Glossary

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Terms of art that recur across these essays. Definitions here favor the sense in which the term is used on this site over the broader academic literature.

land rent

The market price of exclusive use of a parcel or natural resource for a fixed period (typically annual). Rent reflects the productive advantage of the site over the best freely available alternative; it is determined by nature and by the surrounding community, not by anything the current holder has done. The capitalized stream of rent is what gives a land title its sale price.

bona-fide capital

Produced means of production: tools, machines, buildings, software, inventory, working capital. Distinguished here from economic land because bona-fide capital exists only because someone produced it, and so can be justly owned outright by its producer or their assigns. Conflating bona-fide capital with land is the shared error of right-propertarianism (which extends produced-capital intuitions to land) and socialism (which extends land-monopoly intuitions to produced capital).

economic land

All inputs to production that are freely supplied by nature rather than produced: 3D space, raw materials, free energy, water rights, mineral rights, the electromagnetic spectrum, and so on. Economic land cannot be created and is not substitutable for anything humans or machines can make. Its existence owes nothing to its current holder, which is why exclusive control over it raises a justice question that produced capital does not.

allodial

A form of land tenure free from any superior obligation: no rent owed, no overlord, no ground above the holder. Historically contrasted with feudal tenure, in which holding implied service or rent to a lord. Right-libertarian "voluntaryism" envisions allodial private property in land; geovoluntarism rejects this as coercive against the excluded and substitutes ongoing rent distribution as the price of exclusive use.

quadratic funding

A coordination mechanism for funding public goods, formalized by Buterin, Hitzig, and Weyl. Each project's matching pool allocation is proportional to the square of the sum of the square roots of individual contributions, so many small contributors outweigh a few large ones. Useful in geovoluntarism as a way for citizens to pool dividend shares into public-style provision without state intermediation.