The Pamphleteer in Paris

Thomas Paine, in the winter of 1795 to 1796, was sixty years old, in Paris, in indifferent health, and writing what would be his last major political pamphlet. He had been released from the Luxembourg Prison the previous November, after eleven months in confinement and a near miss with the guillotine that survived in his subsequent biographical literature as a story about a chalk mark mistakenly placed on the wrong side of his cell door. The story may or may not be exactly true. What is true is that he had expected to die in the prison and had not, that the political faction that imprisoned him had themselves been executed in the meantime, and that the new French government, recognizing his standing as a former delegate to the National Convention, had restored him to his seat on his release. He was at this point neither English nor French but technically still American, having taken citizenship of the new republic he had helped to argue into existence twenty years before. He was writing, in late 1795 and early 1796, in a small room in a boarding-house, on the subject of who owns the Earth.

He had been provoked into the topic by an English bishop named Richard Watson, the bishop of Llandaff, who had recently published a sermon on the moral providence of inequality. Watson’s argument was that economic inequality among human beings was natural, divinely ordained, and outside the proper sphere of political reform. The argument had been reprinted in the English press during Paine’s imprisonment. Paine, on his release, read it. He disagreed at length. The disagreement, after some compression and several drafts, became the pamphlet Agrarian Justice, which he published in 1797 in both English and French.

The pamphlet is short. About ten thousand words. Plain prose. It is also, in the public memory, the Paine pamphlet nobody reads.

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Paine’s argument in Agrarian Justice is more careful than the simplified version that has been periodically attributed to him. He does not argue for the abolition of private property. He does not argue for the redistribution of accumulated wealth. He does not argue for any form of the collectivization that the political tradition coming out of Marx, half a century later, would make recognizable. He argues something narrower and more durable.

He begins from a distinction. He writes that there are two kinds of property in any human society: the kind that came into existence through human labor, and the kind that existed before any human labor was applied. The first kind he calls artificial property — the cultivated field, the built house, the manufactured tool. The second he calls natural property — the Earth itself, in its uncultivated state, before anyone has fenced or plowed any portion of it. He accepts that artificial property is the legitimate possession of those who produced it; he is uninterested in disputing the labor-theoretic justification of private ownership of what one has made. His attention is on the natural property.

His historical claim is this. Before the political institution of private ownership of land, every human being in any given community had access to the natural property without exclusion — could hunt, could gather, could draw water, could subsist directly from the unowned ground. The political institution of land ownership removed that access for everyone who did not become an owner. In Paine’s framing, this was a transaction: the non-owner lost something — the direct subsistence access — and gained, in return, the right to compete in a labor market the landowner had organized. Paine’s claim is that the transaction was unequal. The landowner gained a perpetual exclusive position; the non-owner gained only the right to negotiate his subsistence at terms set by someone else.

He does not claim, on the basis of this, that civilization should be reversed. He believes civilization is a net gain, and he says so. His claim is that the establishment of private property in land generates a debt from the landowning class to the non-landowning class — a debt that is owed in perpetuity, because the loss of access is in perpetuity, and that the debt does not go away because some particular landowner happens to have inherited his title rather than acquired it actively. The political community, in Paine’s framing, is the institution responsible for collecting and discharging the debt on behalf of those owed.

The single sentence in the pamphlet that has been most quoted is: Every proprietor… owes to the community a ground-rent (for I know of no better term to express the idea) for the land which he holds.

The phrase ground-rent, in Paine’s usage, is not the conventional landlord-tenant rent of his period. It is a perpetual obligation owed by the institution of private ownership to the political community that maintains the institution. Every owner holds his title only on the condition that he discharge the obligation. The community has standing to demand the discharge. The form of the discharge, in his proposal, is a tax on inherited property. The proceeds go directly to the community in two payment streams.

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The first stream is a one-time payment of fifteen pounds sterling to every citizen at the age of twenty-one. The figure, in 1796 money, is approximately equivalent to two thousand five hundred dollars in 2024 purchasing power. Paine proposed it without means-testing — every citizen received it, rich or poor, on the explicit theory that the rich citizen had the same claim against the natural-property debt as the poor citizen, and that means-testing the payment would convert it from a property-rights settlement into a charity, which it was not. The payment was a discharge of an obligation owed to every citizen as a matter of citizenship, not a transfer to the deserving.

The second stream is an annual pension of ten pounds, beginning at age fifty, paid for the remainder of life. Approximately seventeen hundred and fifty dollars per year in 2024 purchasing power. Same rationale. The natural-property debt is owed across the lifetime, not only at the threshold of adulthood; the older citizen, whose capacity for productive labor declines, has the same claim and a more pressing need.

The funding mechanism is a tax on inheritance, set at ten percent of the value of estates above a defined threshold, with the proceeds dedicated entirely to the two distribution streams. Paine selected the inheritance tax for a specific reason. The living landowner who has cultivated his property has at least added artificial value through his own labor; the heir has added nothing. The heir receives, in unmediated form, the accumulated benefits of the original property-creation event. The inheritance tax captures the natural-property debt without imposing on the labor-and-capital of those who are actively working their holdings. It is, in the pamphlet’s phrase, a settlement against the institution of inheritance, not a punishment of effort.

The math is rough. Eighteenth-century pamphleteers did not have the demographic and revenue data needed for precise modeling. Paine’s arithmetic, however, is plausible: he estimates the annual revenue from the proposed inheritance tax at about £5.6 million in 1796 England, against an annual obligation of about £3 million under his payment schedule. His point is not the precision; his point is that the arithmetic works, that the proposal is fiscally self-sustaining, that no general redistribution of accumulated wealth is required. The discharge of the debt is paid for by the institution of inherited property itself, taxed at a modest rate.

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The pamphlet did not change anything in Paine’s lifetime. He published it in 1797, returned to the United States in 1802, and lived the remaining seven years of his life in increasing political marginalization. Federalist newspapers attacked him as a Jacobin radical. Old Democratic-Republican allies, including Jefferson, kept their distance. He died in 1809, in a small house in New York. Six people attended his funeral. His remains were dug up and sent to England by an admirer in 1819, with the intention of erecting a monument; the remains never made it to the monument and were lost. The Founder who had written the most-read pamphlet of the American Revolution and the most-read pamphlet of the French Revolution and was eligible by birth to participate in neither nation’s politics by the end of his life had become, by his death, the kind of inconvenient figure that political traditions tend to lose track of.

The pamphlet remained in print, mostly in obscure editions. It was not a major reference for nineteenth-century American political economy. The Populist movement of the 1890s recovered some of its themes — Henry George’s Progress and Poverty of 1879 restated the natural-property-and-debt argument in different vocabulary and proposed a single tax on land — but did not produce sustained legislative implementation at scale. The New Deal era recovered some of the structure. Francis Townsend’s plan for old-age pensions, and the Townsend movement that became the political pressure behind Social Security, used Paine’s age-based pension structure but converted the funding from his inheritance tax to a payroll tax. Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth movement in 1934 and 1935 polled at twenty percent of the country before Long was shot in Baton Rouge; the proposal was a more aggressive cap-and-redistribution scheme but its political-economic logic shared the Paine framing. Each of these was a partial recovery. None of them was a full implementation.

The full implementation, on a small scale, exists in one place. The Alaska Permanent Fund, established by constitutional amendment in 1976 and statute in 1982, distributes a portion of state oil-royalty revenue to every Alaskan citizen as an annual dividend. The institutional structure is precisely Paine’s, with the natural-property base shifted from agricultural land to subsoil mineral resources but the structure preserved. The Permanent Fund has paid an annual dividend continuously for forty-three years. Annual payments have ranged from about three hundred dollars in 1984 to about thirty-three hundred dollars in 2022. The state has not experienced the inflationary pressures or the labor-supply distortions that critics of cash transfers had predicted. The dividend has substantial bipartisan support in Alaska across the political spectrum. It is not a national program. It is the only sustained example of a Paine-form citizen’s dividend operating at population scale anywhere in the United States. It has worked.

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The political party I am writing this for has built a national version of the proposal into its platform.

Country Profit Sharing is, in substance, Agrarian Justice re-derived for an economy in which the principal natural-property analog is no longer agricultural land but the cumulative public investment in the institutions, infrastructure, education, research, and law that made the contemporary AI productivity premium possible. The substitution does not weaken Paine’s argument. It strengthens it. The case for a debt owed to the community, by those who benefit disproportionately from access to a politically-constructed common resource, is more defensible when the resource is the public-investment substrate of the modern technology economy than when it is the original commons of seventeenth-century England. The public-investment substrate is documentable, traceable, and recent. No private firm built the National Science Foundation, the university system, the Internet protocols, the patent and contract law, the labor force trained at public expense. The firms that capture the AI productivity premium capture it from a substrate they did not build, on terms set by political institutions they did not establish, under circumstances that would not exist without the long history of public commitment that produced them.

The Country Profit Sharing dividend is the discharge of that debt, distributed to every citizen, indexed to national output, not means-tested, not earned, not contributory. It is property held in common, distributed to its rightful holders. The Tiered Profit-Ratio Tax is the contemporary analog of Paine’s inheritance tax — collecting the debt from the firms whose scale most directly captures the productivity premium, on the same theoretical principle Paine used to direct his collection toward the inheritance of large estates. Paine could not have known about per-employee profit ratios; he had a different revenue base to work with. The principle is the same. The instrument is updated.

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The platform’s case for Country Profit Sharing will be attacked, when it begins to be attacked seriously, on the grounds that any unconditional cash-transfer program is socialism — a redistribution from the productive to the unproductive, a confiscation of what the rich have earned, a foreign import alien to the American tradition. The charge will be made with vigor.

The charge is structurally incorrect. The reason it is structurally incorrect was articulated in 1797, by a Founder, in a pamphlet most of the people who will make the charge have never read.

Country Profit Sharing is not a redistribution. It is the discharge of a property debt. The property is the common substrate of public investment that produces the AI productivity premium. The citizens, as the heirs of the public investment that produced the substrate, are the rightful holders of a share of the premium. The firms that capture the premium without discharging the debt are not earning it in the sense the charge requires; they are appropriating, under the political institutions of the moment, a resource that was built politically for the benefit of the community. The dividend is the community’s claim on its own property, settled in cash, paid to the rightful holders.

This is not a contemporary rationalization of a redistributive impulse. It is the original argument of the pamphlet that has been the foundational document of every citizen’s-dividend proposal in two hundred years of American political life — written by the Founder whose other works any opponent of the platform will, in the same breath, claim to revere. The opponent cannot consistently invoke Common Sense and dismiss Agrarian Justice as alien to the American tradition. The pamphlets are by the same author. They are part of the same political project. The argument of Agrarian Justice is the argument of Common Sense extended to its logical economic application: that the legitimacy of the political community rests on the consent of those it governs, that the consent rests on the conditions of those who give it, and that the conditions cannot be sustained where the natural inheritance of citizenship has been quietly transferred to a smaller and smaller fraction of the polity.

He saw it. He wrote it down. He published it in 1797. He died in 1809, before any of it was implemented. The Alaska Permanent Fund implemented the structure in 1982 in a single state, on a single resource base, and has demonstrated across forty-three years that the institutional form works. The platform of The Intelligent Party is the implementation of the structure at the scale of the country, on the resource base of the contemporary AI economy, in the year 2026. We are two hundred and twenty-nine years late.

The pamphlet is on the public record. It has been on the public record for two hundred and twenty-nine years. The opponents who will attack the platform as socialism are attacking a Founder. They may not know they are doing it. They will be told.

He saw it. He wrote it down. The pamphlet is short. The argument is plain. We are late.