They generally locate where they can draw on a pool of talented people, and those people are drawn by social amenities, good schools, good infrastructure. All those things contribute to land value.
Those late to the game who decide to rent are paying rents based on current land values, but their landlords, who may have owned the property for 10, 20, 30, 40 years, are paying to the community based on their purchase price. It becomes a form of sharecropping. Landlording can be very profitable, especially in California, if you own or inherit property from someone who bought it decades ago. Cui bono?
"George preferred taxing unimproved land value"
It is not good politics to start your political campaign by proclaiming that you will remove all taxes altogether because it is so far out of anyone's reality that he would have been considered crazy.
Also, I live in an apartment. Should my tax be $0? Or if I owned and lived on land way out in a rural area where a small plot is only worth a few thousand bucks, do I only pay tax on that despite my income being mid six figures? The point is, as a knowledge worker, my economic productivity is entirely divorced from land. This is true of most white collar workers. Land value taxes may have made sense as the primary tax hundreds of years ago but they don't make sense for that purpose now.
Countries and states that let tech companies thrive are winning the race for capital.
So how much does that Brooklyn homeowner owe to the rest of society for excluding others from what they enjoy? How much does the SaaS millionaire exclude others from opportunities?
Many proposed economic systems distinguish between property that comes from your own labor, and profits that come from idly owning an asset and restricting its use by others in certain ways. The slogan "property is theft" doesn't refer to the bookshelf that a person crafted, it refers to real estate and the economic systems of the time that excludes so many people from the opportunity to escape the economic rents of those who were born with more wealth and privilege.
There are many reasons to tax things: to make life more fair, to raise funds for government, to improve economic efficiency, to reduce pollution. It's so hard to say who should be taxed more without baseline values!
I agree with you, providing defense and protecting real capitalism, stopping oligarchies/long term monopolies from forming is important, to be able to have a return on investment on the taxed capital in the country.
As I wrote before, countries are competing for investor money, that's why it's important how they collect and distribute taxes. The counterforce is usually corruption inside the political system though.
Markets need massive amounts of legal structure and regulation to make them efficient. Including taxation as part of that is an excellent idea.
And if we get to Piketty-inspired corrections for r>g, part of that will include eliminating economic rents the way a LVT does.
You wouldn't see a tax bill because you're not a landowner. But you'd be paying your share via your monthly rent. And your rent would not rise: your landlord is already charging what the market will bear.
And if there is a vacant lot next door, its owner would be motivated to build on it or sell to someone who would. That would likely reduce the rise in your monthly rent.