I think that's the point, to free up all the economic activity that's being held up by patents, copyright and land underuse, and to get fair tax assessment on assets previously exempt from property taxes as a bonus.
I don't see how this has anything to do with patents or copyright. Presumably, those would be subject to this seizure mechanism and thus flow to those most willing to enforce their claims.
Like, 99% of the activity under such a mechanism would be transfers of financial assets.
A power law land value tax would take care of most of the problem at almost no cost (since land is assessed regularly anyway).
This should completely replace income tax. Copyright terms should also be 10 years, maybe 15 max. Patents could probably stay as is, but I don’t see any problem reducing them too.
> power law land value tax would take care of most of the problem at almost no cost (since land is assessed regularly anyway)
Sure. This is a totally different proposal.
Would note that you could go a long way to making this proposal electorally appealing by exempting primary residences. (In my experience, the assessed value of a home is at best loosely related to its market value.)
It would be electorally appealing, but would fail at one of the main benefits.
The number one waste of space in the US is people’s excessively large footprint, causing enormous consumption of energy and infrastructure costs that are borne by future generations.
All these detached single family homes on 0.1+ acre lots are massively expensive and the people living in them hardly pay taxes proportionate to the benefit they receive from the government. Instead, our society takes from the working class via income tax.
If you want to live in a detached home on a large lot, be ready to pay the appropriate land value taxes.
If you want to conserve and use less of society’s resources, live in an apartment building.
Since the tax formula would be a power law function, it would inherently not be punitive to the vast majority of Americans who don’t live on outsize plots of land.
The unstated assumption here is that efficiency is the most important thing, rather than any of a number of other things we could value like stability, security, safety, reliability, and so on. The problem with efficiency-driven ideas is that they almost always will result in a bunch of people with money descending on a bunch of people without money and exploiting the difference to...make money.