Vision

The Harberger tax

An old idea, from economist Arnold Harberger and revived by Radical Markets:

You declare what your property is worth. You pay tax on that number. Anyone may buy it from you at that number, whenever they like.

Declare high and the tax hurts. Declare low and you lose it. The only stable answer is the truth. Assets keep moving toward whoever will actually use them.

Why almost nobody uses it

The theory is decades old and the implementations are rare — not because it is wrong, but because it is unpleasant to build and unpleasant to live with.

• Payment has to be continuous. Metered per second, settled without anyone remembering to press a button.
• Forced sale has to be real. Offchain that means courts. It only becomes credible when the transfer is code.
• It is exhausting to hold. Watch your price, keep a deposit funded, accept that the thing can vanish mid-use. Most people try it once.
• Everyone rebuilt it from scratch. The onchain experiments each wrapped one asset in a bespoke contract, leaving nothing reusable behind.

What we are trying

Make it a primitive instead of a project.

A slot is Harberger ownership factored out: deploy one, point it at anything, and the pricing, metering and forced sale come with it.

That handles the first two problems. The third — that it is exhausting to hold — is why the sharp edges are configurable rather than fixed. Occupancy policies decide when you can be bought out: guaranteed time, a price floor, a queue instead of a race. The forced sale stays real; you choose the terms.

Harberger, minus the parts that made people give up on it.