The Citizen's Dividend (Paine)

In the winter of 1795–1796, Thomas Paine wrote a short pamphlet called Agrarian Justice that made one of the most consequential structural arguments in the history of political economy. The earth in its natural, uncultivated state was the common property of the human race. Cultivation created immense wealth, but it also created landed property, and in doing so it dispossessed the majority of their natural inheritance in the common earth. From this single observation Paine derived a precise obligation: the landholder owes the community a ground-rent for the land he holds, and from this rent every person should receive, upon reaching adulthood, a lump sum as partial compensation for their lost natural inheritance, and every person above a certain age should receive an annual payment for life. These payments should go to everyone—rich and poor alike—not as means-tested relief for the indigent but as a universal right