Status: proposal under active development by Floyd Marinescu with Claude, in the standalone groundshare repo. Not published to the wiki. The movement name Groundshare was coined by Sean Platt (MMT Nemacolin, 2026-04-23/24), evolving Floyd's earlier "earth-sharing" framing; companion tagline "natural equity." The mechanism's components are each well-attested in the literature cited below; the combined single-instrument formulation does not appear as a named proposal in the corpus the wiki has surveyed.

Definition

The equal land share scheme starts from the Georgist premise that the value of land — as distinct from the buildings and improvements on it — is created by nature and by the community, not by the owner, and is therefore the equal common property of all citizens (George 1879, Bk. VII; Paine 1797). It then implements that premise directly, as a property settlement rather than as a tax-and-spend program:

1. Compute the threshold. Divide the nation's total assessed land value by its citizen population. Call this per-capita share V̄ — the land value each citizen is morally entitled to.
2. Net each person against the threshold. A citizen whose attributed land value V is below V̄ receives an annual payment in proportion to the shortfall; a holder whose V exceeds V̄ pays in proportion to the excess. With an annual rate r (a fraction of land's rental yield), the net transfer is:

T = r × (V̄ − V) — positive means receive, negative means pay.

A citizen who owns no land receives the full payment r·V̄ (the maximum — the position of most renters); a citizen holding exactly the per-capita share neither pays nor receives; payments from above-threshold holders fund the payouts, so the scheme raises zero net revenue by construction — it is a pure transfer among citizens, not a source of government funding.

Formal Properties

Equivalence to LVT plus citizen's dividend. Algebraically, T = r·V̄ − r·V: the scheme is identical to a flat-rate land value tax at rate r on every holding, combined with an equal citizen's dividend of r·V̄ paid to every citizen — with the two flows netted into a single settlement. Every incidence, efficiency, and capitalization result in the LVT literature therefore carries over unchanged. (C-claim; follows directly from the definition.)

One straight line — no kink. The schedule superficially resembles Milton Friedman's negative income tax (Friedman 1962, Ch. 12), which pays out below a break-even income and collects above it. But the NIT schedule has a kink — the marginal rate changes at the break-even point, which is where its work-incentive problems live. The equal-land-share schedule is a single straight line through the threshold: the marginal cost of holding one more dollar of land value is r everywhere, above or below V̄. The threshold determines only who nets in or out, never the marginal incentive — so the scheme inherits the LVT's neutrality (holding land yields no return beyond its use value at full r; there is no gain to gaming one's position around the threshold). (C-claim; theoretical.)

A built-in majority of net recipients. Land wealth is right-skewed — a minority holds far more than the mean, so the mean exceeds the median and most citizens hold less than V̄. The majority of citizens are therefore net recipients on day one. This is the distributional finding of the wiki's LVT-progressivity evidence: land ownership is concentrated at the top of the wealth distribution (Saez & Zucman 2016; see A land value tax can be progressive), and Common Wealth Canada's 2024 distributional modelling of a national LVT with a flat refundable credit — the same mathematics as this scheme — found the credit turns the package progressive for most households. (B-claim; empirical, via the cited distributional studies.)

Netting minimizes gross fiscal flows. Because only the net position moves money, gross flows are far smaller than under separate tax-and-dividend administration: a median homeowner slightly below V̄ receives a small cheque rather than paying a large tax bill and receiving a large dividend. Detroit's proposed land-value-tax credit design uses the same netting logic at municipal scale — a credit guarantees no overall increase for below-break-even homeowners rather than routing both flows separately (City of Detroit 2023). (D-claim; design analysis.)

Both figures use illustrative round numbers (V̄ = $100,000 per citizen, r = 5%) and an illustrative right-skewed decile distribution; they are not estimates for any jurisdiction.

The Predistribution Framing

The scheme's proponents present it as predistribution, not redistribution: it does not tax away the fruits of anyone's labor and hand them to others — the moral vulnerability of income-based transfers — but settles who was owed what in the first place. The framing has deep roots:

• Thomas Paine (1797) grounded his ground-rent-funded National Fund in exactly this distinction: every proprietor of cultivated land "owes to the community a ground-rent," and the payments funded from it are "not charity but a right" (Agrarian Justice, held in full on this wiki).
• Peter Barnes (2014) applies it to modern commons dividends: "Dividends of this sort aren't redistribution; they're a way to allocate income fairly in the first place... they're legitimate property income" (With Liberty and Dividends for All, Preface).
• Hillel Steiner's "Global Fund" is the closest structural precedent: in Steiner's left-libertarian theory of justice, every person is entitled to an equal share of all natural-resource values, and holders of more than their share owe payments into a fund disbursed equally — applied by Steiner at the level of nations rather than individual landholders (Steiner 1994; 2011). The equal land share is, in effect, Steiner's principle implemented domestically at the level of the individual citizen, with land value as the base.

The advocacy case for the framing: it asks nothing technical of the audience — no tax rates, no revenue projections — only a moral judgment that each citizen is entitled to an equal share of what none of them made. The schedule then follows from the judgment by arithmetic.

Design Questions

Person-based, not parcel-based. A conventional LVT is in rem — assessed on the parcel regardless of who owns it. The equal land share must attribute land value to persons to compute each citizen's V, which raises the question of land held through corporations, trusts, and foreign owners. One design answer: give every citizen a land allowance of V̄ (the analogue of a personal income-tax allowance); land held by entities carries no allowance and pays the full rate r, while citizens offset personally-attributed holdings against their allowance and receive the unused balance in cash. Entity-held land is then taxed exactly as under an in-rem LVT, and only owner-occupied and personally-held land needs attribution. The difficulty of tracing beneficial ownership is real and documented — see the land-ownership-secrecy problem. (D-claim; design analysis.)

Rent basis, not price basis (working position, wave 4). The robust specification settles on assessed annual rental value — T = s × (R̄ − R_held) — rather than a rate on asset prices: rental value persists when the settlement itself deflates speculative land prices, so the flow is stable where the stock is reflexive. The rate-on-price form remains the presentation convenience. See objections.md §3.

The rate still exists. Land value is a stock; the scheme transfers an annual flow. The choice of r is the choice of how much of the rent is equalized: at r equal to land's full rental yield, the entire annual value of holding more than one's share is transferred, and the private return to holding land above one's share — the speculative motive — is eliminated. Presenting the scheme as "threshold plus proportion" moves the rate out of the moral foreground, but the parameter remains, and assessments must be maintained exactly as under an LVT.

What Would the Equal Share Be Worth in Canada?

Update (2026-07-18, wave 1): verified against the live StatCan tables — land $6.49T + natural resources excluding land $1.37T (Q1 2026, market value, Table 36-10-0580-01), population 41.47M → equal share ≈ $157k per resident (land only) or ≈ $190k (land + resources); annual flow at 5.5% ≈ $8,600 / $10,400 per person. The first-pass $145k below understated (dated 2022 vintage, land-only, trough quarter). Full workings: [analysis/canada-estimate.md](canada-estimate.html).

First-pass estimate, built from the numbers already verified in the wiki's Common Wealth Canada research page (all figures verified there against the primary PDFs):

The base. Statistics Canada's National Balance Sheet Accounts (Table 36-10-0580-01) put Canada's total land value at roughly $5.8 trillion (2022) (the July 2023 CWC revision's StatCan measurement; the January 2023 version used $6.4T). Land rent at CWC's long-term 5.5% capitalization rate: ≈ $320 billion/year.

The equal share. Two design choices give two thresholds:

Worked examples (per-resident design, r = 5.5%): - A renter family of four holds $0 of land against a combined threshold of ≈ $580,000 → receives ≈ $32,000/yr. - A homeowner family of four whose home sits on $250,000 of land value → receives ≈ $18,000/yr. - A holder of $1M of land value (single person) → pays ≈ $47,000/yr (5.5% of the $855k excess).

Method sensitivity (state it up front). CWC's own two editions bracket the range: the January 2023 growth-proxy method (8.32%/yr of $6.4T) implies annual land rent of ≈ $534B — roughly $13,000/yr per resident at full settlement — while the July 2023 capitalization-rate method gives the ≈ $320B / $8,000/yr figure above. The publisher cut its own headline by ~46% between editions; any Groundshare claim should quote the conservative figure and show the range. Both use 2022 data; a loop task is to refresh against the latest StatCan release and to add a distributional cut (who holds how much land, by decile) from SFS microdata rather than the illustrative distribution used in the figures.

The Name

Groundshare (Sean Platt, MMT Nemacolin 2026): "ground-rents → ground-share — share the ground-rents" roots the name in Adam Smith's vocabulary rather than in Henry George's surname. Sean's framing: the word "sounds like an idea instead of a policy," conjures shared town-square ground rather than taxation, and pairs with "natural equity" — what you create is private equity; what nature provides is natural equity, shared by all. Names considered and set aside: Groundright, Earthright, Natural Equity (kept as tagline), earth-sharing (original). "Equal Land Share" remains the mechanism's descriptive name inside the proposal; Groundshare is the movement and brand.

Honest Limits

• It raises no revenue. The classic Georgist program uses captured rent to replace taxes on labor and capital (the single tax; the Henry George Theorem). A pure equal-land-share settlement forgoes that gain entirely: existing taxes remain. Hybrids are possible (retain a fraction of collections for public revenue), but they reintroduce the tax framing the scheme is designed to avoid.
• Transition effects are those of an LVT at rate r. Above-threshold holders bear a one-time capitalized loss when the scheme is announced, exactly as under the equivalent LVT — the equivalence cuts both ways, and the standard transition objections (see the transition-fairness objection) apply unchanged.
• Attribution is harder than parcel taxation. The person-based accounting that gives the scheme its moral legibility is also its main administrative cost relative to in-rem LVT.
• Novelty caveat. The wiki has not found this exact formulation in the literature, but its mathematical content — flat LVT plus equal dividend — is a standard proposal; claims made for the scheme should therefore be evaluated against, and inherit the evidence base of, that established package.

See Also

• Citizen's Dividend — the tax-and-dividend form of the same mathematics
• Land Value Tax — the levy side of the equivalence
• A land value tax can be progressive — the evidence on who pays and who gains
• Agrarian Justice — Paine's "a right, not charity" predecessor, held in full
• Milton Friedman — the negative-income-tax schedule the scheme visually resembles (and structurally improves on: no kink)
• Land as Commons · Geolibertarianism

Sources

1. Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879), Bk. VII — used for the rent-as-common-property premise (A/C-claim). Full text
2. Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice (1797) — used for the ground-rent obligation and the "a right, not charity" predistributive framing (A-claim; public domain, held in full). Text page
3. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962), Ch. 12 — used for the negative-income-tax schedule the scheme is contrasted with (A/C-claim). https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/internal/media/dispatcher/271085/full
4. Hillel Steiner, An Essay on Rights (Blackwell, 1994) and "The Global Fund: A Reply to Casal," Journal of Moral Philosophy 8:3 (2011) — used for the equal-share-of-natural-resource-values principle with above-share holders paying in (C-claim). https://philpapers.org/rec/STET_F-5
5. Peter Barnes, With Liberty and Dividends for All (Berrett-Koehler, 2014), Preface — used for the dividends-as-predistribution framing (D-claim). Book page
6. Common Wealth Canada, Distributional Impacts of a National Land Value Tax (2024) — used for the finding that a flat refundable credit makes a national LVT progressive for most households (B-claim). Research page
7. City of Detroit, Land Value Tax Plan (2023) — used for the municipal netting/credit design precedent (A-claim). https://detroitmi.gov/departments/office-chief-financial-officer/land-value-tax-plan

Groundshare — a proposal in open development. Every number traces to a cited public source with its retrieval date; corrections are published, not erased. Rebuilt 2026-07-19 from the repo's research files.