Michael Lorrey

Georgism and Geolibertarianism are Frauds

by Mike Lorrey

GEO-LIBERTARIANISM or GEORGISM is just FEUDALISM used to enforce COMMUNISM.

If you own your land, for real, you shouldn’t have to pay anyone for the privilege of owning it. Such payments, historically, indicate that you owe tribute or fealty to some more powerful entity that controls you and determines what you can and cannot do on your land. Such independence is called Sovereignty, and such ownership without fealty or tribute is called allodial title, or freehold. Under the Enlightenment, the principle of the noble savage, the “New Jerusalem in the wilderness”, and equality of all men before god or their creator, is that the only thing a person owes fealty to is the Creator, and otherwise, the person is a sovereign, holding control over themselves as natural rights, living in sovereignty, and owning land in allodial freehold.

This is how it is SUPPOSED TO BE here in America. But it turns out to not really be the case. The Founding Fathers believed it was the case. However, they also felt that the only true anarchy could exist if men were angels, without sin or corruption, evil intent or malice, greed, lust or sloth. So they felt that a bare minimum of government was necessary to ensure that people could not get away with abusing the natural rights of others, thus delegating limited, enumerated powers to government SPECIFICALLY in order to ensure that all other rights and powers remaining in the holding of individuals are properly protected and defended.

The state was never supposed to be sovereign, it was never supposed to have allode. The Articles of Confederation were a fair attempt to achieve that, however the states themselves refused to give up power, because they knew they had been given that power, not by the people, but by the former sovereign, King George.

In the Treaty of Paris, George transferred sovereignty and allode not to the people of the colonies, but to the states, because it was not, in his eyes, the people who defeated him, it was the states. They won, so by right of conquest, their defeat of George in the Trial by Combat of the Revolutionary War, they earned sovereignty.

The land system George and his predecessors had established here in the colonies was feudal. After all, that was the system the monarchy knew best and was designed to operate. The King and his Governors made land grants to persons and companies to develop, inhabit, colonize, and hew civilization out of the wilderness. The King did this because he had won sovereign allode over the territory by a) discovery, b) conquest over and subjugation of the natives, and c) forcing natives to cede sovereignty over the land by treaty.

Thus, the land grants were always tenancy deeds of feudal nature, owing fealty to the crown. No royal grants were ever transfers of allodial freehold, to anyone who did not win by conquest or combat. The Crown of England does not simply give away territory unless it is forced to.

So, all land here in the US began as sovereign allode held by the states. Some states ceded their claims westward (the royal grants to those creating the colonies always granted territory going westward to the Pacific, often times overlapping other colonies claims). The colonies, which then became states, granted land to colonists as fee simple tenancy deeds, registered with the County Registrar of Deeds, and the fee simple is an annual rent of land known as property tax, based on the value of everything on the titled land.

All that Georgism or Geo-Libertarianism does is make the fallacious claim that all land is the communal property of all mankind, of all sapient persons, or souls under the Creator, that all persons have equal right to all land, and for one person to claim land is to restrain the rights of others to that land. Of course, this presupposes how can a person who has never seen, is unaware and cannot imagine of land on the other side of the planet, can somehow own that land they are unaware of? Ownership is based on contract, and contract requires a meeting of the minds. If you are unaware of the existence of land somewhere else, you cannot have a meeting of minds about who owns it, and if you are unaware of each and every other person in existence with such a valid claim, you cannot have a meeting of the minds over such a communal condition of holding. So Geolibertarianism fails basic principles of contract law.

Secondly, the claim of land value rent presupposes that some state entity, not the market, can determine the value of land, irrespective of demand for it. It is a denial of free market supply and demand to claim that some other entity can determine your lands value.

Thirdly, the claim that this other entity is validly capable of speaking for all other persons in existence, when neither they are ware of its existence, nor is it aware of theirs.

Now let us take Georgism to its logical extreme. We know, for instance, of thousands of planets orbiting other stars in the nearby parts of the Milky Way Galaxy. Some of these are habitable earth-like worlds. Based on their distribution, we can statistically infer that there are at least 40 billion inhabitable Earth-Like planets in this galaxy alone. There are also at least 200 billion other galaxies in the observable universe, and probably at least several trillion more in the unobservable universe.

So that’s a WHOLE LOTTA LAND. By Georgism, we have a right to it ALL. Aliens living on those planets all owe us a WHOLE LOTTA BACK RENT. We owe THEM a whole lotta back rent.

By Georgist theory, the scenario of aliens showing up to invade our planet to strip it of its resources is entirely legitimate, legally, because we aren’t using those resources properly, and we are millenia in arrears to the Galactic Registrar of Deeds on our past Fee Simple Tenancy land value rent. So, in the movie Independence Day, the bag guys, to Georgists, is not the aliens. It is us.