[lokar]

This illustrates the issue (IMO) at the heart of all of these discussions:

Is personal ownership of land like other property ownership (like a chair), or is it somehow different? To what degree does society at large retain some ownership rights to all land, and a say in how it should be used?

[Pfhreak]

It's different, but similar. We do actually care about other property ownership -- we tax various parts of its production to encourage the outcomes we want. That might be taxing based on country of origin, of materials used, of cost to dispose of, etc.

But land is intrinsically tied to housing and food production. We should be strongly discouraging allowing usable land to lie dormant because someone wants to speculate on it. Land should be taxed in a way that encourages maximizing housing/business/service utilization. A city block dedicated to surface parking provides almost no utility compared to placing a forty story mixed use residential building on the same lot. Even worse are property speculators who purchase abandoned sites and do nothing with them for years in hopes that property values will rise considerably in an urban core.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Land is something that comes in an (essentially) fixed supply, and is (almost never) human created.

Chairs are created by human (or machine) labor.

Since the provenance of the owned thing is entirely different in each case, it seems likely the legal/social/moral understanding of ownership in each case would be quite different.

[ClumsyPilot]

If there is shortage of chair, you can start a business making chairs.

If there is shortage of land there is nothong you can do.

[BurningFrog]

I know the land use disaster in the SF Bay Area, and much of it comes from allowing the community around a piece of property a say in how it's used.

It turns out that what he community does say when given a voice is NO!