Freedom That Maintains Itself
Last piece of a civic-georgist sketch. Part one: the economics. Part two: the governance. This one: why it’s legitimate, how it holds together, and how you’d actually get there.
LVT is rent, not tax
The move that makes the whole thing cohere is reclassifying LVT as contract enforcement rather than taxation. This resolves the tension a libertarian reader has been holding since Part One: isn’t this still coercive taxation under a different name?
You don’t naturally own land. The community owns it collectively. Holding a land title means you’ve entered a voluntary agreement — you pay for exclusive use. If you stop paying, the title voids after a notice period and goes to auction. Proceeds cover arrears; the remainder returns to you.
No arrest. No prison. No wage garnishment. No asset seizure beyond the land itself. Just enforcement of a voluntary contract. Hard to see where the coercion is.
If you don’t want to pay LVT, don’t hold titles. Rent from someone who does. Use public spaces. No force is applied to anyone who hasn’t opted in.
the force budget
The state can use force in exactly four cases: preventing aggression, enforcing voluntary contracts, removing trespassers, and defending the commonwealth.
Everything else falls outside its authority. Drug use, sex work, gambling — not crimes here. Tax evasion — impossible by design. What remains: assault, murder, theft, fraud, rape. Genuine crimes against persons. The force apparatus shrinks to a fraction of what modern states require.
The warlord question — who stops a powerful actor from seizing territory? — gets multiple answers working together. Service-citizens are trained and organized: a distributed militia, not a standing army that could turn inward. Title holders have direct financial interest in stability. Economic integration means everyone has too much to lose. And if one jurisdiction goes authoritarian, residents defect to neighbouring ones, taking their economic activity with them.
commissions
Whatever LVT surplus remains after funding core government doesn’t have to be distributed as cash. Citizens can allocate portions as commissions — bounties for specific public goods.
“We’ll pay $500,000 for a public-domain physics textbook.” Creators compete. The winner delivers. The result belongs to everyone.
“We’ll pay $X per ton of carbon sequestered.” Companies compete on method and price. The cheapest effective solution wins.
This replaces both government procurement (bureaucratic, captured, inflexible) and the impossible problem of centrally pricing public goods. The commission doesn’t try to determine what a textbook or a ton of carbon removal is “worth.” It just asks: what are citizens willing to pay? Price discovery through democracy.
Carbon is a good case. Instead of building a cap-and-trade apparatus or guessing the “right” carbon price, citizens commission removal and let the market find the cheapest delivery method.
the citizen dividend
Whatever LVT revenue remains after the force budget and commissions gets distributed equally to all residents — citizens and civilians alike. You live here, you get a share.
How much depends on the jurisdiction. Dense, high-value cities generate bigger surpluses. A place like Edmonton or Calgary — lots of valuable urban land, stripped-down government costs — could produce a meaningful per-person dividend. Rural areas generate less but have lower costs of living.
The dividend creates a natural incentive to make your community a better place to live. The land value you help create comes back to you. It also means the elimination of income and sales tax isn’t just a benefit for earners — everyone gains from the commons they share.
resilience without growth
Most modern economies need perpetual expansion. Debt pyramids require growth to service. Pensions assume 7% returns forever. Government obligations only work if GDP outruns interest rates.
This system has no such addiction.
There’s no debt pyramid underneath land values. If values fall, no leveraged mortgage chain collapses. Sunset provisions automatically right-size government to available revenue — when receipts drop, marginal programs expire naturally. Commissions pivot from “build new things” to “improve efficiency” without any structural change.
Population decline: fewer people, less demand, lower values, lower revenue, smaller government, new equilibrium.
Energy constraint: dense urban land appreciates while sprawl depreciates — the market drives densification on its own.
Resource scarcity: commons pricing raises extraction costs, encouraging conservation automatically.
I don’t know of another economic architecture designed for a world of constraints rather than infinite expansion.
getting there
You’d need a twenty-year phased transition. The overnight version would crash land prices, put every mortgage underwater, and collapse the banking system. So you don’t do that.
Years 1–5: Kill property tax. Institute LVT at 25% of ground rent. Reduce income tax by 25%. Create the legal framework for separating titles from improvements.
The key innovation here is voluntary mortgage conversion. The land portion of existing mortgages converts to LVT obligations with government backing. Homeowners pay LVT instead of the land piece of their mortgage. The math often works out cheaper once you factor in the income tax savings.
Here’s a worked example. A typical $380,000 Edmonton home with a $300,000 mortgage. The property splits roughly 80/20 between building and land. So the building loan continues at $240,000 — the monthly payment drops from about $1,750 to around $1,400. The land component ($60,000) converts to an LVT bond. The government assumes that portion, pays the bank, and the homeowner pays ground rent instead — maybe $250/month at Phase 1 rates. Total monthly cost: roughly $1,650. Factor in the 25% income tax reduction and most households come out ahead. Nobody goes underwater. Banks stay solvent. The transition generates economic activity rather than destroying it.
Years 6–10: LVT to 50%. Income tax to 50%. The service-citizenship program launches. The commission system begins.
Years 11–15: LVT to 75%. Most other taxes gone. Full tokenization of land titles. Voluntary governance layers emerge.
Years 16–20: Full implementation at 85%. No income tax. No sales tax. Government funded entirely by LVT and resource rents.
Every five years, citizens vote on whether to continue. It’s reversible at each checkpoint. If it fails — revert. If it succeeds — it locks in.
what’s next
Three posts to sketch something that usually takes a book. Open questions remain — disability accommodations in the service path, existing zoning unwind, revenue bonds in bankruptcy, judicial structure. Those deserve their own treatment rather than a hand-wave here.
The core shape is there, though. Markets are genuinely free because the only levy falls on unearned location value. Government structurally small because sunset provisions and competitive jurisdictions make bloat impossible. Force minimized because LVT is contract enforcement and most “crimes” vanish from the code. Public goods funded through democratic commissions instead of bureaucratic planning. Resilient because none of it depends on infinite growth.
I keep coming back to the oldest question in political philosophy: how do free people govern themselves without the government eventually eating the freedom? Making the government re-earn its existence every year, from citizens who earned their voice — that’s one answer worth testing. A municipality-scale pilot somewhere in Alberta could tell us whether it works.