| If you accept the ATCOR concept (All Taxes Come out of Rent) then the presence of existing taxes diminishes land rent by the amount of those taxes. You can read more on this subject in Taxation: The Lost History in the following section: All Taxes Indirectly Fall on Land Values - https://www.jstor.org/stable/43817496?read-now=1&refreqid=ex... and in the "Trickle-Up Economics" report - https://www.prosper.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Trickl... Of course, we should first replace the existing bad taxes for multiple reasons. Nonetheless, as a matter of economic and social justice, -any- amount of land rent that exists should be publicly collected and distributed on a per-capita basis. This does not increase the user-cost of land as land has no cost of production. Of course as a transitional issue there will be net winners and net losers (for which we could create policies to address the transitional effects). The ultimate effect of the full public collection of land rent would be to bring the selling price of land down to $0, while the rental value would remain the same (not counting the dynamic effects). In reality, land value taxation isn't really a tax when properly understood. You either pay a previous owner in selling price or you pay the public the annual rental value. Most people don't properly consider that the selling price is simply the capitalized ability to capture future rents. In an ethical society, this privilege would not exist. |
why not? paying for the use of privately owned property (land or car) seems like a natural and ethical transaction.
If ownership exists, this privilege also must exist.