What Paine Proposed

The Pamphlet Nobody Reads

Thomas Paine, in the public memory, is the author of two pamphlets. Common Sense, published in January 1776, sold a hundred thousand copies in its first year in a country of three million people, made the political case for American independence in language any reasonably literate colonist could follow, and is conventionally credited with shifting the Continental Congress and the broader colonial population from a position of constitutional accommodation toward a position of separation.¹ The Rights of Man, published in two parts in 1791 and 1792, defended the French Revolution against Edmund Burke’s critique, sold approximately a million copies in Britain (in a population of ten million), and was banned in England as seditious libel, which forced Paine to flee to France and eventually to be elected to the French National Convention as a representative of Pas-de-Calais despite not speaking French.² He wrote other things: The Crisis papers during the war, The Age of Reason on religion, the personal correspondence and minor pamphlets that fill the various editions of his collected works. But in the public memory the two pamphlets carry his name.

The third pamphlet, the one this essay is about, has not been substantially read for two hundred years. It is short — about ten thousand words. It was published in 1797. Paine wrote it during the winter of 1795–1796 in a Paris boarding-house, while recovering from imprisonment under the Robespierre government, and he wrote it specifically in response to an English bishop named Richard Watson, who had recently published a sermon arguing that economic inequality was natural, providential, and not subject to political correction.³ Paine, who had read the sermon, disagreed at length. The disagreement became Agrarian Justice.

The pamphlet’s argument has been substantially absent from American political discourse for the entire history of the country, with the partial exception of brief recoveries during specific periods (the Populist movement of the 1890s, certain Progressive Era debates, the post-2000 universal-basic-income discussion). It has also been the foundational document of every citizen’s-dividend scheme that has been seriously proposed in those two centuries: Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth, the Alaska Permanent Fund, the various negative-income-tax proposals from Milton Friedman to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the contemporary universal basic income literature, and the platform now associated with The Intelligent Party. Each of these proposals is, in its specific institutional form, different from Paine’s. None of them is structurally different from Paine’s. The argument is his.

This essay walks the argument.

The Distinction Paine Made

Paine’s analytical move, in Agrarian Justice, is more careful than the move usually attributed to him by his selective subsequent quotation. He does not argue for the abolition of private property. He does not argue for the redistribution of existing wealth. He does not argue for any form of the nationalization or collectivization that the political tradition descended from Marx would later make recognizable. His argument is more specific and, for that reason, more durable.

Paine begins from a distinction between two kinds of property: what he calls “natural property” and what he calls “artificial property.” Natural property is the Earth — the land, the rivers, the forests, the mineral resources — in its uncultivated state, before any human labor has been applied to it. Artificial property is everything human labor has produced from that natural starting point: the cultivated field, the built house, the manufactured tool, the accumulated capital. Paine accepts that artificial property is the legitimate possession of those who produce it; he is uninterested in disputing the labor-theoretic justification of private ownership of what one has made.

The distinction matters because of a specific historical claim Paine then advances. He observes that, prior to the establishment of private property in land, every human being in any given society had unrestricted access to the natural property — could hunt, gather, draw water, cultivate any portion of unowned ground. The establishment of private property in land, which Paine treats as a historical-political act rather than as a feature of the natural order, removed that access for everyone who did not become a landowner. The non-landowner, in the new regime, lost something he had previously possessed — the ability to feed himself directly from natural property — and gained, in return, the obligation to obtain his subsistence by selling his labor to a landowner.

Paine’s argument is that this exchange is, on its face, unequal. The landowner gains exclusive access to a resource that previously had been available to everyone; the non-landowner loses access in return for nothing more than the right to compete in a labor market the landowner has constructed. Paine is not claiming that civilization is therefore a net loss; he believes civilization is a net gain, and he says so explicitly. His claim is narrower: that the establishment of private property in land generates a debt from the landowning class to the non-landowning class, and that the debt is owed in perpetuity, because the loss of access to natural property is also in perpetuity. The landowner who inherits land inherits, with it, the share of the debt that attaches to that land. The political community is the institution responsible for collecting and discharging the debt on behalf of the non-landowners.

The single sentence in Agrarian Justice that contemporary readers most often encounter, when they encounter the pamphlet at all, 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.⁴

The phrase ground-rent, in Paine’s usage, is not the conventional eighteenth-century landlord-tenant rent. It is a perpetual obligation owed by the institution of private landownership to the community that authorizes the institution. Every proprietor holds his title only on the political condition that he discharge this obligation. The political community has the standing to require the discharge. The form of the discharge, in Paine’s specific proposal, is a tax on inherited property, the proceeds of which are distributed in two streams to the citizenry.

The Two Streams

The first stream is a one-time payment of fifteen pounds sterling (about £2,000 today, or approximately $2,500 in 2024 purchasing-power-equivalent terms) to every citizen reaching the age of twenty-one.⁵ Paine’s stated rationale is that a young adult arriving at the age of full civic participation should arrive with a small initial endowment, sufficient to allow him or her to make the choices about education, occupation, family formation, and geographic location that are foreclosed by the absence of any starting capital. The payment is not means-tested. It goes to every citizen, rich or poor, on the explicit theory — Paine states this directly — that the rich citizen has 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 is not. The payment is the discharge of a property 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 (about £1,400 today, or roughly $1,750 per year in 2024 terms) paid to every citizen reaching the age of fifty, for the remainder of their life.⁶ The rationale is parallel. 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 pension, like the one-time payment, is not means-tested.

The funding mechanism Paine proposes is a tax on inheritance, set at a rate of ten percent on the value of estates above a defined threshold, with the proceeds dedicated entirely to the two distribution streams.⁷ He selects the inheritance tax specifically because, in his analysis, inherited property is the most direct continuation of the original property-creation event — the heir receives, in unmediated form, the accumulated benefits of the original landowning grant, and is therefore the appropriate party from whom the discharge of the original debt should be collected. The living landowner who has cultivated his property has at least added artificial value through his labor; the heir has added nothing. The inheritance tax captures the natural-property debt without imposing on the labor-and-capital of those who have actively worked their holdings.

The math, in Paine’s pamphlet, is rough — eighteenth-century pamphleteers did not have the demographic and revenue data necessary for precise modeling — but the arithmetic he sketches is plausible. He estimates the annual revenue from the inheritance tax, at the proposed rate, at roughly £5.6 million in 1796 England, against a citizen population that would generate approximately £3 million in annual obligations under his proposed schedule.⁸ The proposal is, on his arithmetic, fiscally self-sustaining without any reliance on income or commodity taxation. He does not propose general redistribution. He proposes the discharge of a specific debt that the existing institution of inherited property has been failing to discharge.

The Argument’s Theoretical Foundation

Paine’s argument rests on a small number of explicit philosophical premises that he names directly and defends briefly. Each of them is contestable; each has been contested at length in the subsequent two centuries of political-philosophical literature. None of the contested ones, in the contemporary critical literature, has been refuted in a way that disposes of Paine’s argument. The premises, summarized:

The first premise is that the Earth, in its pre-civilizational state, was the common possession of the human population — that no one had a particular claim against any specific portion of it, and that everyone had a generalized claim against the whole. This is the common-property premise. It is found in earlier seventeenth-century political philosophy, most notably in John Locke’s Second Treatise (1689), which Paine knew and cited.⁹ Locke had used the premise in a different direction — to argue that the application of labor to common property could legitimately convert it into private property — but the premise itself was Lockean before Paine adapted it.

The second premise is that the establishment of private property in land was a political act rather than a natural fact — that the institution of exclusive ownership required, and continues to require, the active enforcement of the political community, and that the political community therefore has standing to attach conditions to the ownership it enforces. This is the political-construction premise. It distinguishes Paine’s argument from any natural-rights argument that would treat private property as antecedent to politics; it places property within politics, as one of politics’ constructions, subject to political revision.

The third premise is that those who lose access to a previously-common resource through the political construction of exclusive ownership are owed compensation for the loss, and that the compensation is a debt rather than a charity. This is the debt premise, and it does the principal moral work in Paine’s argument. The compensation is owed regardless of the recipient’s economic circumstances, regardless of the recipient’s deservingness, regardless of any subsequent labor or contribution the recipient may make to the community. It is a payment of a property obligation, not a redistribution.

The fourth premise is that the political community has the legitimate authority to levy the tax required to discharge the debt, and to distribute the proceeds to those entitled. This is the fiscal-authority premise. It is the most conventional of Paine’s premises and the least contested.

The four premises, in combination, generate the proposal. The premises are not original to Paine; the synthesis is. The synthesis converts a generalized intuition that something is owed to those who do not own the means of production into a specific institutional proposal — the citizen’s dividend, financed by the inheritance tax — that has been the model for every serious citizen’s-dividend proposal since.

The Two Centuries Since

Agrarian Justice was not influential in Paine’s lifetime. It was published in 1797, three years before he returned to the United States in 1802, where he spent the remainder of his life in declining health and increasing political marginalization. The pamphlet was reprinted occasionally in the nineteenth century but did not achieve the circulation of Common Sense or The Rights of Man; the Founders who survived Paine’s death in 1809 did not, in their published correspondence, treat Agrarian Justice as a major work; the antebellum political tradition that did engage seriously with property questions was more interested in the homestead-and-frontier model of distribution-by-occupation than in Paine’s debt-and-dividend model of distribution-by-citizenship.

The proposal recovered partial influence in three later periods. The first was the late-nineteenth-century Populist movement, whose advocates (Henry George above all) returned to a Paine-inflected analysis of the political construction of property and the resulting public claim against rents.¹⁰ George’s Progress and Poverty (1879) restated Paine’s debt premise in different vocabulary and proposed the single-tax-on-land alternative; the proposal generated substantial political traction in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, but did not produce a sustained legislative implementation at scale.¹¹ The second was the New Deal period, in which the Townsend Plan (an old-age pension proposal that became the political pressure behind Social Security) and Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth (a wealth-cap-and-redistribution proposal that polled at substantial levels in 1934–1935 before Long’s assassination) returned to the debt-and-dividend pattern in different specific forms.¹² Social Security, in its eventual form, retained Paine’s age-based pension structure but replaced his inheritance-tax funding with a payroll tax — a substantial deviation that converted the dividend from a property-rights settlement into a contributory insurance program. The conversion has shaped the program’s politics ever since: the contributory framing has made Social Security harder to repeal but has also conceptually obscured the original debt-and-dividend logic.

The third recovery is the post-2000 universal basic income discussion, which has been substantially driven by anticipation of the AI labor-displacement transition this site has been concerned with. The contemporary literature — Andrew Yang’s “Freedom Dividend” proposal during the 2020 Democratic primary; the Alaska Permanent Fund as a working precedent; the various pilot studies in Stockton, Finland, Kenya, and elsewhere; the academic literature represented by Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght’s Basic Income (2017); the Open Philanthropy and Effective Altruism community’s analyses of cash-transfer programs in low-income countries — has, in nearly every case, returned to Paine’s analytical frame even where it has not cited him directly.¹³ The Alaska Permanent Fund, established in 1976, distributes a portion of state oil-royalty revenue to every Alaskan citizen as an annual dividend; the institutional form is precisely Paine’s, with the natural-property base shifted from land to subsoil resources but the structure preserved. The Permanent Fund has paid an annual dividend continuously for nearly fifty years and has not produced the inflationary or labor-supply distortions that critics had predicted.¹⁴

What none of these recoveries has produced is a citizen’s-dividend program at the scale of the population, indexed to the productivity premium of the contemporary economy, financed by a mechanism appropriate to twenty-first-century capital concentration. That is the program the platform of The Intelligent Party advances.

What This Platform Inherits

Country Profit Sharing, in its substantive content, is 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 unimproved Earth, because the public-investment substrate is documentable, traceable, and recent in a way that the original commons of the seventeenth century is not.

The mapping is direct.

The natural-property premise — that the resource generating the productivity premium is the common property of the citizenry — corresponds to the recognition that the AI productivity premium rests on the entire history of public investment in basic research, education, communications infrastructure, and legal-institutional architecture. 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.

The political-construction premise — that the institution of private appropriation requires the active enforcement of the political community — corresponds to the contemporary observation that the firms capturing the AI productivity premium do so under specific legal arrangements (corporate-form law, intellectual-property law, capital-markets regulation, labor-law arrangements) that are politically constructed and politically maintainable. The political community has the same standing it has had since Paine to attach conditions to the institutions it enforces.

The debt premise — that those who acquire exclusive access to a previously-common resource owe compensation in perpetuity to those who lose access — corresponds to the case for a citizen’s dividend in the AI era. Every citizen has lost the access they would have had to a more-equally-distributed share of the productivity premium under a different institutional arrangement; every citizen has standing to receive the discharge of the debt.

The fiscal-authority premise — that the political community has the authority to levy the tax and distribute the proceeds — corresponds to the standard fiscal-and-tax authority that no contemporary policy proposal needs to defend at length.

The Country Profit Sharing dividend is the discharge of the AI-era natural-property 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. The mechanism is updated; the principle is two centuries old.

The Defense Against the “Socialism” Charge

The platform’s case for Country Profit Sharing is regularly attacked, and will continue to be attacked, 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 to subsidize the indolence of those who have not earned. The charge will be made with vigor. The honest response is that the charge is structurally incorrect, and that the structural reason it is incorrect was articulated in 1797 by an American Founder.

Country Profit Sharing is not a redistribution. It is the discharge of a property debt. The property in question is the common substrate of public investment that makes the AI productivity premium possible. 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” the premium in the sense the charge requires; they are appropriating, under the political institutions of their time, a resource that was politically constructed for the benefit of the community. The dividend is the community’s claim on its own property, settled annually, in cash, 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 centuries 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, advancing complementary arguments, in the same political project.

The platform of The Intelligent Party is not advancing a novel or imported ideology. It is advancing a Founder’s proposal, two hundred and twenty-nine years after the pamphlet was published, against the institutional conditions the proposal was designed to address. The conditions have changed; the argument has not. We are late.

He saw it. He wrote it down. We are doing the work that should have been done in his lifetime, and was not, and is overdue.

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