My usual answer to “why tax land?” is “the speed of light”, i.e. the physical constraints of our universe making locality valuable. And we’re okay to tax things that are powered by things like physical constants because they are constant and if you get the policy right you minimize the creation of disincentives on the margin, i.e. you tax the “fixed” value of land (locality) so you avoid doing things like creating price floors and ceilings or creating marginal disincentives that result in no development or less development since any marginal development will pay for itself, taxes included.
To be clear, you can’t tax land. You tax people (or corporations), calculating the amount based on land, secured by your ability to (re)take their land. But more importantly, my question wasn’t “why tax land”, but “why not tax everything?” michaelcohen had a pretty good answer for this—land is a better target than most assets because it’s difficult to hide and not subject to removal from the tax jurisdiction.
Basically, land is easily found and threatened by the tax authority (for both physical and historical reasons).
My usual answer to “why tax land?” is “the speed of light”, i.e. the physical constraints of our universe making locality valuable. And we’re okay to tax things that are powered by things like physical constants because they are constant and if you get the policy right you minimize the creation of disincentives on the margin, i.e. you tax the “fixed” value of land (locality) so you avoid doing things like creating price floors and ceilings or creating marginal disincentives that result in no development or less development since any marginal development will pay for itself, taxes included.
To be clear, you can’t tax land. You tax people (or corporations), calculating the amount based on land, secured by your ability to (re)take their land. But more importantly, my question wasn’t “why tax land”, but “why not tax everything?” michaelcohen had a pretty good answer for this—land is a better target than most assets because it’s difficult to hide and not subject to removal from the tax jurisdiction.
Basically, land is easily found and threatened by the tax authority (for both physical and historical reasons).