The Groundshare narrative kit

2026-07-18 · wave 7 · NARRATIVE lane. Working language for the movement — every line consistent with the measured numbers (analysis/) and the conceded limits (objections.md). Nothing here promises what the data doesn't support.

Voice (Sean Platt's principles, operationalized)

1. "People don't share data. They share stories. They share names." Lead with the name and the story; the numbers corroborate, they don't carry.
2. "An idea, not a policy." Groundshare is a noun for something that was always true — never "the Groundshare Act," never a rate, never a bracket.
3. "It doesn't take sides." Town-square, common-ground, handshake imagery. Refuse the capitalism-vs-socialism frame in both directions; the word "quietly insists 'this is ours, before it's mine.'"
4. Terra firma register. Plain, ancient, physical words: ground, hold, share, owe, settle. Avoid: mechanism, redistribute, implement, levy, capture.

Vocabulary — always / never

The one-breath version

Nobody made the ground, and everybody makes it valuable. So everyone owns an equal share of what it's worth. Hold more than your share, you owe the difference. Hold less, you're owed. That's Groundshare.

The ten-year-old version

You know how a lemonade stand on a busy corner makes way more money than the same stand on an empty road? The kid didn't make the corner busy — everybody did, just by being there. Groundshare says: the lemonade money is yours, you earned it. But the corner belongs to everyone. So people who've got the best corners chip in a little every year, and it goes to everyone who doesn't have one.

Yard-sign candidates (short enough to shout)

• The ground is ours before it's mine.
• Nobody made the land. Everybody made it valuable.
• You have a share. You always did.
• Settle the oldest account.
• What you build is yours. The ground is ours.

The seminar defense (90 seconds, terms allowed)

Groundshare is a revenue-neutral, person-based net settlement on assessed land rental value: T = s(R̄ − R_held). It is algebraically a flat-rate land value tax plus an equal per-capita dividend, netted — so it inherits the LVT literature whole: no deadweight loss on a fixed base, non-shiftability to tenants (Danish quasi-experimental evidence), progressivity given concentrated land ownership. Three properties distinguish it from tax-and-spend LVT: it raises no revenue, so there is no ratchet and no fiscal-churn objection; the schedule is a single straight line, so unlike Friedman's NIT it has no kink and no marginal distortion anywhere; and person-based allowances with no entity allowance reverse the usual sheltering gradient. On Statistics Canada's balance-sheet and distributional data, four of five wealth quintiles are net recipients. The open questions — measurement, regional incidence, and the transition path — are specified as a pre-registered research program.

Audience keys (the door-opener per audience, one line each)

• Renter: you've been paying for someone else's ground your whole life; here's the account, settled — over $20,000 a year for the average renting household (NUMBERS.md #9).
• Homeowner: you probably come out ahead — the average owner household does. The ones who pay are the top fifth and the corporations that hold a quarter of the country's land and would get no share.
• Conservative / property-rights: this is the strong property position: everything anyone builds or earns is untouchable, and the state keeps nothing — every dollar moves citizen-to-citizen on one visible schedule. Smith and Friedman are the lineage, not Marx.
• Progressive: it's the largest measured predistribution available in Canada — ≈+$21k/yr to the average bottom-quintile household — without a single new bureaucracy or means test.
• Farmer: the numbers, straight: the average farm holds ~$4M of land — far above the share, and we corrected ourselves publicly when the data said so. The design answer: your charge is set by farm rental value at use-value assessment (what a tenant neighbour already pays, not a percentage of a speculative price), you can defer it entirely until the land leaves farming, and your household receives its shares in cash every year regardless.
• Economist: it's the Arnott–Stiglitz/George program in a zero-revenue, kink-free form; the interesting parts are the rent-basis respecification and the entity-allowance asymmetry. (Then hand them academic-path.md.)
• Journalist: a movement that publishes its own objections file and marks two of them unanswered is a story in itself; start at the development log.

Story shapes (the three that carry)

1. The coffee shop (Sean's): worth more because the neighborhood exists; nobody built the land; Groundshare names what was always true.
2. The two lots: identical dirt, downtown vs three hundred kilometres out — the difference is everybody else. Who should collect the difference?
3. The renter and the widow (the honesty story — tell it against ourselves): the renter has paid ground-rent to others for forty years with nothing back; the widow holds a valuable lot and little cash. Groundshare pays the first and defers the second until her estate settles. Telling both halves is what makes the first half credible.

One-liners for the eight objections (backed in objections.md)

1. "You're taking my savings" — The rules changed on renters every year for fifty years; nobody called it confiscation. We phase in, and we say plainly: above-share holders do give something up.
2. "Grandma" — BC has deferred seniors' property taxes since 1974. Same machinery, same mercy.
3. "Prices will crash and the money vanishes" — Prices fall; rents don't. We settle the rent. The speculative premium dying is the point, not the problem.
4. "You can't assess land" — BC and Quebec publish a land value for every parcel today; Saskatchewan will show you yours on request. Ontario and Alberta compute one and don't publish it — so step one costs nothing: publish the number that already exists.
5. "People will hide land in companies" — Companies get no share. Hiding land in one raises the bill. First shelter in history that runs backwards.
6. "It's socialism" — Socialism shares the bakery. Groundshare shares the ground under it — and defends the bakery absolutely.
7. "Homeowners will kill it" — The average homeowner gains. This is the first land reform where the median voter is on the receiving side of the schedule.
8. "It kills the family farm" — We published the farm numbers and corrected our own claim when they surprised us. The charge is tenant-rent at use-value assessment, deferrable until the land leaves farming — and the farm household collects its shares every year in cash.

Rules of engagement (honesty constraints on all copy)

• Never claim "nobody loses." The one-liner is "most people gain, and we publish who doesn't."
• Numbers on public materials only from the measured set (StatCan-derived, in analysis/) with the year attached; ranges when the method is contested.
• The Indigenous-title question is not a talking point; until the section is written with collaborators, the honest sentence is: "settler title and Indigenous title are different questions; Groundshare addresses the first and stands ready to be shaped by the second."

Groundshare — a proposal in open development. Every number traces to a cited public source with its retrieval date; corrections are published, not erased. Rebuilt 2026-07-19 from the repo's research files.