# Citizen's dividend A **citizen’s dividend** (CD) is a regular, unconditional cash payment to each resident, funded from rents on land and other common assets — location value, minerals, spectrum, atmosphere, and similar. It is the distribution half of classical geoism. Related but not identical: universal basic income (any funding source), Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend (oil-seeded sovereign wealth), Paine’s ground-rent-plus-inheritance scheme. ^def ## Lineage Thomas Paine, *Agrarian Justice* (1797): the earth is a common inheritance; proprietors owe ground rent; part of the fund should go to each person as a stake (Paine also wanted an inheritance component). See [[Geolibertarianism]]. Many modern Georgists treat surplus land rent — after financing necessary public goods — as belonging to persons equally. That is the ethical rationale for a CD rather than a larger state. Foldvary’s geo-libertarian budget is exactly this: thin state + dividend. Whether [[Henry George]] himself favored a dividend is disputed. He wanted rent socialized and other taxes abolished. He wrote about the community participating in the advantages of landownership. He did not build a UBI apparatus. Single-tax fundamentalists say that is decisive. Dividend Georgists say the *logic* of common heritage requires a residual payout. ^george ## Alaska as the working model The Alaska Permanent Fund (constitutional amendment 1976, Gov. Jay Hammond) banks at least 25% of specified mineral revenues. The Permanent Fund Dividend, paid since the early 1980s to residents who meet a presence test, is the nearest large-scale resource dividend. Amounts vary with fund earnings (on the order of $1,000–$2,000 per person in many years; cumulative payouts over decades are in the tens of thousands per resident). Researchers treat it as a basic-income-like resource dividend, not a full UBI, and credit it with compressing Alaska’s inequality relative to other states. It is funded by oil rents, not a statewide [[Land value tax]]. ^alaska ## Why [[@TaxLandNotMan]] rejects it Monroe’s posts are unusually explicit. He is a [[Single tax]]er and *not* a geo-distributist. > Land Tax + Citizen's Dividend = FEUDALISM > Land Tax + Nothing = NATURAL LAW, aka ECONOMIC JUSTICE, aka INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY > A "Citizen's Dividend" turns society back into cattle. […] If we are subsidized, nature loses control. > Paying for the sick, needy and elderly =/= a Citizen's Dividend. Those are things every civilized government does. A CD or UBI is an entirely different concept with zero social benefits and a plethora of socially detrimental aspects. Justice is natural, not engineered. > He wrote many books and not even one paragraph in any of them advocates a Citizen's Dividend or a UBI. The single tax is natural order. Government distribution of currency is not what will give us individual freedom. Equal access to Earth is. Reading, compressed: 1. Justice is *cheap land and high wages*, produced by taxing land hard enough that it is not an asset class — not a check. 2. A dividend is a political permission slip for the state to sit between persons and nature. 3. Caring for the sick/elderly is ordinary government; a universal cash grant is a different species. 4. If a polity still wants a dividend after the single tax, it can vote one in *later*; it is not required by the theory. He will concede the last point in a softer post: a CD “will not be necessary,” but if enacted after people are “freed from financial servitude,” it would be easy. The hard posts treat it as a category error. ^monroe ## The intra-Georgist argument | Pro-dividend | Anti-dividend (Monroe) | |---|---| | Common heritage is a *personal* claim, not a treasury claim | Equal access is achieved when land is not hoarded; cash is a substitute for access | | Surplus rent otherwise grows the state | A dividend makes recipients “cattle” / feudal dependents | | Politics: voters like checks | Politics: voters should want lower land prices, not a new entitlement | | Alaska “works” | Alaska is oil royalties, not the single tax; different thing | For the deep dive this note belongs to, the dividend fight is the cleanest way to see that “Georgist” is a family, not a party line. --- ## Citations 1. [Citizen's dividend — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_dividend). Paine; definition; Alaska PFD figures. 2. [Alaska Permanent Fund — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund). 1976 amendment; PFD eligibility; inequality claims. 3. Alanna Hartzok on the Alaska Fund in *Rent as Public Revenue* (Davies ed.). 25% mineral-revenue rule; first $1,000 dividend. 4. [Basic Income and Citizens Dividend path — Progress.org](https://www.progress.org/paths/citizen-dividend/). Contemporary Georgist pro-dividend literature. 5. Paine via [[Geolibertarianism]] citations. 6. Monroe posts (quoted above): [1742577510318018943](https://x.com/TaxLandNotMan/status/1742577510318018943), [1938450777392963900](https://x.com/TaxLandNotMan/status/1938450777392963900), [1910407222762340427](https://x.com/TaxLandNotMan/status/1910407222762340427), [1619488211033817088](https://x.com/TaxLandNotMan/status/1619488211033817088). Full extracts in [[TaxLandNotMan-sources]]. 7. Related: [[Geolibertarianism]], [[Single tax]], [[Henry George]].