Geolibertário

The economist Fred Foldvary coined the term in 1981. It joins two pieces. The land piece comes from Georgism, the current of Henry George in Progress and Poverty (1879): soil and natural resources were not produced by labor, so the economic rent of the site, apart from improvements, belongs to the community. The classic instrument is a tax on land value, in place of taxes on wages and on what labor produces. The libertarian piece asks for a minimal state financed by that rent, and for private property in what people produce. Foldvary also described a more voluntarist variant, geoanarchism. The name is not one membership card.

The idea is older than the word. Thomas Paine, in Agrarian Justice (1797), argued that the earth itself is not individual property and that an occupant owes the community a ground rent. George turned that into a program, the single tax. Geolibertarianism is the version that also refuses to tax labor. Georgism without that libertarian limit is still another current: there are Georgists who accept a much larger state. Supporting one land tax is also wider than this label. Milton Friedman praised a tax on land value as a reform. That does not make him a geolibertarian, and his page on this site is not this doctrine.

It is a different claim from right-libertarianism. In that current, justly acquired land becomes full private property, and a tax on the unimproved site is treated as an attack on property. The geolibertarian says the opposite about unimproved land: exclusive possession is paid to the community, and the fruit of labor is not taxed. It is not socialism. Factories, wages, and produced goods stay private. It is also not libertarian socialism, the anti-state socialism elsewhere on this list. And it is not this site's social libertarianism, which joins personal freedom to a floor and to shared resources without defining a land-value tax as the rule.

Economy runs from Collectivize to Privatize. A geolibertarian keeps private property in what is produced, and at the same time refuses to treat bare land as if it were a product of labor. The axis has no mark for private, except the land. A high Privatize score can be right-libertarianism, classical liberalism, or something else. It does not identify a geolibertário.

Control runs from Planned to Laissez-faire. The preference is for prices and for a state that does not direct production. A land-value tax is, in the argument, the way of paying for government that bends those prices least, not a plan. Power runs from Security to Freedom and, in this current, sits toward Freedom: civil liberties and a state limited to securing rights. That also describes right-libertarianism. The difference, the soil, has no axis of its own.

The match uses Economy, Power, Intervention, and Culture, and 38 positions from the open-source 12axes project. Geolibertarianism is not among them. The RightValues quiz hosted on this site can return the word geolibertarianism as one of its own results. That is another questionnaire and another list. It is not a 12 Axes coordinate. The nearest published names, by meaning, are social libertarianism, right-libertarianism, and classical liberalism. The charts below are their real positions.