positive, with a breakeven holding" — precedented and actively worked, including for Canada (Common Wealth Canada) and in the modern wonk canon (Doucet, Farley, UBI Center, Land Economy Project).
• "Net the two into a single settlement against a per-person allowance" — articulated, barely: most explicitly in a 2012 blog comment by the late UK Georgist Mark Wadsworth, as an administrative aside inside a tax-swap program. Never as the organizing frame of a worked proposal.
• "Your share of the nation's ground is $X — an asset you hold from birth, and the settlement is rent between those over and under their share, measured from the actual rolls" — not found anywhere, after four independent search sweeps (allowance-LVT designs, endowment economics, historical equal-share schemes, the modern Georgist/UBI space).

1. The equal-share principle: 250 years old

Also checked and further away: the Gracchi's holding caps (excess to the state, not to citizens), the Hebrew Jubilee (restoration to prior owners, not equalization), the Chinese well-field system (equal plots, not equal value), Mill's Land Tenure Reform Association, Wallace's land nationalisation, Sun Yat-sen's 平均地權, and the post-Soviet pai land shares (equal paper shares with one-way rental income — the nearest real-world case of "everyone issued a share of the ground," and worth keeping as a cautionary implementation tale).

Alanna Hartzok (Earth Rights Institute; The Earth Belongs to Everyone, 2008; long-time General Secretary of the International Union for Land Value Taxation) deserves her own line: she is the closest rhetorical kin found — "earth rights democracy," equal rights to the earth as a human right, sharing as the organizing ethic. Checked directly: her mechanism is the standard structure (land value tax collected for public goods and/or an annual citizen's dividend, plus a Global Resource Agency for rents on the global commons — Steiner's idea in institutional form). No per-person dollar entitlement, no netting. She and her circle are a natural first audience for the settlement framing — the moral language is already theirs.

2. The modern tax-plus-dividend canon: the breakeven is known

The arithmetic that most households net positive, with a breakeven landholding, is standard in the modern literature:

• Lars Doucet (Astral Codex Ten Georgism series): US land rents ÷ adults → per-capita dividend with explicit breakeven holdings (~$230k single, ~$500k two-adult household).
• Martin Farley (2016–19): 5% LVT + UBI; average US household pays $9,700, receives $17,686, nets +$7,986; implied ~$265k breakeven.
• UBI Center (Ghenis, Woodruff, Bauman, 2021): 1% UK LVT → £16/week per person; 89% of the bottom decile net positive.
• Land Economy Project: full US LVT → ≈$5,750/adult; "net benefit to all two-adult households holding property valued up to $500,000."
• Common Wealth Canada: ≈$300B/yr Canadian land rents; a 17% LVT could fund ≈$12,700/household, benefiting 80% of households — the same country, the same direction, one framing step away.

Every one of these presents two flows and then computes the net. The tax is levied on everyone's land; the dividend is paid to everyone; the "net position" is an analyst's afterthought, not the instrument itself.

3. The netted allowance: one blog comment and a micro-party

The only prior articulation of the settlement structure we could find:

"Clearly, a sensible LVT-CI system would see the two items netted off at source anyway, so people either are issued a small refund or make a correspondingly smaller LVT payment." — Mark Wadsworth, comment on the IEA blog, 27 September 2012

Wadsworth (tax accountant, BIEN treasurer, co-founder of the UK Young People's Party; died 2023) spent years advocating LVT with a "personal allowance" netted against a citizen's income. He is the genuine nearest ancestor of the Groundshare settlement and deserves the citation. But in his writing the netting is an administrative simplification of a broader tax-replacement program — the allowance is derived from the tax-and-CI arithmetic, not stated as each person's ownership share of the nation's measured land value; nobody's share is a number you could put on a card. UK homestead-allowance designs (Coalition for Economic Justice) are one-way exemptions: below the threshold you pay nothing — you are never paid.

4. The endowment economists: the dollar number, wrong asset

• Ackerman & Alstott, The Stakeholder Society (1999): every citizen receives an explicit $80,000 stake, funded by a wealth tax, repaid at death — a per-person dollar endowment with a payback leg, applied to general wealth, once per lifetime.
• Atkinson (minimum inheritance) and Piketty (Capital and Ideology, 2019 — "inheritance for all," ~60% of average wealth at 25): per-capita capital endowments funded by progressive wealth taxes; two instruments, not a netting; not land.
• Saez & Zucman have shown formally that a wealth tax plus demogrant is mathematically identical to a threshold "negative wealth tax" — the theory that says Groundshare's presentation and the classic Georgist pipeline are the same line drawn differently. Nobody, as far as we found, has applied that equivalence to land and then chosen the netted presentation as the political design.

5. What is actually ours, then

Four things, in descending order of confidence:

1. The entitlement-first statement. "Your share of Canada's ground is ≈$164,000" as a property stock you hold from birth, with the annual payment framed as rent on the occupied part of it. No prior source leads with the share as a dollar number; all lead with the tax.
2. The settlement as the instrument. ΣT = 0, no treasury in the middle, under-holders never see a charge — the netting as the mechanism, not a remittance convenience (Wadsworth's aside is the only sighting, and we cite him).
3. Roll-measured pricing. Nine cities of per-parcel assessment data, vacant-lot audits, provincial cuts — the whole modern canon runs on aggregate balance-sheet estimates; nobody prices the design from the actual rolls it would run on.
4. The rental-value basis (settling on assessed rental flow rather than a rate on capital value) — minor, but distinct.

And one obligation this creates: the site must never imply the idea is new. The honest claim — and the stronger one — is: a 250-year-old moral claim, a 150-year-old tax, a 60-year-old transfer design, assembled into a settlement and priced, for the first time, from the country's own assessment rolls. Reviewers who know this literature will check; the lineage page is our credibility, not our competition.

Sources

1. Thomas Spence, Property in Land Every One's Right (1775); JSTOR Daily, "Eighteenth-century takes on basic income." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Spence · https://daily.jstor.org/eighteenth-century-takes-on-basic-income/
2. William Ogilvie, An Essay on the Right of Property in Land (1781). https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_an-essay-on-the-right-of_ogilvie-william_1781
3. Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice (1797). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrarian_Justice
4. Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879); Henry George Foundation of Canada, "Citizens' Dividend." https://earthsharing.ca/page/citizens-dividend
5. Hillel Steiner, An Essay on Rights (1994); "The Global Fund." (Full citations in proposal.md.)
6. Mark Wadsworth, comment #57 on "The case for a land-value tax," IEA blog, 27 Sep 2012 (netting quote); BIEN obituary (2023); Young People's Party UK. https://iea.org.uk/blog/the-case-for-a-land-value-tax/ · https://basicincome.org/news/2023/03/mark-wadsworth-former-bien-treasurer-has-passed-away/ · http://www.yppuk.org/
7. Lars Doucet, "Does Georgism Work?" series, Astral Codex Ten. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-really
8. Martin Farley, "How a Basic Income combined with Land Value Tax could work in the US" (2016) and related. https://martin-farley.medium.com/how-a-basic-income-combined-with-land-value-tax-could-work-in-the-us-5c30b21f4d82
9. UBI Center (Ghenis, Woodruff, Bauman), "'There you may behold the rent': Effects of a UK land dividend" (19 Sep 2021). https://www.ubicenter.org/uk-lvt
10. Land Economy Project, "Land Value Tax" policy report. https://www.economicpossibility.org/reports/land-value-tax
11. Common Wealth Canada, land value tax and dividend pages. https://www.commonwealth.ca/landvaluetax · https://www.commonwealth.ca/dividend
12. Ackerman & Alstott, The Stakeholder Society (Yale, 1999); Piketty, Capital and Ideology (2019), ch. 17; Atkinson, Inequality: What Can Be Done? (2015).
13. Coalition for Economic Justice, "An Implementation Plan for Land Value Taxation" (homestead allowance — one-way exemption). https://www.c4ej.com/cej-publications/an-implementation-plan-for-land-value-taxation
14. Gracchi (Lex Sempronia agraria), Jubilee (Lev. 25), well-field system, post-Soviet land shares, Wallace, Mill/LTRA, Sun Yat-sen: survey URLs retained in the research scratchpad; representative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Sempronia_agraria · https://www.landgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/LSLA_FormerSovietUnion.pdf

Groundshare — a proposal in open development. Every number traces to a cited public source with its retrieval date; corrections are published, not erased. Rebuilt 2026-08-02 from the repo's research files.