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You keep what you make.

Creation should earn absolute title. Stake a copper ridge, risk capital, drill, haul, smelt—every refined ounce is yours, and yours alone.

But you didn’t build the ridge itself—each seam is eons of stored work and petrified photosynthesis, compressed until sunlight was literally sealed in carbon.

The land precedes your work, and your fence bars us all from its riches. Longitude, latitude, seam depth—its worth depends on these raw coordinates.

4.6 billion years of blind pressure, sunlight, burial, and anaerobic decay is what gifted us seams of compressed sunlight. These ‘raw materials’ are vaults of rich, ordered matter—a treasure gifted, never earned.

Pay market rent for the privilege of holding them—and keep everything else that your effort brings to daylight.

Tax land, its latent worth, and its highest use always follows; when taxed as if it was used, it must then be made so—make it serve, or yield it to those who will.

Land can pay up, labour can keep all, and parasites can starve.

Of all resources, oil is the crown jewel of passive wealth—fungible, portable, and one global price. The good shit gathers only in a few porous vaults—pressure vessels that, once drained, stay empty. Most reservoirs hold no latent pressure—but a few do.

Open Ghawar, Burgan, Brent, and gravity does the lifting—no rods, no steam, no submersible pumps, just native pressure alone feeds crude straight into tankers. Close these reserves, and the world ignites every engine of entropy (fracs, pumps, steam) just to keep the flow going.

Low effort, high yield—this asymmetry is where rent lives.

The near-zero lifting cost of deep deposits, set against a single, inelastic world price, is a lever of power.

Their owners pace output to keep pressure high, bury seismic data, fortify their straits, and let high-cost shale set the world price instead—while the surplus pours in as sovereign funds.

Then watch how oil buys silence—think of UN diplomatic vetoes, Qatar’s stadium naming rights and its VC rounds for Silicon Valley firms, endowed chairs at policy schools, and media empires like Al Arabiya that crown privilege and call it deserving.

Oil cartels depend on one quiet privilege—land, yet all consumers see is generic fuel; all investors parse are cap-ex forecasts; all lawmakers invoke are lobby-drafted policy briefs; and all media crowns is ‘visionary’ lore. This is how power completes its silent conversion into influence—unseen, unmeasured, and omnipresent.

Recall, again, that it’s not capital or policy, but land’s worth—unearned, untouched—that distorts the system.

Capital, even technology, pales beside the gulf carved by nature. One corroded Saudi well—one valve, one pressure gauge—on Ghawar still outdoes even the most advanced Permian frac. Ghawar’s Arab-D limestone can lift crude through cheap vertical wells, gravity doing all the work. Bakken must drill, case, perforate, then frac mile-long laterals stage after stage—just to coax a short-lived surge that soon fades, demanding another round of debt & redrilling.

It’s this primal, unearned advantage that defines true wealth in this domain. Bakken bleeds debt—Ghawar just sits and earns. Those pathetic Saudi/Emirati rulers fence their field, wave an OPEC quota, and siphon rents born of pressure gradients they never earned nor could replicate.

So tax the land. Tax it all. Let labor keep its sweat, and let parasites bleed.

Keep the tax locked on the true in-situ worth of every pore space, and these parasites will stand naked before a world that finally denies them tribute.