No, I definitely mean tax the land, not at a constant rate, but based on its value.
This was originally a solution to help deal with rent-seeking on privatized agricultural land, when some land was more productive than others. The more productive land results in excess, unearned profit for landowners (not the workers). Farmers are very different from farm workers. Farmers have millions in assets, and though they talk big game about being poor, they have immense wealth. They extract it from the farm workers' labor on their land.
This effect is even larger in cities, where access to the city is required for access to those wages. The landowners who hoard land most effectively take most of profits, and analyses of our growing inequality (Piketty and Ronglie) show that the source of our growing inequality is a larger and larger share of wealth getting transferred to housing and land.
If we have high taxation on land value, the most expensive land in cities will be used more effectively, no longer can landlords take more than their fair share of our labor, because all that land will be used more effectively. Which also means more land is available for farming.
In short, most of our problems are caused by allowing people to rent-seek on the one thing that we can never really expand significantly: land
This was originally a solution to help deal with rent-seeking on privatized agricultural land, when some land was more productive than others. The more productive land results in excess, unearned profit for landowners (not the workers). Farmers are very different from farm workers. Farmers have millions in assets, and though they talk big game about being poor, they have immense wealth. They extract it from the farm workers' labor on their land.
This effect is even larger in cities, where access to the city is required for access to those wages. The landowners who hoard land most effectively take most of profits, and analyses of our growing inequality (Piketty and Ronglie) show that the source of our growing inequality is a larger and larger share of wealth getting transferred to housing and land.
If we have high taxation on land value, the most expensive land in cities will be used more effectively, no longer can landlords take more than their fair share of our labor, because all that land will be used more effectively. Which also means more land is available for farming.
In short, most of our problems are caused by allowing people to rent-seek on the one thing that we can never really expand significantly: land