The State, in its typical form, is nothing more than a protection racket for landowners. And that goes right back into the age of kings and barrons.

UPDATE: I’m rederiving Geolibertarianism. Albeit with a much more elegant foundation than land taxes. (spits after word taxes.)

The problem with Libertarianism is that it assumes that the state’s stolen property – the land historically taken by violence – can be grandfathered into a Libertarian state without any significant reappraisal of the situation. The initial wrongdoing implied in the formation of nearly all States – theft of land by violence – is replicated in the system of land-as-property.

I have a counterproposal which would only work in a denovo libertarian state, but which I think would work.

Here it is.

1> The citizens of the State are the owners of the State.

2> The land is owned by the State, given that this is a denovo state and property rights over land have not yet been created.

3> All members of the State have equal rights to the assets of the State, including its land. Note this refers to property of the government only – not all property within the boundaries of the State.

4> Land is made available for private use at auction. This is a multi-part process which I will detail below.

5> Proceeds from this land auction are divided up equally among the citizens of the state, and form a baseline of public support to the individual which is entirely fair in how it is divided, and without doubt fairly gotten. In short, we have public welfare without socialism. The State owns the land and rents it to citizens, and then divides the proceeds. There is no taxation: if you do not wish to own land, you do not have to participate in the land auction.

This is, I think, entirely clear and pragmatic. And, I’m gobsmacked to discover, Tom Paine and Winston Churchill had similar notions. Also compare to universal basic income, and most specifically, Georgism. The problem is that we want to implement a universal basic income without taxes: the solution is for the State not to surrender ownership of land to the individual, only use.

Is this insanity? It depends on the dynamics of the land auction.

Now, the dynamics of the land auction are key and core, and here is my suggestion.

Firstly, inheritance and transfer of property are not assumed. It may be that upon a person’s death, the land use right they have terminates. Or it may be inherited. Either way, there is no guarantee. Secondly, there is the issue of property built on land. If one creates a building, is it yours?

And in this we hit the rub – non-mobile assets, like buildings and improvements in farmland, which are naturally the property of those that created them, while the land they rest on is naturally (in this model) the property of the owners of the State in all.

One approach is to assign such things market value, and pay those that made the improvements. But the right not to sell the home you live in, even if its value has increased a thousand-fold, is clearly fairly deeply rooted.

To this issue we will return. It is a question of what is being leased? This also raises questions about the transferability of leases, subleases and so on.

In terms of the boundaries of each plot of property to be auctioned, and the length of time which the lease on the land is for, my suggestion is simple: the longest lease should be for 100 years, or some number with a similar relationship to the human lifespan. The shortest lease should probably be dependent on the transactional cost of the auction, perhaps one to three months. My suggestion is that in an initial run, these values would be randomized, and areas where leases were commonly thought to be too short or too long handled at an administrative level. Citizens could, of course, choose to surrender a lease to public auction at any time.

The actual dividing lines between plots would be generated initially with some care regarding rives, watersheds and so on, implementing some principles from bioregionalism. If it was commonly agreed that the boundaries in a given area were all screwed up to, say, the changing course of a river or original administrative errors, the lease renewal dates on those areas would be synchronized, and new boundaries proposed and implemented for the whole at the next renewal date. Note this implies mechanisms as-yet-undefined, probably including democratic election or popular voting for boundaries, and represents a significant issue.

It also provides a foundation for environmental law: one cannot dump one’s poisons on “one’s own land” because all land is leased, not owned, except the territory of the State itself.

I believe this schema implements much or all that is required for a libertarian state which is sound to the core to be implemented. Gives me the chills.