Earned Citizenship
Part two of a civic-georgist sketch. Part one covered the economics — LVT, unbundled ownership, the commons principle. This is the governance.
Here’s the idea most people react to first: political participation — voting, holding office, constitutional juries — requires a term of service to the community.
Two classes of residents.
Civilians have full economic freedom, complete civil liberties, property rights, and legal protection. They pay LVT, run businesses, and hold land titles. They just can’t vote or hold office.
Citizens have everything civilians have, plus the franchise. The only way in is to complete two to four years of service. Military, infrastructure construction, environmental restoration, teaching, emergency services, elder care, civic administration. It’s deliberately challenging but achievable regardless of physical ability. It can’t be bought, inherited, or transferred.
The obvious objection: this is a caste system. Two tiers of people, sorted by whether they served.
Look at the current system, though. Political influence is already tiered — by money. Campaign donations, lobbying access, regulatory capture. A billionaire and a minimum-wage worker both get one vote, but only one of them gets meetings with the premier. The franchise is universal in theory; the actual levers of power are gated by wealth.
This system replaces wealth-gating with effort-gating. The price of admission is time and service, not money. A rancher’s kid from Bonnyville and a CEO’s kid from Calgary face the same path. Nobody buys their way in.
And civilian life isn’t diminished. Most of daily life happens outside politics. The economy — where the action is — requires no service at all. Foreign companies, immigrants, children — anyone can own titles, run businesses, and participate fully. Only governance demands the earned franchise.
why this works
The free-rider problem dissolves. People shaping governance have demonstrated willingness to sacrifice for the commons. The competence gap narrows — citizens who’ve served understand viscerally how infrastructure gets built, how services get delivered, how defence works.
And since land value comes from everyone’s effort, it makes sense that the people who’ve contributed get to say how rents are spent.
But the structural benefit matters most. Citizens who earned their franchise aren’t career politicians. They served, they voted, they went back to their lives. They have no institutional interest in government expansion. When a marginal program comes up for renewal, “do we actually need this?” gets asked by people who are paying the opportunity cost honestly.
laws that die
Every law except the constitutional core expires automatically. The default state of the system is no law.
- 5-year law: Simple majority.
- 10-year law: 60% supermajority.
- 20-year law: 75% supermajority.
- Constitutional amendment: 80% of citizens plus a majority of geographic districts.
Traditional states ratchet — they only grow, because repealing takes political energy while keeping takes nothing. Sunset provisions invert this. Growth requires energy. Shrinkage is the default.
The practical payoff: crises produce temporary powers via simple majority with a short sunset. When the crisis passes, the powers expire on their own. No political fight needed. Emergency regulations can’t become permanent because permanence requires a supermajority that’s nearly impossible to muster once the emergency is over.
the permanent core
Small enough to teach a child. Fits on one page.
- Individual rights. Self-ownership. Speech, movement, association. Due process. Equal protection.
- The Georgist compact. Land and natural resources belong to all. Exclusive use requires compensation via LVT. Extends to any scarce unearned resource.
- The service principle. Political participation requires service. Paths remain open to all. Civilian status is protected.
- The force principle. State force only to prevent aggression, enforce voluntary contracts, remove trespassers, and defend the commonwealth. Never for redistribution, behavioural control, or victimless offences.
- Structural limits. Enumerated powers only. All non-core laws sunset. No debt beyond current revenue.
Everything else — every regulation, program, agency, budget line — renews or dies.
voluntary layers
Above the constitutional minimum, governance is opt-in. Parcels can join or leave associations. Border properties choose which municipality to belong to. Fire protection, utilities, delivery zones — these are subscriptions, not territorial monopolies.
Governance layers have to earn their members. Here’s the bite: if a governance layer charges mandatory fees for association rather than actual service, those fees get treated as ground rent — subject to 85% LVT.
Take a typical suburban HOA charging $6,000 a year to maintain a sign and send threatening letters about lawn height. Under this system, that $6,000 counts as ground rent extraction. The HOA owes $5,100 in LVT on it. That leaves $900 — not enough to pay the management company, let alone the lawyer they use to harass residents. It dissolves.
Now take an association that runs a community well, maintains fire breaks, and plows roads — services that visibly raise land values. Their fees reflect real value delivered. The LVT bite is proportionally smaller because the service genuinely costs what they charge. They survive and grow. The mechanism selects for governance that creates value and kills governance that extracts it.
Border fluidity makes this bite harder. If your parcel sits between two municipalities, you choose which to join. If Medicine Hat runs better schools and lower overhead than the county next door, parcels at the boundary start switching. Your switch gives your neighbours the same option — suddenly the border is moving.
Over time, well-governed towns expand and poorly-governed ones contract. Not through conquest, but through voluntary defection. A town that mismanages its LVT revenue doesn’t just lose an election — it loses territory, residents, and the revenue base to fund whatever it was doing poorly. The feedback loop is immediate and financial, not abstract and electoral.
Same principles at every scale. Parcel, block, municipal, provincial. Each level constrained by exit rights, the constitutional core, competition from neighbours, and sunset provisions. Over time, it’s natural selection for competent governance — the ones that serve people well grow, the rest shrink.