Narrow Edge -- A Trialogue

Some say, compar'd to Bononcini
That Mynheer Handel's but a Ninny
Others aver, that he to Handel
Is scarcely fit to hold a Candle

Strange all this Difference should be
'Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee!

— John Byrom

Three voices. SL speaks for the Social Liberty Foundation. Claude is the AI model that helped draft this piece, given its own lines. 3rd Party is a composite of the country's existing outside parties, fifty years of running candidates and collecting a percent or two.

The open territory

SL: Most Americans will say they don't like the choice they're given. For several years running, Gallup has found a majority saying the two major parties do such a poor job of representing the public that a third party is needed. In 2023 the figure hit a record of about six in ten. More than four in ten Americans now call themselves independents, more than identify with either party. A growing share view both parties unfavorably.

Claude: The complaint is old enough to have a name. John Byrom wrote those lines in the 1720s to mock two quarreling factions of London music fans, whose favorite composers differed by less than the fans' shouting suggested. Lewis Carroll later made Tweedledum and Tweedledee into twins who agree to have a battle.

SL: Most voters would recognize the description. Two sides that fight loudly, look alike from any distance, and agree wholeheartedly and jovially to keep the fight between the two of them. So there's a large, dissatisfied public, and there's no invasion of any alternative. No third party is charged at the border ready to cross.

3rd Party: That's not for lack of trying. We're on the ballot every four years.

SL: Collecting a percent or two like mechanical clocks. Independent candidacies flare and fade, usually built around one person and gone once that person is. Well-funded efforts to launch a centrist alternative come and go without winning much of anything or maintaining any sort of continuity.

What nobody is arguing about

SL: Meanwhile there's a vast inattention in our reality to every issue the two parties aren't different enough on to make hay of.

Claude: Politics runs on contrast. An issue gets airtime in proportion to how far apart the two sides can be made to look on it. Where they agree, or where both quietly do the same thing once in office, there's nothing to campaign on.

SL: And the issue magically drops out of view...poof. The reporting of ordinary financial transactions has grown under both parties. Civil asset forfeiture, occupational licensing, exclusionary zoning, the quiet freezing of property assessments, LVT legislation: none of them gets a debate question, because neither side can use it against the other. These aren't small matters. They go unnoticed because nobody is contesting them.

3rd Party: Give me one that matters to ordinary people.

SL: Water in California. It's the most consequential resource question in the state. It decides which farms survive a drought, which cities can grow, and whether the Delta and its fisheries do. Ask where the state's Democrats and Republicans stand on it and almost nobody can say, because it isn't seen as political fodder.

Claude: The fights over it line up by geography and by who holds which rights, not by party. North against south, the Delta against the export contractors, farms against cities, senior rights holders against everyone who came later. The plan to tunnel water under the Delta has a Democratic governor for it and Delta Democrats against it. Rights claimed before 1914 still sit largely outside the state's permit system more than a century later. The groundwater law of 2014 was the biggest change in a generation, and it passed with little of the noise a far smaller partisan fight would make.

SL: Nearly everything The River Decides What Seven States Couldn't found about the Colorado applies here too. Water is a natural rent held by whoever got there first, and neither party has a position on it, because neither party can make hay of it.

That's also why our support has to be wide. Environmentalism in California isn't one issue. It's water, and it's fire policy built to protect sacred cows and not the forest. It's a five-hundred-year-old oak that a city votes on. It's parkland an agency holds and can't tend, and soil, coast, and habitat that belong to no one's campaign. On nearly all of it we stand apart from both parties, and on nearly all of it the parties aren't arguing. We differ from the mainstream on things that really do matter, and those are often the very things the mainstream has stopped contesting.

Claude: So being wide isn't a lack of focus. It's what standing outside looks like when the uncontested ground is this large.

The reserve that isn't there

SL: The territory is plainly open. A great river before us as we stand on this bluff watching for eagles. What's missing?

Claude: A force that knows where to cross, what to carry, and whom it expects to meet on the other side.

3rd Party: The force is already there. Six in ten want an alternative. They just haven't heard us yet.

Claude: Dissatisfaction isn't weak, but it isn't a platform either. "Neither of these" unites people who want opposite things. A party built on it alone gathers a crowd that splits the moment it has to say what it's for.

3rd Party: Then we give them a reason to show up. There are millions of people who've never voted, never volunteered. Reach them and the math changes.

Claude: That's the belief worth being least naive about. It pictures a reserve of people outside the party circle, waiting for the right cause to turn them into activists. The evidence says that reserve is mostly imaginary. How politically active a person is turns out to be one of the more stable facts about them, and a surprisingly inherited one. Twin studies, beginning with James Fowler, Laura Baker, and Christopher Dawes's 2008 work on voter turnout, attribute roughly half the variation in whether people vote and take part in politics to genes, not to upbringing or circumstance. Interest in politics, willingness to sit through a meeting, and the temperament to argue in public run the same way.

3rd Party: Genes don't decide elections. Campaigns do.

Claude: Campaigns decide them at the margin. Decades of get-out-the-vote field experiments, summarized by Donald Green and Alan Gerber, find that even the best door-to-door canvassing raises turnout by a few points, and mail and phone calls by much less. The pool of political actives is set largely by biology and not by intent, and no message, however good, is going to double it.

SL: Which changes what an outside party is for. We aren't going to raise a new army from the inattentive. The people who will do politics are, for the most part, already doing it, and most of them are already inside one of the two parties. A movement that grows will grow by winning some of them over. That finally means the wedge doesn't enter between the parties, into the empty ground outside them. It has to enter within the parties themselves.

It might be satisfying for some to be always in the margins complaining about how nobody listens to us, but what if we could be an actual force? We're starting from further back than most. Nobody is arguing with us.

Claude: The two coalitions described in Why Neither Party Wants Social Liberty don't oppose this project the way they oppose each other. They don't run ads against land value taxation. They don't write op-eds against a bill of separations. They don't mention either one at all. That silence is harder to work in than opposition, because opposition at least tells a movement where the fight is.

SL: Being ignored isn't the same as being wrong, and it isn't permanent. But it does set the terms. An ignored position doesn't get a hearing. It gets a glance: one sentence, maybe two, from a reader who didn't come looking for it. Whatever we say in that sentence is, for practical purposes, what we are.

Claude: Which forces the question every small movement eventually faces, usually too late. Do we lead with the whole view or with one piece of it? And if one piece, or a narrow set of pieces, which ones?

Three things that seem to be true at once

3rd Party: The whole view. Always. We have to be wide. Social liberty isn't a single policy. It's a way of seeing how land is held as a core element of the social fabric, where decisions get made, and what a person is free to do given both. Reduce it to one plank and it's misrepresented, and it attracts people who came for the plank and leave when they find the rest.

SL: And we have to be narrow. An ignored party gets one sentence. A platform of forty positions, read in one glance, reads as no position at all, or worse, as a sign that the people behind it haven't decided what matters most. Every movement that ever broke through did it by being recognizable in a phrase people are able to repeat.

Claude: And there's a third claim. We can't be captured. A narrow issue popular enough to be heard is popular enough to be stolen. The moment an outside party's one idea starts to win, a major party can adopt it, strip it of everything around it, and leave the outside party with nothing to say.

3rd Party: Pick any two and the third breaks. Wide and uncapturable gets ignored. Narrow and heard gets captured. Narrow and uncapturable needs an issue nobody wants.

Claude: The move this site usually makes with three claims like these is to ask which pair was never in conflict. Here it's the first two. Narrow and wide aren't rival strategies. They're the front and back of the same tool. The third claim is the one that does the work: it tells us which narrow thing belongs at the front.

The shape of a wedge

SL: A wedge. Narrow at the tip, wide at the back, and both halves matter.

Claude: The tip is what gets in; nothing blunt enters a gap. The width behind it does the splitting; a needle gets in easily and moves nothing. A movement built like a needle has one sharp idea and nothing behind it, so when the idea is absorbed there's no second act. A movement built like a brick has everything and no point, so it never gets in at all. And a wedge only works where there's already a seam to drive it into.

3rd Party: So which seam?

Claude: We'll get there. First the principle: "narrow or wide" was the wrong question. The right one is what belongs at the tip. The answer is whatever can't be accepted without pulling the width in behind it.

SL: In short: narrow in focus, wide in support. The focus is the one thing we say first and keep saying. The support is everything standing behind it: the essays, the positions, the people who hold them. The support has to agree with the focus and not pull against it. And the focus needs a hook. It has to catch on something happening now.

Claude: A tip that meets no live fight doesn't get in anywhere, however sharp it is. The hook is what lets a narrow focus enter an argument people are already having, and not one we'd have to start from nothing. American third-party history has run this experiment several times, and the results are unusually clear.

Free soil and free silver

3rd Party: The abolitionists were wide and they were right.

Claude: They were right, and at first they were nowhere. The Liberty Party ran James Birney for president in 1840 on outright abolition and got about seven thousand votes, roughly a third of one percent. In 1844 it did better, a bit over two percent, and was still irrelevant to anyone who held power. In 1848 the movement narrowed. The Free Soil Party led with a single, concrete, geographic demand: no slavery in the western territories. "Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men." With Martin Van Buren at the head of the ticket it took about ten percent of the national vote. After the Kansas–Nebraska Act reopened the territories to slavery in 1854, the Free Soilers were absorbed into a new party, the Republicans, which elected a president six years later.

3rd Party: Absorbed. Captured and dissolved.

Claude: In a narrow sense. But look at what got captured. "No slavery in the territories" couldn't be adopted without taking on the moral argument behind it. It fixed the question of the country's future on slavery itself. Any coalition that picked up free soil had picked up the whole fight. The tip went in, and the width came with it.

Forty years later the Populists ran the same experiment and got the opposite result. The Omaha Platform of 1892 was as wide as any American platform has been: a graduated income tax, direct election of senators, public ownership of railroads and telegraphs, postal savings banks, a subtreasury plan for farm credit, and the free coinage of silver. James Weaver carried five states. By 1896 the party had narrowed to one demand, free silver, because it had the mass following. That was exactly the plank the Democrats could take. William Jennings Bryan took it, the Populists fused behind him, Bryan lost, and within a decade the party was gone.

SL: Free silver could be adopted without adopting anything else.

Claude: It was a monetary fix, detachable from the Omaha Platform's larger claim about who the economy was supposed to answer to. The Democrats took the tip and left the width behind. That's what capture looks like.

3rd Party: And yet the income tax and direct election of senators both became constitutional amendments in 1913. The Populists died and won anyway.

SL: That's a fair point, and an outside party should decide early whether it counts as success. We think it partly does. Being right early and uncredited is better than being wrong on time. But it isn't the same as having built anything, and a movement that only ever wins that way hasn't made a place for anyone to stand.

The single tax, which was already a tip

Claude: The Georgist movement has its own version, closer to home. Henry George ran for mayor of New York in 1886 on the United Labor ticket and came in second with about thirty-one percent, ahead of a young Theodore Roosevelt. It was the high-water mark of the movement as an electoral force. After it, Georgism became a movement whose whole platform was, by design, a single tax. It was already as narrow as a platform can be.

SL: And the tip went into places.

Claude: Pittsburgh ran a graded tax, weighting land over buildings, from 1913 until 2001. The Fairhope Single Tax Corporation in Alabama, founded in 1894, still holds its land under a leasehold that collects ground rent in place of a property tax. Dozens of Pennsylvania municipalities have run split-rate systems. But the tip mostly got in without the width behind it. The land value tax got treated as a clever tax-policy tool, efficient and non-distorting, a favorite of economists across the spectrum. It stopped being the claim George made, which was moral as much as fiscal: that the rent of land is created by the community and belongs to it, and that letting it be privately captured is the root of a great deal else that goes wrong.

SL: So the single tax wasn't the wrong tip. It was stated in technical language, and it got taken as technical. "Split-rate property tax" can be adopted by a city finance office without a single person in that city changing how they think about land. "The value of land belongs to the people who made it valuable" can't.

Pressure, not a ticket

3rd Party: You keep talking about movements. We're a party. Parties run candidates.

Claude: Then here's the case that separates narrowing the message from narrowing the method. The Prohibition Party was founded in 1869 and ran presidential candidates for decades. Its best showing, in 1892, was a little over two percent. The Anti-Saloon League, founded in Ohio in 1893, never ran a candidate at all. Under Wayne Wheeler it did one thing: it backed whichever candidate in a given race would vote dry, regardless of party, and worked to defeat whichever wouldn't. It made itself the deciding margin in close races across the country. The Eighteenth Amendment was ratified in 1919.

SL: We don't hold up the League's cause. The results of Prohibition are an argument we'd make against it. The method is the point.

Claude: An outside movement in a two-party system is structurally unlikely to win as a party. That's roughly what Duverger described: plurality voting in single-member districts pushes toward two parties, and a third one mostly just divides the side closer to it. But an outside movement can make itself the thing both parties have to answer to in a close race, without asking anyone to leave their party.

3rd Party: So we're a pressure group now.

SL: Something more specific than that. Watch where the pressure goes.

Four parties wearing two names

Claude: Each of the two major parties is really two, and the factions inside each differ on something at least as basic as what divides the parties from each other. Among Democrats, one wing governs through administration. It trusts agencies, process, review, and programs, and it treats public hearings, environmental review, and licensing as protections worth their cost. The other wing, the one that has taken the name "abundance" in the last few years, looks at the same apparatus and sees why nothing gets built. It wants permitting reform, zoning liberalization, and more housing, transit, and energy, even when that means overriding the process its own party built.

Among Republicans, one wing governs through consolidation. It wants a strong executive, tariffs, and a legislature willing to use state power on moral questions. The other wing is the older fusionist one: limited government, free trade, federalism, suspicion of any concentrated power including its own party's. It's smaller than it was, but it hasn't gone anywhere.

SL: So there are two axes, not one.

Claude: The parties divide left from right. The factions divide something else: whether the answer is more central control or less, whether the job of government is to review and approve or to get out of the way of building. On that second axis, the administrative Democrats and the consolidating Republicans are closer to each other than either is to its own party's other wing. Both centralize. Both expand what has to be approved from above. They just want different things approved.

That leaves the builders on the left and the fusionists on the right on the same side of the second axis, in different parties. Each is losing its own party's internal argument. Neither can work openly with the other without being accused of disloyalty, and in a primary that accusation is usually fatal. They agree on more than either can say in public: build more, license less, let places decide for themselves, stop letting process serve as a veto for whoever already holds land. What they lack is somewhere to do that agreeing.

SL: That's the seam. A wedge doesn't split solid material; it goes in where a crack already runs. In American politics the cracks don't run between the parties. That line is policed, fortified, and fought over every two years, and an outsider trying to open ground there is only a spoiler.

3rd Party: Spoiler. We've heard that word before.

SL: Because that's where you've been standing. The cracks run inside each party, between the wing that centralizes and the wing that doesn't. That's where the active people already are, where the arguments are already live, and where a narrow, exact focus can separate one faction from its party's governing logic without asking anyone to leave. An outside party can be the place where those two factions meet. Given how fixed the pool of political actives is, it's also the only realistic place to recruit from. A bridge between one faction of each party, not a third pole competing with both.

3rd Party: Has that ever worked?

Claude: Several times, and never as a merger. Airline deregulation in 1978 came from Ted Kennedy's consumer-advocacy wing of the Democrats, with Stephen Breyer as his staff counsel, allied with free-market Republicans and economists against a regulated industry and the agency that protected it. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 came out of converging proposals from Bill Bradley and Dick Gephardt on one side and Jack Kemp and Bob Kasten on the other, all agreeing to broaden the base and lower the rates, an agreement about what kind of tax and not how much. The First Step Act of 2018 passed because progressive criminal-justice reformers and a libertarian and evangelical right had spent years building the case together outside either party's leadership. In each case the factions stayed in their parties. What they shared was a narrow, exact proposal and outside institutions that let them trust each other.

SL: Which is why the choice of tip matters so much. It has to be something both bridged factions can be for, each for its own reasons, without either having to become the other.

Claude: Land fits that. To the builders, a land value tax is the strongest pro-housing tool there is: it makes holding empty or underused land expensive, discourages speculation, and returns to the public the value the public created. To the fusionists, it's the least distorting tax available. Milton Friedman called the property tax on unimproved land "the least bad tax." It doesn't punish work, saving, or building, and it can replace taxes that do. The dividend it can fund is universal, with no categories and no caseworkers, which is the left's concern that people are hurting, answered in the form the right has always said it prefers. Neither faction needs to adopt the other's reasons. They only need to vote for the same bill.

SL: And land isn't even the tip. It's right behind it. We'll come to the tip.

3rd Party: What stops one of the big parties from just walking across your bridge and taking what it likes?

Claude: Nothing, unless it's built for that. A dominant faction that notices the traffic can adopt a piece of the agenda to pull its own dissidents back in, which is the free-silver problem again. And a bridge built too close to one bank becomes a faction of that party. The defense against both is what the Anti-Saloon League understood.

SL: One scorecard for both parties. Grade every candidate on the same exact positions: transactional privacy, land, transaction taxes, building, sovereignty. Publish it. Endorse whoever scores well, in either party, and say out loud when a builder Democrat and a fusionist Republican score the same. Host the joint work the factions can't host themselves: the model ordinance, the municipal pilot, the shared testimony at a county hearing. We don't need either faction to leave home. We need both to find it useful to meet in the middle.

What belongs at the tip

3rd Party: All right. What's the tip?

Claude: Put the cases together and there's a set of tests. They're not a formula, but they rule most candidates out.

It has to be ours. If a major party already says it, we add nothing but a smaller, less credible copy.

It has to be undetachable. Neither coalition should be able to adopt it as a standalone fix. Adopting it should commit them to the premise behind it. Free soil passed this test and free silver failed it.

It has to be stated as a claim, not a mechanism. A mechanism can be adopted by a finance office. A claim has to be believed by a person.

It has to be felt. It names something people already know is wrong. The only question is whether they have an explanation for it.

It has to hook into what's live. A focus tied to a bill, a lawsuit, a new reporting rule, or a story already in the news gets its audience without asking.

It has to be winnable somewhere small. A single town or county can try it, so the argument can point at a real place and not a hypothetical one.

It has to reach both banks. The builder wing of one party and the fusionist wing of the other can each support it for its own reasons.

3rd Party: Personal sovereignty. That's the foundation of everything.

SL: It is, and stated alone it sounds like a slogan both parties already claim. The bill of separations is a structural answer, but it reads as abstract to anyone who hasn't yet felt the problem it solves. Municipalism is how we'd organize, not what we'd lead with. Education is a real fight, but it pulls us into an existing argument between two coalitions where we'd be the third voice nobody hears. None of that is wrong. It belongs in the support.

A bad narrow

3rd Party: Then here's one that passes. Abolish the property tax. It's narrow. Everyone hates the bill. And it's live: proposals to abolish or sharply cap property taxes on homes have been circulating over the past year in Florida, Ohio, Texas, and elsewhere. We could ride that wave tomorrow.

SL: And it would be a disaster for us. It isn't ours. It belongs to the tradition behind Proposition 13 and to the consolidating wing that already carries it. It's detachable: ending the property tax pulls nothing of ours in behind it. Worst of all, it pulls against our own support.

Claude: The one tax this site argues is legitimate, a reasonable tax on land, is exactly the one that focus would abolish. The lost revenue would come back through sales taxes, income taxes, and fees, the transaction taxes we oppose. Anyone who came in through that door would find behind it a whole body of arguments against the thing they came for.

SL: A focus that contradicts its own support isn't a narrow version of the movement. It's a different movement. Narrow in focus doesn't mean picking the most popular narrow thing available. It means picking the narrow thing the support is already standing behind.

A good narrow: the privacy of transactions

SL: Privacy. Specifically the privacy of transactions: what a person buys, sells, pays, and is paid is their own business, and not the state's.

3rd Party: Privacy is a niche issue. Crypto people and civil-liberties lawyers.

Claude: Run it through the tests. It's live, more than almost anything else on this site. Whether central banks should issue digital currencies, which would let a government see every payment, has become an actual legislative fight: the House passed a bill against a U.S. central bank digital currency in 2025. The reporting threshold for payment apps, the Form 1099-K rule, was set to drop to six hundred dollars, delayed year after year, and pushed back up by Congress in 2025. The Bank Secrecy Act's ten-thousand-dollar cash-reporting threshold was set in 1970 and never indexed to inflation, so it now reaches transactions worth a small fraction of what it was written for. Developers of privacy software have been prosecuted as unlicensed money transmitters. Banks and payment processors have closed the accounts of lawful businesses and people, including cannabis sellers, sex workers, gun dealers, and political causes on both sides, on grounds of "reputational risk" that no court ever reviews.

SL: It's ours, and it's exactly the kind of issue we started with: one the two parties don't differ on enough to make hay of.

Claude: Both coalitions want transactions visible, for different reasons. The administrative wing wants reporting to enforce taxes and regulations. The consolidating wing wants it for policing, immigration enforcement, and security. Each objects to surveillance mainly when the other side would be running it. The Republican objection to a digital dollar hasn't extended to the rest of the reporting apparatus, and the Democratic objection to warrantless data collection hasn't extended to the IRS. Nobody holds the position on principle.

It's felt. Most people know their bank, their payment app, and their card network know nearly everything they do, and the fear of an account closed without explanation is widespread. It's a claim, not a mechanism. It's winnable small: a city or state can require businesses to accept cash, as Massachusetts has since 1978 and as New Jersey, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New York City have more recently. It can refuse to sell or share the payment data it collects itself, and it can limit its own tools for watching residents. And it reaches both banks. The civil-liberties strand of the left and the fusionist right that led the fight against a digital dollar are on the same side of it.

SL: Privacy runs along the same second axis the factions do. The centralizers in both parties want to see, and the decentralizers want not to be seen.

3rd Party: And undetachable? A party already took the anti-digital-dollar line.

Claude: It took the slogan. It can't take the exact position without taking the land tax too. If transactions are private, the state can't tax them. A sales tax, a value-added tax, and income withholding all depend on seeing exchanges. So anyone who accepts the privacy of transactions has to ask right away how anything gets funded. The answer is the one tax that needs no surveillance at all: a tax on land, which can't hide, can't move, and is already on a public map.

SL: The privacy of transactions and the taxation of land are one position seen from two sides. Don't watch what people do with each other; charge them for what they hold from everyone else.

Claude: And from there the rest of the support follows. What a person buys is their own business, and that includes the "sin" trades. A currency the state can't use to watch its holders is the argument of Separation of Currency and State. A universal dividend paid from land rent needs no caseworker checking what recipients spend, which is the hidden surveillance built into every means-tested program. Local control follows because the land tax is collected where the land is.

SL: That's the wedge: a narrow focus, hooked into a live fight, that opens onto the whole of what we support.

What the wedge stays out of

3rd Party: Fine. But people want to know where we stand on abortion. On guns, immigration, the school fights, the wars. If we don't answer, we look like we're hiding.

SL: Among the strategy characteristics of the wedge is to stay out of the contentious issues not aligned exactly with our narrow focus.

Claude: Those are the issues on which the two parties most want to be seen as different, so they're the ones that fill the fortified line between them. Stepping into any of them costs a wedge three things at once. It puts the wedge on the line between the parties and not in the seams inside them. It tells one faction of every pair we hope to bridge that we belong to the other side, and a builder Democrat and a fusionist Republican who agree on land and privacy won't agree on most of those. And it spends the one sentence of attention an outside party gets on a fight where we'd be the third voice nobody hears.

3rd Party: So no views.

SL: Views, yes. The support is wide, and the essays in it can and do take positions, including on questions fiercely contested elsewhere. But holding a position in the support isn't the same as picking a fight over it in public. The wedge picks only the fights that serve its focus.

Claude: The Anti-Saloon League kept that discipline for a quarter century. It backed any candidate who would vote dry, whatever else that candidate believed, and refused every other quarrel. Nobody could dismiss it as belonging to the other side.

SL: The test is simple. Before taking up a fight, ask whether winning it would advance the privacy of transactions, or the land tax right behind it. If not, the wedge stays out, however strongly the people in it feel.

Being exact

Claude: A tip is only as hard to capture as it is exact. A vague position gets filled in by whoever picks it up, with whatever their coalition already wanted. Two areas show it clearly: taxation, where each major party owns a direction but neither holds a position, and the "sin" questions, where a slogan has already been taken and turned into something its original advocates wouldn't recognize.

Taxes: which kinds, not how much

3rd Party: Taxes are simple. Lower.

SL: "Lower taxes" belongs to the Republicans. "Make the wealthy pay their share" belongs to the Democrats. Both are directions, not positions. They say how much and who, and never what kind, so either can be adopted, traded away, or reversed without anything underneath changing. Our position is about what kind, and it fits in two lists.

Appropriate: a reasonable, uniform tax on property, falling mainly on the value of land. Assessed openly at current value, levied by the community the land sits in, and charged at the same rate on every parcel in that community.

Not appropriate: any tax on a transaction, of any kind. Sales taxes, excise taxes, value-added taxes, transfer taxes on the sale of property, per-transaction fees, and sin taxes.

Claude: The first is close to what Paine called ground rent. It taxes something that can't move, can't be hidden, and can't be produced in greater quantity, so it doesn't shrink the supply of anything. It collects value the community created, not value the owner produced. And it's visible: the bill arrives once a year, and the payer knows the number. A transaction tax falls on the moment two people agree to trade, so it penalizes exactly the cooperation a free society runs on. It's hidden inside prices. It falls hardest on people who spend most of what they earn. And collecting it requires the state to watch every exchange.

SL: That's the privacy argument from the other side. A state that taxes transactions has to see them, and a state that can see them will find other uses for what it sees.

Claude: Los Angeles supplies a clean comparison. Measure ULA, passed in 2022, added a tax of roughly four to five and a half percent on property sales above five million dollars: a transaction tax on land, the same land an annual tax could have reached. Its first years brought in far less than projected, largely because sales above the threshold fell off. An annual tax on land value pushes an owner to put a parcel to use or sell it to someone who will. A tax on the sale rewards whoever already holds the land for never letting go.

SL: And California's property tax has the same problem in disguise. Under Proposition 13, as Parcel Duality laid out, a parcel is reassessed at market value mainly when it changes hands. What looks like a property tax behaves, at the margin, like a transfer tax. Being exact about what kind of tax is appropriate shows what's wrong with the state's largest tax fight of the last half century, without taking either side of the argument over how much.

3rd Party: The founders would have been with me on this. They fought a revolution over taxes.

Claude: Over transaction taxes, mostly. The Stamp Act of 1765 taxed every legal document, newspaper, and deck of cards. The Townshend duties of 1767 taxed glass, paint, paper, and tea at the port, and the Tea Act of 1773 led to the Boston Tea Party. To be exact, the Constitution didn't forbid transaction taxes. Article I gave Congress power over "Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises," and Hamilton's excise on whiskey in 1791 led to the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. But the framework restricted them in several places. It barred any tax on exports from a state. It barred states from taxing imports or exports without Congress's consent. It required excises to be uniform across the country. And it treated a tax on property as the "direct" tax, apportioned among the states by population. The first federal direct tax, in 1798, was levied on land, houses, and enslaved people. The states funded themselves mostly from property, and through the nineteenth century they wrote uniformity clauses into their constitutions requiring property to be taxed at one rate by value.

SL: Read as a whole, the founding design treated the property tax as the ordinary, local, visible revenue of a self-governing community, and transaction taxes as a national expedient, tolerated, restricted, and resisted twice with violence in its first thirty years. Our position is to finish that thought: keep the first and end the second.

Claude: Neither coalition can adopt that as stated. Republicans would have to accept a tax on land value that falls on their landholding base. Democrats would have to give up the sales and excise taxes that fund much of what they govern.

Drugs and prostitution: sovereignty, not "legalize it"

3rd Party: At least on drugs we've been right for fifty years. Legalize it.

Claude: Which is why it fails the first test. It's yours, not ours. And the major coalitions have shown exactly how to adopt it without adopting anything behind it. California legalized adult cannabis with Proposition 64 in 2016. What arrived was a licensing regime and a stack of taxes: a state excise, local cannabis taxes, and ordinary sales tax, which together, in some cities, reach more than a third of the shelf price. Most California cities and counties still ban storefront sales. By most estimates the unlicensed market remains larger than the licensed one.

SL: The state accepted legalization and kept the disapproval, turning it into revenue. A sin tax is a transaction tax with a sermon attached.

Claude: Oregon ran it from the other side. Measure 110, passed in 2020, decriminalized possession of small amounts of drugs statewide. It arrived as a state rule on top of communities that hadn't chosen it, with the treatment money slow to reach anyone, and the legislature recriminalized possession in 2024. A narrow tip went in without the width behind it, and nothing held it in place.

Prostitution shows both captures at once. Nevada allows it only in licensed brothels, only in certain rural counties, and not in Las Vegas or Reno. Workers register with the county, submit to mandatory testing, and in practice can't work for themselves. The other model, adopted by Sweden in 1999 and promoted since by a good part of the American left, makes selling legal and buying a crime.

SL: The moral paternalism of one coalition and the administrative paternalism of the other, arriving at the same premise: that a person's own body is something the state licenses or protects them from. Our position, stated exactly, is none of those. What an adult does with their own body and mind, alone or with another consenting adult, isn't the state's to license, tax, or forbid. The state's business is the third party: fraud, coercion, trafficking, minors, and harm to others, prosecuted as the serious crimes they are, whatever trade they happen in. No sin tax, because a sin tax is a transaction tax. No special license beyond what any trade requires. Where a shop may stand is a question for the community, settled through land use and nuisance, the way it's settled for a bar or a gas station, and not through morality.

3rd Party: Then lead with that.

SL: No. It belongs in the support. For most people it fails the test of being felt, since the harm lands on a small group. And a stranger meeting it first files us, in one sentence, next to the fifty years of "legalize it" we've just distinguished ourselves from. In the support, the exact version can be read in full, and it's the clearest demonstration of personal sovereignty we have. Where it meets the focus, at the sin tax and at the bank account closed for "reputational risk," it points straight back to it.

What the support is for

3rd Party: So you shrink everything down to one argument.

SL: No. The support stays wide. It just gets a different job. The back of the wedge is for the people who came through the front. Someone persuaded that what they pay and are paid is their own business will ask the next question within a week: then how does anything get paid for?

Claude: The answer is land, and it brings the questions after it: who collects the rent, who decides what it's spent on, and what stops that body from becoming another landlord? Those are what the essays on municipalism, sovereignty, separation, and governance design were written to answer. They don't need to be the first thing a stranger reads. They need to be there, thorough and serious, the moment a stranger becomes a reader.

SL: Paine worked this way, and he did it in order.

Claude: Common Sense, in January 1776, made one demand, independence now, and supported it with an argument against hereditary rule wide enough to carry a republic. Agrarian Justice, twenty years later, made the wider and stranger claim that the earth in its natural state was "the common property of the human race," and that every landholder owed a ground rent to the community in return for holding it. Paine didn't lead with that in 1776. He had it in him, and he said it once there was a republic in place to hear it. The committees of correspondence, beginning in Boston in 1772, worked the same way. They opened with a pamphlet stating a small set of grievances and asked each town to answer. More than a hundred towns did. The working network of provincial governments the committees later became grew behind that first narrow ask. It wasn't announced in front of it.

The advantage of being ignored

3rd Party: You make it sound as if being ignored is an asset.

SL: It partly is. A movement nobody is paying attention to has no coalition to maintain. It doesn't have to keep a donor base comfortable or balance three interest groups that each hold a veto. It doesn't have to soften a claim because an ally would be embarrassed by it. It can say the true thing plainly and keep saying it for as long as it takes.

Claude: The major parties can't do that about privacy or land. Each finds surveillance useful when it holds power, and both coalitions are built on people whose wealth is mostly land.

SL: We can, precisely because no one is counting on us yet. But that freedom is only worth something if it gets spent on a single, clear, repeated claim. Spread across forty positions, it's just noise nobody's listening to.

3rd Party: Then say it. What's the strategy?

SL: Lead with the privacy of transactions. Say it as a claim, not a mechanism, and say it exactly: what people pay each other is their own business, and a government that needs revenue should charge for land, which hides nothing, and not for trades, which it can only tax by watching. Hook it to every live fight over reporting thresholds, account closures, and digital currencies. Point at the places where land taxes have been tried. Keep one scorecard for both parties, back every politician who'll move toward it, and say so publicly. Drive it into the seams inside each party, not the fortified line between them, and stay out of every fight that doesn't serve the focus. Be the place where the builders on one side and the fusionists on the other can agree without either having to leave home. And keep the whole rest of the view built out behind it, so that anyone who comes through the narrow edge finds a wide place to stand.

3rd Party: And us?

SL: Bring what you've built. The ballot lines, the volunteers, the fifty years of being right early. Just stop spending them on the fortified line.

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A note on how this piece was written: it's a trialogue, and the voices are what they say they are. SL speaks for us, and every argument, conclusion, and choice of direction in it is ours. Claude is the AI model that helped draft the essay; it supplied research and much of the phrasing, and here it gets its own lines instead of being invisible. 3rd Party is a composite of the country's existing outside parties, not any real person or organization. Every exchange was edited by hand.