A complete guide to the village simulation — read it straight through and you will know how the whole system runs. The simulation itself is here; the full framework it implements is Free Market Ecology: First Principles.
J.W. Sher
West Mazupo is an intentional community of eight people, one village, and no committee. Nothing in it is allocated by a meeting, a rota, a warden, or a founder’s judgment. Every mechanism that replaces those things is running live under the map, and every number in the corner of the screen balances. This guide walks the whole system once, in order, the way the village itself would explain it to a newcomer.
The one big idea: own the place, not a paycheck
Every member of West Mazupo owns an equal share of the village’s land. Not money, not a stipend, not permission slips from an owner — property. The share pays out as an income of land resource usage rights (land RURs): on the first of each month, every member receives 35.5 fresh rights, where one land resource usage right (a land RUR) is simply the use of one hectare for one month. The village is 284 hectares — fields, cottage sites, and the marsh, all under one surveyed number — so it mints exactly 284 rights a month, split eight ways. Occupying land costs its literal footprint: a 4-hectare lakefront site is 4 rights a month; a farmer pays for the hectares he actually cultivates — fallow ground rests un-drawn — underwritten by credit against the harvest.
That one arrangement carries most of the weight in everything that follows. Because the share is property, nobody’s standing depends on a wage, a job, or anyone’s approval. Because it arrives as a monthly flow, commitments must be paid over time out of income, and no one can corner the year from a hoard. And because the rights are denominated in the land itself rather than in money, outside wealth cannot buy the commons out from under the people who live on it.
Three things you can do with a right
Eat from it — food grows on land, and every basket at the store carries the rights of the ground that grew it. Live on it — the cottages sit on land, and the nice ones sit on more of it. Or sell it — to a neighbor, for dollars, at your price, whenever you like. Housing and food come out of the same personal budget, so a month on the lakefront is a month of rights you could have eaten or sold. Every luxury has an honest price in the same unit as every necessity.
Each month’s rights expire at that month’s end. The reef does not bank last month’s catch, and the village does not bank last month’s land: an unused right lapses, and the land it named simply rested. Nothing is dumped in December because nothing accumulates to dump. What persists is the share — the claim that pays out again on the first, forever.
The three books
The village keeps three ledgers and never merges them.
Land is the flow just described: capped by survey, distributed equally, spent on use.
Damage is its own book with its own unit. Every member has a small annual land-damage budget — an equal share of the ground’s surveyed capacity to heal itself in a normal year — strictly, a proportional share of what it actually heals, shrinking pro rata in a drought — which is why it renews annually where standing damage never does — and harm to the land itself, a bonfire scar, a trampled bank, soil handed back poorer than it was received, debits it. Scuffs within the budget close on their own by spring; anything beyond it is standing damage, which sits on the account until real restoration clears it. Like any right, the unused part of the budget is a frugal member’s to sell. Damage-rights cannot be created by any authority and cannot be bought into existence with money. They are minted one way only: by physically restoring damaged land. That single rule makes repair a paying trade and makes the damage book impossible to inflate.
Dollars handle everything subjective and everything human: labor, skill, taste, imports, exports. Money can buy a right from a willing seller. It can never mint one, never stand in a primary auction itself — bids are in the commons’ own unit, and every right in a bid was either the bidder’s own share or bought from a willing seller, so a bigger bid means only that more willing sellers stood behind it — and never pay off a damage. Money is a courier in this village, not a key.
Keeping the books separate is not accounting pedantry; it is what keeps the arguments honest. Under one merged number, “you’re always here” and “you always wreck the place” blur into a single shouted grievance. Separated, they are two checkable facts about two different ledgers.
The quiet auction
Nobody arrived owning anything, because the founding was an equal buy-in: every member joined the community as it stands — houses, fields, sheds — and holds an equal share of the whole estate through the land RURs. Who lives where is settled by an annual auction in the commons’ own unit. The site’s metered draw — four hectares under a house is four rights a month — retires at the registry, physics rather than a price, the same rate as every hectare of farmland. Whatever the winner bids above the meter is the constitution’s deepest split made visible: physical objective cost versus human subjective value. The meter is nature’s invoice — the physical space consumed — and it retires. Everything above it is taste and scarcity, human value, and human value belongs to the humans who co-own the commons: payment above the natural cost passes through to the other members pro rata, in rights, month by month, the winner excluded. Nothing pools and nothing persists — a constitutional conduit, like the mint itself — and nothing is burned: land not set aside for conservation may be used fully, so the overage returns as usable capacity instead of idling hectares nobody chose to rest. Naturally different land is worth different amounts, and sellers are paid for what they give up; everyone is paid the overage for what the site is worth above its physics. Land itself is never owned — only held, month to month, by whoever pays its draw, and it walks free the moment the flow stops. And nothing conveys the way a deed would: movables trade freely for dollars; fixtures can never be sold, because they stand on ground nobody owns; a member’s own post-founding improvements ride tenure and sublease at a deemed resource markup — the Mansion Paradox engine at cottage scale, the same markup logic as the farmer’s and the baker’s, applied to place instead of produce. Fields work the same way at the ground layer: where several farmers want the same vacant parcel, they bid — but here the overage rule forks on the funding side. An asset-funded overage, like the housing auction’s, is a payment, and redistributes. A credit-backed overage is a promise, paid to no one: credit never turns into cash in this system, so paying out a bid that exists only as a lender’s commitment would mint distributable value from a promise. Instead the bid above the meter is the bar the winner’s collections must clear — he makes the ground worth that much to its eaters, delivered as food and proven at the store — and the community captures that value as goods, not as a dividend. The lender caps each bid at what the projected harvest can carry; miss the bar and the miss is public, the field re-auctions, and the next bid is sized to what he actually delivered. No housing office, no plot committee, no fund.
A lease is then paid month by month out of the winner’s arriving rights — a forward contract, in the framework’s terms: I will pay this rate for twelve months, while each month’s right itself stays short-lived. Nobody prepays a year from savings, because there are no savings in rights to prepay from. And the discipline is symmetrical: fall two months behind and the lease simply ends — no hearing, no debt spiral. The cottage re-lets at the next auction. A commitment here is only ever as deep as the income that services it.
The site draw goes to no landlord, because nobody owns the ground: it retires at the registry, struck off the year’s books, the commons recorded as used — the registry collects nothing it can spend. And there is no collective pocket anywhere else either: no fund, no premium pool, no dividend. When a monthly obligation runs past someone’s own share — Eli’s lakefront-plus-appetite is the standing example — the difference comes from willing sellers: Bella, who lives small and sells her surplus rights at her price, spot or by forward contract. Her thrift funds his view; his dollars fund her winters at the easel. Every dollar and every right in the village moves between named counterparties. No allocator, no landlord, no loose end.
And people will always build on the land — the constitution’s job was never to stop them, only to keep two sets of books honest and separate. Gil’s hillside cabin is the whole answer in one project: the ground is held, never owned, at its metered draw (uncontested ground leases at its meter; a contested site’s overage would flow to the members); the lease runs thirty years because the building must fully depreciate inside its tenure — by the term’s end the capital’s own earnings have paid back every resource usage right embedded in building it, and nobody builds an improvement a lease can’t outlive; the cabin itself is his improvement claim, capital in the money domain — insured, repaired, sold at his price, or subleased at his deemed resource markup. And the term’s end holds one more quiet theorem: a profitable operator is nearly impossible to outbid at renewal, because any challenger’s bid is capped by what the site would earn without his expertise — the only bidders who could beat him are his own customers banding together to run it themselves, and they cannot run it. Tenure security for productive capital is granted by no board; it is earned, term by term, by being the person the ground is worth most to. If he leaves anyway, his claim faces whoever wins the ground next — one buyer, one seller, a struck price. The mint test guards the seam forever: damage to the cabin is his own dollar loss, damage to the ground is the commons’. Two books, one honest seam.
Producers borrow the future; consumers spend their share
When Ari, the village’s best farmer, bids for the North Field, he is not limited to his own monthly flow. He borrows the rent from the EPF — the village credit desk — against his equipment, and the loan is repaid as his neighbors buy the harvest, month by month, out of the rights they surrender for the food. A producer’s bid is financed, in effect, by everyone who will eat what he grows — and he never shops for his neighbors’ rights to pay the rent: in a lean month the EPF advances the registry and adds it to his liability, at interest; the collections repay the lender, or the collateral does. Debt is the producer’s instrument; assets are the consumer’s.
And the desk has a face. Fay, the village’s saver, underwrites it: she reads a borrower’s yields and sizes his collateral before the EPF backs him at auction, and as the crop sells and the debt repays she takes a small interest in kind, paid only as the eaters actually settle each debt — the fee rides the repayments, never the line, and a failed loan pays her nothing: the lender’s return rides the venture’s real performance. Verification is a paying trade, which is why it gets done well: the loan is the lender’s to lose, and her savings are the equity a default burns. Where several farmers want the same parcel, her judgment is the allocation — lenders pick between qualified applicants, not committees, because no committee ever ate its own bad loan.
A pure consumer enjoys no such leverage. When Eli wanted the meadow for picnics, his bid was capped at his own endowment: his use ends with himself, so there is nothing downstream to borrow against. That asymmetry is the village’s entire zoning code, and no one wrote it: land goes to production over private enjoyment exactly when, and only when, the neighbors’ own future demand says it should. Where nobody’s demand says so, the picnicker wins, and the meadow stays a meadow.
The Marsh makes the deepest point on the map. Nobody bids on it, so its twenty hectares rent for almost nothing — yet on the ecological books those hectares count the same as the best field. The unit measures the Earth’s stake, which is physical and equal; the price measures human usefulness, which is neither. Improving land is how you move the price. Draining the marsh, on the other hand, would be damage — and damage has its own budget.
Every price has two parts
A basket of vegetables at the store costs dollars plus a sliver of land resource usage rights (land RURs). The dollars pay Ari — his labor, his skill, his ingenuity. The rights pay the land, and the eater surrenders them from their own share; they travel back through Ari to the registry, where they retire against his field’s rent. The books close at consumption, every time, which is why the footer of the simulation can show an identity that always balances: held plus retired plus lapsed equals minted plus the lender’s advances. That last term is the two flows made visible: eaters spend minted asset-rights, while a producer’s lean months run on liability-rights the EPF advances — retired the month the land is used, repaid when the eaters’ rights arrive. Nothing is used that isn’t on one side of the ledger or the other.
Each lot at the store carries its own producer’s actual per-unit draw plus a small retail margin, and buyers take the cheapest first — so the last lot the village still needs, from the least efficient producer still selling, sets the price at the margin. That number is what makes efficiency pay.
The markup: profit in the commons’ own unit
Ari grows more food per hectare than Chaim, the old-school farmer whose costs set the posted content. So every basket Ari sells collects the standard rights-content while having consumed less land — and the spread is his, handed over voluntarily, meal by meal, by the people he feeds. Hana runs the same engine at the ovens: the posted loaf content reflects the standard bakery’s wheat use, her ovens embed less, and the difference is a second income in rights on top of her money margin. Efficiency is not subsidized or commanded anywhere in the village; it is simply the most profitable position available, in a unit nobody can print. And part of every markup is a risk premium: the producer’s stake is wiped if he fails, his lender’s return exists only when eaters settle, and no rescue stands behind either of them — so the spreads that clear here run higher than an efficiency-only story would predict, and the difference is the visible, at-the-store price of a financial system with no bailout in it. And the marginal farmer is not starving for lack of a spread: the rights he collects pass through to his field’s rent, the dollar half of every sale pays his labor, and his own monthly share covers his cabin and his table — the markup pays efficiency; the money pays work.
What do the winners do with a markup that expires monthly? Spend it first — the spread arrives as rights during the month and goes straight back out on their own bills: the cottage draw, the site premium, the rights-slice of their own groceries. What’s left sells forward for dollars, and the dollars become capital and standing: Ari’s five years of banked markup bought the robot fleet, and each spring his dollars buy future RURs from willing sellers for a stronger housing bid. Hana runs the same loop at smaller scale, toward her oven and her rent. And the appraisal that meets every purchase is itself the point. Conventional capital budgeting runs one column — revenue minus cost — with damage exported to someone else’s books. In West Mazupo an upgrade is priced on two efficiencies, side by side in the buyer’s own books: the value it creates (the markup it widens — more harvest per hectare, less draw per unit) and the damage it limits (the soil test passed, the depletion debit never posted, the restoration rights never bought). At the registry each column settles in its own unit — no surplus in one ever erases a debit in the other; nothing converts, nothing offsets — but both columns pay: the hectares the gentle rig doesn’t need are land rights to sell, and the damage it doesn’t cause is healing allowance left unspent, sellable in its own dimension’s market. The clean machine profits twice, exactly like the clean producer, each profit in its proper unit. So the low-till cultivator can beat the bigger plough with no subsidy and no committee: the dirtier rig has to be worth its own damage bill to the buyer, spring after spring — and as long as the caps hold, it rarely is. That is capital appraisal with ecology priced inside it rather than bolted on.
And once a markup is proven, it can raise equity: savers’ unspent consumption buys into a producer’s equipment — a named, willing stake, no fund, no pool — and their dividend is a residual slice of the markup flow the capital widens, paid in the commons’ own unit, month by month, as it is actually collected. Eaters pay the same posted content; the equipment draws less ground; the spread carries the savers’ yield — lean months pay lean, and a failed season pays nothing. Abstinence financing roundabout production, direct and named.
Because rights expire monthly, a markup must convert as it arrives, and there are exactly three channels that carry value across time: money (surplus rights sell before month-end — though a buyer pays little for units that die with the month; what trades at full value is the forward: a promise of next year’s flow, delivered monthly — and this is the village’s preferred form of payment generally: rights spread evenly over the coming year, since each month’s unit dies at the bell, which is how Eli affords the lakefront — a year of Bella’s surplus, promised at her price — and how a thrift-surplus becomes an income stream), durable improvement claims (rights spent on land whose orchard or shed outlives them), and credit standing (a good record raises what the EPF will lend next spring). What can never carry is the rights themselves. The one thing this system refuses under every disguise is banking this year’s unused ecological capacity as a claim against next year’s cap.
Two kinds of damage, one test
Eli’s parties damage two different things, and the village’s checkout inspection splits them correctly.
The scorched deck and the cracked window are damage to capital — somebody built those, somebody holds the claim. They cost Eli a dollar repair bill, handled by the boring institutions money already has. The bonfire scar on the shore grass is damage to the commons, and it debits his land-damage budget — which money cannot clear. Only restoration rights can, and those exist only because someone actually healed land somewhere.
The rule that decides which book a damage belongs to is the mint test: would repairing it mint? Restoring fuel-poisoned ground mints damage-rights, so poisoning ground debits the ecological book. Nobody mints for fixing a countertop, so breaking one is a private debt in dollars. The same test explains the village’s odd couple of reclamation projects: Dina’s restoration of the old fuel dump minted new rights, because she healed the land itself; her lease on the old chicken sheds minted nothing, because reusing a structure is ordinary business — rent, an improvement claim, and egg money. Her five-year term on the sheds is deliberate too: fixtures attached to land need tenure, so productive capital gets long leases freely, while positional luxury like the lakefront stays on annual auction where no corner can lock it.
None of this makes damage a sin, and the books never moralize it. Some damage is the cost of civilization itself: there is no first steel without a pit somewhere, no glass without a kiln, and — in a village whose crop yields ride forge tools — no cheap bread without ore. The constitution’s discipline for necessary damage is the cap, not a ban: a ban does not end the pit so much as move it, to the least scrupulous hands going, with no books at all, and the strategic industries downstream drift after the ore. On the books it runs so: the pit sits inside a damage cap, borrows its rights at the price the restorers’ mint sets, sites itself where the land class is already spent — pristine ground would charge the whole class transition, and the pit’s water and air pay the same in their own units wherever it digs — and its standing scar rides the ore’s metered pedigree through the steel to whoever benefits, carried on their capped damage budgets until restoring it becomes the most profitable dig on the ledger. Nobody convenes to rule on whether steel is “essential enough”; that is the argument every polluter has always made, and the village never has to hear it, because the auction reveals essentialness: if the tools are worth their full pedigree, the pit digs. The books’ question about any harm is never whether it is virtuous. It is whether it is inside the cap, whose budget carries it, and what restoring it would mint.
The same inspection logic covers the fields. A field must be handed back with its soil as good as it was received; the year-end soil test charges any shortfall to the tenant’s damage budget. Careful farming builds soil and raises the field’s value. Rough farming pays its own bill, with interest in embarrassment.
The window: where the village meets the world
The town at the bottom of the hill runs on dollars, and the village trades with it through one interface: the window. Exports leave carrying their metered actual draw — surrendered by the exporter, on this side — and outsiders pay money only. No markup is ever earned against the dock, because the dock is not a willing member; and no right ever leaves the village, because outsiders have no standing in the commons. Fay, the village’s saver, runs her hoard through this interface as working capital: she buys surplus produce, covers its embedded draw from her own rights, and ships it out for dollars. The hoard itself has a clock — rights are flow units that die at month-end, so her working capital is only ever this month’s unspent share, the cargo sails before the bell, and what persists across months is the dollars. Hoarding was always benign here — an unused right is land left alone — and in her hands it is also a business.
Imports run the other way and stay deliberately out of the books: an incoming crate carries only a dollar price, the old system arriving in a box, and the village keeps its own accounts rather than pretending to assess what it cannot meter.
Nobody is bailed out
A farmer whose harvest cannot cover his rent defaults — and notice who was never short: the registry, because every month’s draw was advanced by the lender and retired as it happened. The hole is the lender’s — Fay’s, whose savings are the desk’s equity — in the loan’s own unit, and the penalty cascades exactly as far as it must: her interest is gone, her own cash covers what it must, and she seizes the collateral — the claims, and the unsold goods, whose embedded draw rides them. That last clause is the system’s unique bankruptcy law: the liability in inventory never evaporates; it transfers, to the next member of the supply chain or to a new lender who assumes the goods, and whatever the assuming lender lends against settles only when the goods finally reach a consumer. A desk whose investors cannot cover a failed loan defaults upward into Ecological Private Finance, under the same rules it applies downward. His equity is gone, and the field re-lets at the next auction. A tenant who misses two months loses the lease. A bon vivant whose damages outrun the supply of restoration rights carries the liability on his account, visibly, until real restoration exists to clear it. In every case the loss lands on the party who took the risk, the land itself is never harmed by the failure, and no committee is convened to decide who deserves mercy. The village’s forgiveness is structural: next year’s endowment arrives on January first, equal as ever, no questions asked.
The drought: a shock with no committee
The simulation has a second button: press it and the rains fail for a year. Yields halve — and now watch what does not happen. No rationing board convenes, no price ceiling is decreed, no anti-hoarding ordinance passes — the growers reprice their own asks into the scarcity, as sellers do — and the land cap does not move, because the valley contains exactly as many hectares as it did yesterday; what changed is what a hectare gives back. So the posted content roughly doubles by physics — the marginal farmer’s actual draw per unit simply rose — and that higher price is the ration: appetites trim themselves, exports stop on their own, and at this village’s numbers a member’s monthly share still covers a lean table even at doubled content — an observed outcome, not a promise: the framework’s named answer to genuine famine is a survival tier below the market layer, and West Mazupo never needs it. The farmers’ collections shrink, so the credit desk earns its keep: the lender advances the lean months and eats what fails.
And the village’s buffer turns out to be a business. Hana bought wheat cheap in the fat years — paying its embedded draw to the growers then and there — and stored it on her own racks, on her own leasehold. When the drought spikes the posted content, she releases the grain at its carried content — the draw was settled when she bought it, so drought eaters surrender a fraction of what the marginal drought harvest asks, and every crate shaves the rights spike directly. Her profit is the money spread: wheat bought cheap in the fat years and sold dear in the dry one — banked physically, sold for plain money, the cistern pattern. Forbid that profit as gouging and the granary is never built; the smoothing dies with the margin that paid for it. There is no strategic reserve board in West Mazupo. There is a baker with arithmetic about rainy days.
That arithmetic ran before the carpentry, and it is the general rule for every improvement in the village: does the payback fit inside the tenure? Racks that amortize in three years demand a lease longer than three years, which is why Hana signed five years on the grain loft rather than building on her cottage site — the cottage re-auctions every January, and an improvement outliving its lease becomes a claim you can sell to only one buyer — whoever wins your ground — at whatever it fetches. Dina ran the same test on the chicken sheds: $120 of roofs against five years of eggs. Rights expire monthly, but horizons don’t have to; they live in contracts — leases, forwards, credit lines — which is how a system whose unit dies every month still builds things that last for decades.
What the robots prove
The simulation has a button for the endgame: press it and a robot fleet comes up the hill — Ari’s fleet, bought with five years of markup sold for dollars month by month before the rights expired: the capital-creation loop closing, not a collective purchase — with a field of solar on four hectares of old commons, and the price of labor falls to nothing overnight. The panels’ energy is off-cap like sunlight, but the ground under them is not: four hectares is four land-RURs a month, metered and retired on the fleet owner’s books like anyone’s draw — covered by his collections as the eaters’ rights come back through him, with the lender advancing the lean months like any producer’s — and the parts invoices land on his ledger too, because the fleet is his. The site itself was never contested: unbid commons leases at its meter, the same rule that priced the chicken sheds and the Marsh. Under the arrangement most of the world runs on, that morning is a catastrophe for everyone but the machines’ owner — wages were the only claim most people had, and wages just went to zero. In West Mazupo the same morning lands as a dividend. Nobody’s standing was ever a paycheck; everyone owns rights to the land, and the machines cannot grow one tomato without settling those rights. The same monthly share now buys roughly twice the harvest, food prices collapse toward the pure price of the Earth in them, and money shrinks to what it was always best at — buying robot parts through the window. The machines changed what labor is worth. They could not change who owns the ground.
Why ordinary communes die, and this one doesn’t
Communes rarely die of bad people. They die of missing prices: to share the endowment they abolish the price system, and then meetings, norms, surveillance, and ideology must do the coordination work prices were doing, until everyone is exhausted. West Mazupo splits what communes conflate. It socializes exactly the thing that should be shared — the unearned resource, as equal endowments — and prices everything else. So there is no free-riding, because labor is never pooled; no endless meeting, because the auction clears what the meeting used to fight over; no favoritism, because sealed bids leave nothing for charm to work on; no rotting barn, because improvement claims survive turnover; no resented star, because the talented member’s surplus arrives through a constitutional channel, paid willingly by the neighbors themselves; and no exit catastrophe, because leaving is a sale between named people — the entering member, admitted by vetted grant as under any citizenship, buys the leaver’s improvement claims and movables at whatever price the two strike — the share itself is never bought or sold. The surviving kibbutzim crawled toward this structure ad hoc, under bankruptcy pressure, in the “renewing kibbutz” reforms. The village simply starts there.
Five demonstrations, one constitution
The simulation now opens on a menu of guided scenarios: the First Year (the full gentle tour), the Drought (the shock with no committee, above), the Robots (the endgame), the Capital Loop (a decade in which Ari’s markup buys equipment, the equipment widens the markup, and the earned bid finally takes the lakefront from the inherited one — and can lose it back in a lean year, because the auction never stops being real), and the Network — a wagon road to three sister communes: Ironbank (coal and iron, stocks drawn down against cumulative caps, plus an oil wellhead running its own stock dimension), Forgeholm (steel, tools, nails), and Harbor (a reef fishery whose catch-RURs are proportional shares of what the reef actually gives). Between FME communes, unlike at the town window, a crate travels with its declared content attached as an invoice: the buyer’s dollars purchase the minting commons’ own rights from its abstainers on the road’s exchange, surrendered at consumption — minting sovereign, rights traveling only by willing exchange, each dimension in its own unit, the mine’s brownfield cost riding the goods to the one who benefits. The longest chain on the road ends in higher crop yields at West Mazupo: ore mined in spring becomes autumn’s bigger harvest — the roundabout economy, readable end to end.
What the model leaves out
The simulation is honest about its simplifications, and the Help tab lists them: one land category where the full framework splits residential, commercial, and public; a registry standing in as lease counterparty where the framework has citizens selling forward through brokers; water not yet modeled as its own dimension; cottage structures treated as free legacy capital; imports unmodeled; and a land cap that never moves at all — honestly so, because 284 hectares is geometry, and geometry has no measurement error. The conservative-then-tune story (set the cap tight, so the science’s corrections arrive as good news) belongs to genuinely uncertain flows — an aquifer’s recharge, a fishery’s yield — and none of those is modeled yet. None of these simplifications changes the shape of the machine. They change how much of it fits in one browser tab.
Where to go next
Run the village — the tour walks the first year gently, the sim pauses to explain each new event, and every villager and parcel opens on click. When the mechanisms start suggesting bigger questions, First Principles is the complete framework, the Mansion Paradox FAQs are where the hard cases live, and The Abdication is the whole system as a story.