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The Yeoman’s Ledger: A Game-Theoretic Analysis and Alternate History of the Militia.money Political Economy in Post-Revolutionary America
Introduction: The Critical Juncture of 1787
The 1780s represented a period of profound institutional uncertainty for the nascent United States. The political victory in the Revolutionary War did not forge a viable nation; it inaugurated a new phase of conflict over the fundamental structure of its political economy.1 This struggle was defined by a deep ideological chasm between two competing visions for the republic’s future. On one side stood Alexander Hamilton, who championed a centralized, commercial, and industrial nation-state. His vision was predicated on a powerful federal government, a national bank to manage public credit, and the promotion of manufacturing and global trade, a framework that favored the financial and merchant elites of the coastal cities.3 On the other side was Thomas Jefferson, who envisioned a decentralized, agrarian republic composed of independent yeoman farmers. Jefferson believed the virtue and self-sufficiency of these landowners were the essential bedrock of liberty and was deeply suspicious of centralized banking, national debt, and the perceived corruption of urban commerce.6
Into this crucible of competing ideologies, the militia.money framework emerges not as a compromise between the two, but as a revolutionary third path. It proposes a system designed to achieve Jeffersonian ends—a society of independent proprietors—through a sophisticated and systemic economic mechanism that fundamentally redefines the relationship between property, money, and the commonwealth.
This report advances the thesis that the militia.money system, by restructuring property rights and monetary issuance around a Georgist-inspired framework, presents a coherent theoretical solution to the specific public goods game failure that manifested as Shays’ Rebellion. To explore this thesis, the report will first analyze the historical context of the 1780s as a systemic breakdown in collective action. It will then provide a game-theoretic analysis of the militia.money system’s mechanics, demonstrating how it realigns individual incentives with the public good. Following this analysis, it will construct a detailed counterfactual history in which George Washington imposes this system in 1787, leading to a radically different American trajectory. Finally, the report will connect the philosophical underpinnings of this alternate America to the empirical spirit of the Scientific Revolution, arguing that a nation of yeoman farmers could form the foundation of a unique, decentralized scientific culture.
Part I: The Crucible of the 1780s – A Nation on the Brink of Collapse
The crisis of the 1780s was a fundamental collective action problem, where the governing institutional framework—the Articles of Confederation—proved incapable of fostering cooperation among the states and its citizens. This failure led to economic depression, social unrest, and a near-total breakdown of the revolutionary project, setting the stage for a dramatic political overhaul.
1.1 The Legacy of War: Debt, Discontent, and the Currency Crisis
The American Revolution, while a political triumph, was an economic catastrophe. The new nation was saddled with immense state and national debts, its lucrative trade with the British Empire was severed, and it was plunged into a severe economic depression.2 The primary mechanism for financing the war was the issuance of fiat “Continental Dollars” by a Congress that possessed no independent power of taxation.2 Without a reliable tax base or specie reserves to back them, the Continentals succumbed to hyperinflation. By 1781, they were virtually worthless, giving rise to the enduring phrase “not worth a Continental” and shattering public confidence in unbacked paper money.10 This experience created a powerful, and ultimately destructive, demand for payment in “hard currency”—gold and silver coin—which was exceedingly scarce.8
Under the Articles of Confederation, the central government was powerless to address the crisis. It could not regulate interstate commerce, compel states to contribute to the national treasury, or establish a uniform currency. The states behaved as jealous and independent economic entities, issuing their own competing paper monies and erecting trade barriers, creating a chaotic commercial environment with prohibitive transaction costs that stifled the development of a national market.2
This economic crisis fell with crushing weight upon the yeoman farmers and military veterans who had formed the backbone of the Continental Army. Many, including the rebellion’s eventual namesake Daniel Shays, had been paid for their years of service in worthless Continentals or had not been paid at all.14 Upon returning to their farms, they confronted an economy devoid of cash, yet were met with demands from creditors and state governments for tax and debt payments in the very specie they lacked.8 This policy, driven by eastern merchant interests who held the bulk of the state’s war bonds, led to a devastating wave of debt-related court actions, foreclosures, and the seizure of farms, livestock, and personal property.1 For these men, losing their property was not merely an economic loss; it often meant losing the right to vote, stripping them of their voice in the very republic they had bled to create.
1.2 Shays’ Rebellion as a Collective Action Failure
The ensuing uprising, known as Shays’ Rebellion, can be understood as the catastrophic failure of a public goods game. The “public good” was the financial viability of the new republic and the honoring of its war debts. The “players” were the various classes of citizens, and the required “contribution” was the payment of taxes. The game collapsed because the system for collecting contributions was perceived as fundamentally unjust and extractive.
Standard game theory often focuses on the “free-rider problem,” where individuals benefit from a public good without contributing, leading to its underproduction.18 The situation in 1780s Massachusetts, however, was a more complex and pernicious inversion of this problem. The conflict was not simply one of debtors versus creditors, but a clash between two distinct classes of state creditors: the soldiers and farmers who were owed back-wages for their service, and the wealthy financiers who held government bonds.2 The Massachusetts state legislature, dominated by the financial class, enacted policies—specifically, high taxes payable only in specie—designed to ensure that bond payments could be met.15 These policies directly targeted the primary asset of the veterans (their land) and exploited their lack of the required medium of payment (specie). In essence, the state was using its coercive power to transfer wealth from one class of its creditors (the politically weak veterans) to another (the politically powerful financiers). The state itself, by failing to honor its obligations to its soldiers, was “free-riding” on their past sacrifices to satisfy a more influential constituency.
Faced with this rigged game, the farmers of western Massachusetts initially attempted to cooperate through legitimate channels, sending numerous petitions to the legislature requesting debt relief and the issuance of paper money to ease the currency shortage. These petitions were repeatedly rejected.14 When cooperation through the established political system fails, and that system is revealed to be captured by an opposing interest group, defection becomes a rational strategy. The “Regulators,” in closing down the debtor courts, were not acting as a lawless mob; they were engaging in a rational act of collective self-preservation, attempting to halt a process designed to dispossess them.1
The rebellion sent a shockwave of terror through the propertied elites across the thirteen states.14 It starkly exposed the impotence of the Articles of Confederation, which left the national government without the authority to raise an army or effectively respond to such internal uprisings.15 Ultimately, Shays’ Rebellion became the single most persuasive argument for a stronger central government—a powerful “enforcer” that could compel cooperation, suppress insurrections, and protect property rights from the desperation of the disenfranchised.1
Part II: A Game-Theoretic Analysis of the Militia.money Political Economy
The militia.money system represents a radical redesign of the political-economic game. It seeks to resolve the collective action problems that plagued the post-revolutionary era not through centralized coercion, but by fundamentally altering the rules governing property and money to align individual incentives with the collective good.
2.1 The Architecture of a Georgist-Inspired Monetary System
The monetary regime detailed in Section 8 of the militia.money proposal constitutes a self-contained and innovative political economy.21 Its mechanics are built upon a few core, interlocking principles.
First, property rights are the foundational element, but they come with a public obligation. All property rights must be declared, and their assessed value is determined not by a central government assessor, but by the highest publicly escrowed bid for that property.21 This mechanism creates a transparent, dynamic, and market-driven valuation system, reflecting the real-time social demand for any given location.
Second, property owners are required to periodically pay a fee, termed “demurrage,” calculated as a percentage of this market-driven assessed value.21 This functions as a Land Value Tax (LVT), as famously proposed by Henry George. It is a levy on the
unearned rental value of a location—value created by the surrounding community and public infrastructure—rather than a tax on productive improvements like buildings or crops. This makes holding valuable property unproductively a costly endeavor.
Third, the revenue from this demurrage is not used to fund a government bureaucracy directly. Instead, concurrently with the collection of demurrage, an equal dividend of newly created money is issued to every citizen, or “sovereign”.21 This mechanism establishes the principle that every member of the community has an equal, inherent right to share in the commonwealth’s socially-created value, which is captured by the demurrage.
Finally, the system’s most radical feature is its monetary policy anchor. The amount of the dividend, and thus the rate of money creation, is not tied to a commodity like gold or to the fiscal needs of the state. Instead, it is adjusted with the explicit goal of keeping the “cost of homesteading” constant.21 “Homesteading” is defined as that which is necessary to provide for, at a minimum, “replacement reproduction.” This, in turn, is understood as maintaining “intergenerational value,” a concept encompassing the cultural and biological values the community itself deems salient.21 The currency, therefore, is backed not by a metal or by debt, but by the real productive capacity required to sustain the community’s existence across generations. The money supply self-regulates: if demurrage collected exceeds dividends issued, the money supply contracts; if dividends exceed demurrage, it expands.21
2.2 Solving the Public Goods Game: Cooperation and Enforcement in Militia.money
This architecture fundamentally rewrites the payoff matrix of the public goods game that failed so spectacularly in the 1780s.22 It resolves the free-rider dilemma by making cooperation the dominant strategy for all participants.
The system internalizes enforcement and eliminates the initial choice of whether to contribute. For property holders, the payment of demurrage is not an optional tax that can be evaded; it is an intrinsic cost of ownership. To hold title to property is to contribute to the public fund. The most pernicious form of free-riding in a land-based economy—speculative hoarding—is directly punished. A speculator holding valuable land out of productive use, waiting for its price to rise due to the work of others, must now pay a continuous carrying cost in the form of demurrage.18 The more the community prospers and drives up the land’s value, the higher the speculator’s costs become, incentivizing them to either use the land productively or sell it to someone who will.
Simultaneously, the system provides a powerful and direct reward for cooperation. The universal dividend creates a positive-sum feedback loop. When the community thrives—building better infrastructure, creating a safer society, fostering commerce—the desirability of living there increases. This leads to higher bids for property, which raises the aggregate assessed value. A higher assessed value generates more demurrage revenue, which is then redistributed as a larger dividend to every single citizen. This mechanism ensures that collective improvement translates directly into individual financial gain, perfectly aligning self-interest with the public good.23 A rational actor in this game is incentivized to both use their own property productively to cover their demurrage costs and to support public goods that enhance the entire community, as this will increase their personal dividend.
Beyond its incentive structure, the militia.money system functions as a highly efficient social information system. The requirement that the highest bid for a property be publicly escrowed to set its assessed value creates a transparent, real-time public ledger of societal demand.21 This solves the profound information asymmetry that plagues centralized tax assessment, where value is opaque and determined by fallible bureaucrats at infrequent intervals. Here, the aggregate of all public bids provides a direct, quantifiable measure of the community’s collective judgment of value. The subsequent collection of demurrage and distribution of dividends are based on this socially-generated data. This system, therefore, replaces political negotiation and bureaucratic fiat with a transparent, algorithmic process grounded in revealed public preference, making the collective will regarding land value explicit and immediately consequential.
Table 1: Comparative Analysis of Economic Systems (c. 1787)
| Feature | Articles of Confederation (c. 1786) | Hamiltonian Federalism (Proposed 1787) | Militia.money System (Theoretical) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basis of Currency | State-issued paper, scarce specie. Low trust, unbacked. 8 | National debt, public credit, bimetallic standard. 3 | Socially-created land value (“Cost of Homesteading”). 21 |
| Money Creation | Decentralized, chaotic issuance by states and Congress. 9 | Centralized via a National Bank, tied to government debt. 4 | Decentralized issuance as a universal dividend, tied to demurrage. 21 |
| Funding Public Goods | Requisitions on states (voluntary contribution), largely ignored. 2 | Federal taxation (tariffs, excise taxes), centrally enforced. 5 | Demurrage on property (non-voluntary contribution). 21 |
| Primary Beneficiaries | Speculators, those with specie; states that shirked duties. 8 | Financiers, merchants, bond-holders, industrialists. 5 | Productive land users, all citizens via the dividend. 21 |
| Incentive for Cooperation | Extremely weak. Rational incentive to defect (not pay requisitions). 18 | Strong enforcement (federal power), patriotism, access to credit. 15 | Direct financial reward (dividend) tied to collective value. 22 |
| Vulnerability to Free-Riding | High. System collapsed due to free-riding states. 1 | Lowered by enforcement, but tax evasion and loopholes persist. | Minimized. Unproductive holding is directly taxed (demurrage). 21 |
Part III: The Washingtonian Mandate – An Alternate History
This counterfactual narrative explores a pivotal divergence in 1787, where George Washington, moved by the plight of his former soldiers, rejects the path toward the Constitution and instead leverages his authority to implement a radically different political economy.
3.1 1787: The Road Not Taken
The narrative opens in the spring of 1787. George Washington, at his Mount Vernon estate, receives increasingly alarming reports from Henry Knox and others about the uprising in Massachusetts.14 He reads of courts being shut down by armed men, many of them veterans of his own Continental Army. But where others see a lawless mob to be crushed, Washington sees his own starving, unpaid soldiers being systematically dispossessed by the very state governments they had fought to establish.15 His alarm at the “commotions” turns to a profound disgust with the “monied interest” and speculators who had profited from the war while its soldiers suffered destitution.
Compelled to act, he travels to Philadelphia. However, instead of presiding over the Constitutional Convention, he arrives to dissolve it. Backed by the unshakeable loyalty of the Continental Army’s officer corps and the popular support of the agrarian majority, he issues a “Proclamation of the New Economic Compact.” In it, he bypasses the squabbling state legislatures and speaks directly to the people. He declares the old, unjust debts and chaotic currencies void. He announces the establishment of a new system based on the core principles of militia.money, framing it not as a new form of government, but as the final fulfillment of the Revolution’s promise: that the land of America belongs to its people, and that its value should be shared by all.
This action is not a conventional military coup. The role of the Continental Army is explicitly limited and temporary. Its troops are deployed not to occupy towns or rule by decree, but to enforce the initial, universal declaration of property holdings and to oversee the first rounds of demurrage collection and dividend distribution. Their authority is used decisively to break the power of the entrenched state legislatures and financial elites. Once the system is operational and its rules understood, the army recedes, its task complete. Washington frames this as his final, and greatest, service to the republic: creating a system that can govern itself without the need for a powerful, coercive state.
3.2 The Jeffersonian Commonwealths: A Nation of Armed Yeomen
The immediate effect of the Washingtonian Mandate is a massive and rapid economic realignment. The power of the coastal merchants, financiers, and bond-holders—the Hamiltonian base—is shattered.5 Land speculators, faced with a crippling demurrage on their vast, unproductive holdings, are forced to either rapidly develop their properties or sell them to those who will. This triggers a widespread distribution of land into smaller, family-run homesteads. The yeoman farmer, who in the historical timeline was on the verge of being crushed by debt, becomes the undisputed central figure of the American economy, realizing the Jeffersonian ideal.7
With the federal government’s primary economic role reduced to the administration of the monetary system and its anchor, political power flows away from a central authority and back to local communities and newly formed, self-governing commonwealths. The basis of political participation is transformed; while land ownership remains central, the universal dividend ensures that every citizen, landed or not, has a direct economic stake in the community. This broadens the franchise and reinforces a sense of shared enterprise.
American expansion westward follows a different course. Instead of a process driven by massive land grants to railroad companies and speculators, expansion occurs organically as individuals and small groups “homestead” new territories under the established militia.money rules. This creates a patchwork of largely self-sufficient agrarian communities across the frontier, rather than a centrally managed territorial empire. In this context, the name militia.money becomes literal. The security of the commonwealths rests not on a large, standing federal army—a great fear of the anti-Federalists—but on a populace of economically independent, and therefore armed, citizens. Their right to the commons is guaranteed by the system, and their direct economic stake in that system provides the ultimate motivation to serve in the militia and defend the republic from all threats.
This alternate history would have produced a different primary axis of political conflict. The historical trajectory of the United States was defined by the contentious compromise between Northern industrial interests and Southern agrarian slave-holding interests, a tension brokered by the Constitution that ultimately failed in 1861. The Washingtonian Mandate, by decisively empowering a non-slaveholding yeoman model, bypasses this fatal compromise. The power base of the Federalists—international trade, centralized banking, and large-scale manufacturing—is not eliminated but is politically marginalized and geographically contained within a few port cities like Boston and New York. The vast interior of the country develops along a Jeffersonian-agrarian path, valuing self-sufficiency and viewing foreign entanglement with suspicion.4 Consequently, the great political debates of the 19th century would shift. Instead of clashes over tariffs and the expansion of slavery, the key political questions would become: Should the agrarian commonwealths trade their agricultural surplus for foreign manufactured goods? Should they permit foreign banks and capital to operate within their borders? This creates a new and perhaps more sustainable political dynamic, one between an internally-focused agrarian heartland and internationalist coastal enclaves, potentially averting the sectional crisis that led to the Civil War.
Part IV: The Agrarian Mind and the Empirical Spirit
This final section bridges the alternate history with the philosophical proposition that a society of yeoman farmers could serve as the foundation for a unique and robust scientific culture. It re-examines the Jeffersonian ideal through the lens of epistemology, arguing that the agrarian life is inherently empirical.
4.1 Feral Observations: The Yeoman as Proto-Scientist
The Scientific Revolution represented a fundamental shift in European thought, moving away from scholastic, authority-based deductive reasoning toward an empirical, observation-based inductive method.24 Thinkers like Francis Bacon championed the idea that knowledge should be built not from ancient texts or abstract principles, but from the ground up, through direct experience and experimentation.27 The daily life of an independent yeoman farmer is a microcosm of this very process.
A farmer’s survival and prosperity depend not on their ability to quote Aristotle or the Bible, but on their capacity for continuous and meticulous observation of the natural world. They must analyze soil conditions, track subtle changes in weather patterns, experiment with crop rotation and new seed varieties, observe the health and behavior of their livestock, and constantly modify their techniques based on the results.29 This is the scientific method in its most practical form: hypothesis (e.g., “planting clover in this field will improve next year’s corn yield”), experimentation, and observation leading to new knowledge.30 This knowledge is “feral” in the sense that it is wild and untamed by formal institutions, derived directly from the farmer’s unmediated interaction with their environment.
This perspective allows for a reinterpretation of Jefferson’s praise for farmers as the “chosen people of God” in whose breasts are deposited “substantial and genuine virtue”.4 This virtue can be seen as not merely moral, but epistemological. It is the virtue of intellectual honesty, a trait relentlessly enforced by nature itself. A financier can profit from abstract and complex instruments detached from reality, and a politician can thrive on rhetoric, but a farmer who ignores empirical evidence—who plants based on superstition rather than soil conditions—will face a failed harvest. Their theories are tested against an unforgiving reality every single season.
4.2 From Homestead to Hypothesis: A New American Enlightenment
The militia.money political economy, by securing the yeoman’s homestead and guaranteeing a baseline of economic independence through the dividend, creates the necessary material conditions for this empirical mindset to flourish and become the dominant cultural ethos. It provides the stability and the potential for leisure—a key component of the good life praised by agrarian philosophers—that allows for observation, reflection, and tinkering.31
This would foster a uniquely American Enlightenment, one profoundly different from its European predecessor. Where the European Scientific Revolution was often a top-down affair, patronized by monarchs and centralized in elite institutions like the Royal Society 28, this new scientific culture would be a bottom-up, decentralized phenomenon. Innovation would arise from countless farms, workshops, and town meetings across the continent. It would be practical and applied, focused on solving real-world problems related to agriculture, mechanics, and resource management, rather than being primarily theoretical and confined to a small, educated class.
This view also clarifies the agrarian skepticism toward technology.31 The yeoman farmer is not inherently anti-technology; they are anti-
alienating technology. They would readily embrace tools and techniques that enhance their productivity, independence, and understanding of their land—such as better plows, new methods of irrigation, or basic soil chemistry tests. They would, however, be deeply suspicious of technologies that promote centralization, dependency, and the destruction of the homestead model, such as massive industrial machinery affordable only by large corporations or financial instruments that turn land into a purely abstract commodity.
The ultimate fusion of this empirical-agrarian mindset with governance lies in the militia.money system’s monetary anchor: the “cost of homesteading”.21 This concept embeds the scientific process directly into the heart of the political economy. The system’s primary goal is to maintain “intergenerational value,” a condition that is not a fixed dogma but an open empirical question. To manage the money supply, the community must constantly ask and answer questions based on data: Is the soil being depleted? Are water resources being managed sustainably? Is the population healthy and capable of reproducing itself? These are not political questions to be decided by factional power, but scientific questions that require measurement, assessment, and analysis. In this framework, monetary policy becomes a primary tool for achieving a scientifically determined goal of long-term ecological and social sustainability. Governance itself is transformed into an ongoing scientific experiment, where the state’s main economic function is to collect data on the well-being of its people and ecosystem and adjust its core economic parameters accordingly. This represents the ultimate expression of an Enlightenment ideal: a state governed not by arbitrary power or ancient tradition, but by rational, empirical inquiry into the nature of the public good.27
Conclusion: A Nation Built on Land and Logic
The analysis reveals that the crisis culminating in Shays’ Rebellion was not an outbreak of lawlessness but a tragically rational response by veterans and farmers to a corrupted public goods game. The state, by prioritizing the claims of financiers over the promised payments to its soldiers, broke the social contract and triggered a collapse of cooperation. The historical solution was the U.S. Constitution, which created a powerful central enforcer to suppress such dissent and manage the nation’s finances in a way that favored a commercial, centralized republic.
This report has explored a radical alternative. The militia.money system offers a theoretically sound, if untested, solution that addresses the root cause of the conflict. By restructuring incentives around the shared value of land, it aligns individual self-interest with the collective good, punishing free-riding and rewarding cooperation through the mechanisms of demurrage and a universal dividend. The counterfactual history of a Washingtonian Mandate suggests this system would have created a profoundly different America—a decentralized, agrarian republic of the kind Jefferson envisioned in his most idealistic writings.
This alternate America would likely have been more economically equitable, with wider distribution of property and a direct stake for every citizen in the commonwealth. Its decentralized nature and focus on intergenerational sustainability might have made it more ecologically resilient. Its citizenry, grounded in the practical empiricism of agrarian life, could have fostered a unique, bottom-up scientific culture. However, this path would have had its own perils. Such a nation would have been less capable of projecting centralized military and industrial power on the world stage. It might have lagged in the development of large-scale manufacturing and global finance, potentially leaving it vulnerable to the more traditionally organized, mercantilist powers of Europe.
Ultimately, the conflict of the 1780s is an enduring one. The tension between the power of centralized finance and the autonomy of decentralized, land-based communities remains a defining feature of the modern world. The militia.money framework, born of a specific historical crisis, serves as a powerful thought experiment. It compels a reconsideration of the fundamental assumptions underpinning our own political economy—about the nature of property, the creation of value, the purpose of money, and the definition of a just and prosperous society.