The Civilian Innovation Corps
How Virtual Land Value Tax Can Enable Expanding and Maintaining the Public Domain of Knowledge
In 1879, an obscure San Francisco journalist named Henry George published a book that would become, for a time, one of the best-selling works in American history. Progress and Poverty asked a simple question: Why does poverty persist alongside economic growth? His answer was radical in its simplicity. The problem was land.
Not land as dirt, but land as location—the fact that some places are valuable and others aren’t, and that this value comes almost entirely from what the surrounding community does, not from anything the landowner contributes. A vacant lot in downtown Manhattan is worth millions. An identical patch of soil in rural Nevada is worth almost nothing. Same dirt. Different neighbors.
George’s proposal followed logically: tax the unimproved value of land—the location itself, not the buildings or improvements—and use that revenue to replace other taxes. The beauty of the idea was threefold. First, fairness: you’d be capturing value created by the community rather than by the owner. Second, efficiency: landowners couldn’t respond by producing less land (there’s a fixed supply), so the tax wouldn’t distort economic activity the way taxes on labor or production do. Third, it would discourage speculation and encourage productive use.
The land value tax never swept the world as George hoped, though it has devotees to this day and has been implemented in partial forms in places like Singapore and parts of Pennsylvania. But set aside whether George was right about land specifically. The deeper question is whether his logic applies to anything else.
What if there are other things—things that aren’t physical land—that share the same essential properties? Things that exist as a kind of commons, that nobody really “created” in the way you create a product, and that generate enormous value as society learns to use them?
What if there’s land in conceptual space?
The Conceptual Commons
To extend George’s logic, we need to identify what plays the role of “land” in the realm of ideas. Not everything qualifies. A new app isn’t land—someone built it. A patented invention isn’t land—it’s the product of deliberate R&D. We’re looking for something more fundamental: the conceptual equivalent of location, the underlying territory that gains value as civilization develops around it.
The candidates are things like mathematical principles, foundational algorithms, basic frameworks for understanding the world. Things that are discovered or derived rather than invented. Things that are, in principle, public goods—non-rivalrous (my use doesn’t diminish yours) and non-excludable (once known, you can’t really prevent people from knowing them).
An Example: Compound Interest
Compound interest isn’t an invention. It’s a mathematical fact about exponential growth. Nobody owns it. You can’t patent the idea that reinvested returns generate returns of their own. It’s part of the shared inheritance of human knowledge, sitting there in the public domain, free for anyone to understand and apply.
And yet the value generated through compound interest is almost incomprehensibly large. Every mortgage, every bond, every retirement account, every corporate loan, every savings product—all of them run on compound interest. The entire architecture of modern finance is built on this one principle. When you hear that the U.S. federal government pays hundreds of billions of dollars a year in interest on its debt, that’s compound interest at work. When pension funds grow over decades to support retirees, that’s compound interest. When credit card debt spirals out of control, that’s also compound interest.
The principle itself is ancient—Babylonian clay tablets from 2000 BCE show calculations of compound interest. But the value it generates has grown enormously as financial systems have become more sophisticated, as more people have access to banking, as capital markets have deepened. Just as a plot of land becomes more valuable when the city grows around it, compound interest becomes more “valuable”—in the sense of generating more total economic activity—as the financial system becomes more complex.
The land is the principle. The rent is the value generated by applying it.
A Second Example: The Fourier Transform
Lest this seem like a story only about finance, consider the Fourier transform—a principle that has nothing to do with money and yet is responsible for an almost incomprehensible amount of economic value.
In the early 19th century, Joseph Fourier discovered that any complex signal—a sound wave, an image, a time series—can be decomposed into a combination of simple sine waves. This wasn’t an invention; it was a mathematical truth waiting to be understood. Fourier was studying heat flow. He had no idea what his insight would eventually make possible.
Today, the Fourier transform is everywhere. When your phone compresses an image to send over text, it’s using Fourier-related mathematics. When an MRI machine constructs an image of your brain, it’s applying Fourier transforms to raw signal data. When Spotify streams music or when Netflix compresses video, Fourier analysis is at work. When seismologists interpret earthquake data, when astronomers process signals from distant stars, when engineers design noise-canceling headphones—all of it depends on this one 200-year-old mathematical principle.
The value generated is incalculable. Billions of devices, trillions of transactions, entire industries—medical imaging, telecommunications, audio processing, data compression—built on a foundation that nobody owns and everyone can use. Fourier’s insight is conceptual land in the purest sense, and modern civilization has built a city on top of it.
This is what a public good looks like. Non-rivalrous: my use of the Fourier transform doesn’t diminish yours. Non-excludable: once it’s understood, you can’t prevent people from applying it. And yet it generates staggering economic value—value that, if George’s logic were extended and a virtual land value tax were somehow possible, could in principle be partially captured and reinvested in the conceptual commons. That’s not feasible in practice, and probably not palatable politically. But the underlying logic holds: here is shared territory that we all build on, and the question of who tends it—who discovers the next Fourier transform, who validates it, documents it, makes it accessible, helps people apply it well—is not one we’ve answered institutionally.
The Thought Experiment: A Virtual Land Value Tax
Here’s where George’s logic gets interesting. If we can identify the conceptual equivalent of land—foundational principles that generate massive value—then we can at least imagine the conceptual equivalent of a land value tax.
Call it a Virtual Land Value Tax, or VLVT. The idea would be to apply an ultra-small levy on the economic value generated through certain public-domain principles, and use that revenue to fund the discovery, validation, and deployment of more such principles.
How small? Think thousandths of a percent. A 0.001% skim on the trillions of dollars of interest-related value flowing through the financial system would generate billions per year—not hundreds of billions, but enough to fund a serious institution. For reference, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office operates on a budget of around $4 billion annually.
The mechanism would be something like this: built-in micropayment infrastructure that takes an imperceptibly small cut from transactions that derive value from certain tagged, public-domain conceptual assets. This only becomes technically imaginable in a digital economy. You couldn’t do it with paper ledgers. But with modern payment rails, the granularity exists to levy charges of fractions of a cent and aggregate them into meaningful sums.
The revenue would then fund what we might call a Civilian Innovation Corp—an institution dedicated to finding, validating, and operationalizing high-value ideas, then releasing them openly for broad benefit.
Let me be honest: this specific mechanism is probably not feasible.
The implementation would require knowing when particular principles or algorithms are being used, which raises immediate problems. How do you detect when a transaction involves compound interest versus some other financial structure? How do you tag algorithmic usage at scale? The answer involves deep visibility into financial systems and code—something that starts to look like systemic surveillance. And whatever its technical merits, a system that monitors which concepts people are applying in their economic activity is not politically palatable and raises serious questions about privacy and autonomy that are paramount.
So the VLVT as described is likely a thought experiment rather than a policy proposal. But the thought experiment clarifies something important: there’s a real gap in our institutional landscape. We have robust mechanisms for funding and protecting private innovation—patents, venture capital, trade secrets, corporate R&D. We have much weaker mechanisms for cultivating the conceptual commons.
The value of the thought experiment is not the specific funding mechanism. It’s the question it forces us to ask: what would it look like to have a serious, well-resourced institution whose job is to find, validate, cultivate, and operationalize ideas that benefit everyone?
Who Does This Now?
The honest answer is: various organizations try, but each has limitations.
DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is often cited as a model for high-impact public R&D. It funded the early internet, GPS, and countless other technologies that became foundational. But DARPA’s mission is defense, which shapes what it funds and how. Technologies developed there often remain classified or controlled for years. The goal is national security advantage, not open public benefit.
Academic research institutions produce enormous quantities of basic research, some of which becomes foundational. But academia’s incentives favor publication and citation over operationalization. A brilliant paper might sit in a journal for decades before anyone figures out how to apply it. The gap between “published” and “practically deployable” is vast, and academia has little institutional interest in closing it.
Philanthropic efforts like the Gates Foundation, Open Philanthropy, and various research-focused nonprofits fund valuable work. But philanthropic priorities are set by donors, which introduces its own biases. The work tends to focus on causes that appeal to wealthy individuals—which is not necessarily the same as “ideas with the highest leverage for public benefit.” There’s also a legitimacy question: do we want the conceptual commons shaped by the preferences of billionaires?
Think tanks produce policy ideas and frameworks, but most have ideological commitments that shape their output. They’re often funded by parties with interests in particular conclusions. And their focus is usually on advocacy rather than rigorous validation and operationalization.
Open source foundations (Mozilla, Apache, Linux Foundation, etc.) maintain crucial shared infrastructure, but primarily in software. They’re a good model for what collaborative maintenance of commons can look like, but their scope is narrow—code, not concepts more broadly.
Private R&D labs like Bell Labs in its heyday produced extraordinary foundational work. But Bell Labs existed because AT&T had a regulated monopoly and could afford to fund pure research. Modern corporate R&D is more tightly coupled to product development. When Google or Microsoft fund basic research, the goal is ultimately competitive advantage, and much of what they learn stays proprietary.
Government science agencies (NSF, NIH, etc.) fund basic research, but with important constraints. They’re subject to political pressures. Funding is often tied to existing academic structures. The path from “funded research” to “operationalized tool that policymakers or citizens can actually use” is long and poorly supported.
Each of these institutions does valuable work. None of them has, as its primary mission, the task of finding high-leverage ideas wherever they emerge, rigorously validating them, and shepherding them into forms that are practically useful—and then releasing them openly, for anyone to use. That’s the gap.
The Civilian Innovation Corp
Imagine an institution designed specifically to fill that gap.
Call it the Civilian Innovation Corp—a deliberate echo of the Civilian Conservation Corps, the New Deal program that mobilized unemployed young people to build parks, trails, and public infrastructure during the Great Depression. The CCC built things we still use today. The trails in national parks, the lodges, the fire roads—much of it is CCC work, maintained ever since through park fees and public funding.
The Civilian Innovation Corp would build conceptual infrastructure. Its mission would be to find, validate, cultivate, and operationalize ideas that benefit large swaths of society—and to do so openly. Not products to sell, but frameworks, tools, and principles to deploy in the commons.
The work would proceed in phases:
Search and scout. The Corps would actively look for promising ideas—not just in academic journals, but in industry practice, open-source communities, government agencies, international contexts. What frameworks are people using that seem to work well? What principles have been validated in one domain but not yet applied elsewhere? What patterns keep appearing across different fields?
Validate and test. Promising ideas would be treated like minimum viable products in the conceptual domain. Subject them to stress tests—empirical, theoretical, across different contexts. Does this framework actually work? Under what conditions? What are its limits? What happens when it’s applied at scale?
Refine into general-purpose tools. Ideas that survive validation would be developed into what we might call “maximally viable principles”—clear documentation, guidelines for effective use, model implementations, case studies of successful and unsuccessful applications. The goal is to transform a good idea into a deployable tool.
Operationalize and disseminate. The final phase would package these tools for actual use. Toolkits for policymakers. Training programs for practitioners. Reference implementations that organizations can adapt. The gap between “knowing about an idea” and “being able to apply it well” is where most good ideas die. The Corps would specialize in bridging that gap.
The model would be something like a venture capital fund, but oriented toward ideas for the commons rather than startups seeking exits. Back a portfolio of conceptual projects. Expect most of them to be niche or not scale. But the ones that work—the ones that get adopted widely and generate value across many contexts—would justify the entire effort.
The Human Element
Where would the people come from?
There is, right now, an enormous amount of talent that wants to work on things that matter but doesn’t have clear pathways to do so. People in academia who are frustrated by the gap between research and impact. People in industry who want to contribute to something beyond shareholder value. People in government who see opportunities that bureaucracies can’t act on. People early in their careers who want to build things that last.
The original CCC gave people a place to direct their energy toward shared benefit. It provided structure, resources, and purpose. The Civilian Innovation Corp would do the same for a different kind of work.
This isn’t about creating a new class of technocratic experts who decide what’s good for everyone else. It’s about building capacity for a particular kind of work: the disciplined, rigorous process of taking ideas from “promising” to “practically useful”—and doing it in the open, for everyone’s benefit. That work requires diverse perspectives—people who understand implementation challenges, people who understand politics, people who understand how things fail in practice, not just how they succeed in theory.
The Race Between Private and Open Innovation
Right now, there’s a strong gravitational pull toward private innovation. If you have a good idea, the most obvious path is to start a company, patent it, raise venture capital, and try to capture the value yourself. This is fine. It produces useful things. It funds further innovation. But it also means that ideas get locked up—protected by intellectual property, kept secret as trade advantages, optimized for private returns rather than broad benefit.
What a Civilian Innovation Corp would introduce is a parallel track. A place where the explicit goal is to push ideas into the commons—to make them open, documented, and deployable by anyone. Not instead of private innovation, but alongside it.
This sets up a healthy tension. Some ideas will be better suited to private development, where the profit motive drives rapid iteration and scaling. Other ideas will be better suited to open development, where the goal is broad access and the work doesn’t need to generate returns for investors. And some ideas might be developed in both tracks, with private implementations competing alongside open ones.
The point is to have a real alternative. Right now, if you discover something valuable, the default is to try to own it. A well-functioning Civilian Innovation Corp would offer another option: contribute it to the commons, with institutional support to make sure it actually gets used.
The Funding Question
Here’s the honest problem: we don’t know what funding model will sustain this kind of effort.
The challenge is structural. An institution dedicated to finding, validating, and giving away high-leverage ideas doesn’t have a natural revenue stream. We give away the output. That’s the point. But it means we can’t guarantee that value flows back to sustain the work.
Patenting is one option—develop ideas, license them, use the revenue to fund further development. But this sits uneasily with the mission. Once you’re optimizing for licensable intellectual property, you’ve changed what you’re looking for. You start favoring ideas that can be owned over ideas that are most useful. The incentives drift.
The virtual land value tax described earlier is another option, and perhaps the most elegant in principle—the value generated by the conceptual commons funds the maintenance and expansion of that commons. But as discussed, the implementation challenges are severe. Detecting algorithmic usage at scale, tagging conceptual principles, building the micropayment infrastructure—it’s technically imaginable but probably not feasible, almost certainly not politically palatable, and possibly a violation of privacy rights.
Government funding is the obvious alternative, but it comes with its own problems. Government-funded efforts are subject to political pressure. Priorities shift with administrations. There’s a tendency toward risk-aversion and bureaucratic caution. And there’s a legitimacy question: an institution designed to identify and propagate high-leverage ideas for everyone should probably not be controlled by any particular government.
Philanthropy has the issues we’ve already discussed. Philanthropic priorities reflect donor preferences, which introduces bias. The causes that appeal to wealthy individuals are not necessarily the ideas with the highest leverage for broad benefit. And dependence on philanthropic goodwill is precarious—funding can disappear when donors shift interests.
So where does that leave us?
The ideal—the aspiration—would be an institution that can sustain itself while giving away everything it produces. If we could guarantee operational sustainability, we would give away every idea, every framework, every tool, with no strings attached. That’s the goal.
But until we can guarantee sustainability, we need to be pragmatic. We need funding, and we should look for sources that are most aligned with what we’re trying to do. That might mean a mix: some earned revenue from consulting or training, some philanthropic support from donors who genuinely share the mission, some government grants for specific projects where alignment is clear. It might mean experimenting with models that don’t exist yet.
What we shouldn’t do is pretend this is solved. The funding question is open. It’s one of the hard problems. And being honest about that is better than papering over it with optimistic assumptions.
We’re not averse to making money. We’re not averse to supporting ourselves. The goal isn’t purity; it’s impact. If some revenue-generating activity helps sustain the larger mission of finding and sharing high-leverage ideas, that’s fine. The test is whether the funding source distorts the work—whether it pulls us toward ideas that benefit funders rather than ideas that benefit everyone.
That’s the question to keep asking: where are the funding sources most aligned with what we’re trying to do? And how do we structure things so that alignment is preserved as we grow?
The Question We Should Be Asking
Here’s the question that sits underneath all of this:
Who is responsible for finding, validating, cultivating, and operationalizing good ideas for broad benefit?
Right now, the answer is mostly: private industry. And private industry does this well for ideas that can be monetized. That’s valuable. But it leaves a gap—a large gap—for ideas that are high-leverage but don’t fit neatly into a business model. Foundational principles. Frameworks for collective decision-making. Tools for thinking that benefit everyone but that no one can own.
We’re going to share it anyway. That’s the nature of knowledge. Ideas spread. Principles, once understood, become part of the common inheritance. The Fourier transform didn’t stay locked in a French journal; it became infrastructure for the modern world. Compound interest didn’t remain a Babylonian secret; it became the foundation of global finance.
The question is whether we leave the discovery and development of such ideas to chance and private initiative alone—or whether we build institutions that make it a deliberate, resourced, ongoing effort.
Henry George looked at land and saw something everyone had missed: that the community’s contribution to value deserved recognition. In the 21st century, the “land” we build on is increasingly conceptual. The principles, frameworks, and algorithms that underlie modern life are a commons—and like any commons, they require stewardship.
A Civilian Innovation Corp wouldn’t just tend that commons. It would expand it. And in doing so, it would give private innovation a run for its money—not by competing with it, but by offering a genuine alternative. A place where the goal is not to capture value, but to create it and give it away.
We’re going to share the good ideas eventually. We might as well get organized about it.