This makes me wonder, do roads pay land tax? I think railway tracks do but I'm not sure about roads.
Personally I think more of the spectrum should be like 2.4GHz, 5 GHz (and soon 6GHz?). No auctions. No owners.
Rather, the tax on the land of the roads is an accounting mechanism to ensure that the land is being used for greater economic efficiency, rather than, say, a way forward wealthy people who live far away to get the public to subsidize the transport to their large mansions.
Housing was guaranteed in the old Soviet Union, but if you didn’t cooperate, the housing was in the gulag.
Land is quite unique. It is the resource with the weakest argument that humans produce it. Gold, for example, requires human labour to be dug up. Bitcoin requires humans to run machines. The Mona Lisa requires humans to paint. Land behaves differently.
In today's world, where access to a city can dramatically change one's earning potential far far more, they are even more relevant.
The issue is both about the scarcity of access to a resource, such as the economy of a city, but also about where that resource comes from. With urban land, that resource is not the product of the individual land owner, but rather all the other land owners that made the city so prosperous and with so much opportunity.
Yes, it is (or, at least important subsets of land are.) If it wasn't, it would have zero value. Nonzero market value requires, and therefore proves, scarcity.
> Land is quite unique. It is the resource with the weakest argument that humans produce it.
I mean, not really. What about water or oxygen? What about carbon taxes insofar as they're related to the inherent value of the earth's climate? There are plenty of resources that don't require any human effort to produce, but that doesn't make them better suited to taxation. It just seems like an entirely arbitrary distinction to make.
The point here is to maintain a society and some things must come first, namely material things which paintings are not. Of course, art history shows us time and time again the vital importance of material sustenance in creating and preserving works of art. If you really care about art, you have to care about the material foundations that make rich and meaningful social livelihoods possible.
>"If you really care about art, you have to care about the material foundations that make rich and meaningful social livelihoods possible."
I care about all the tiers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and I think that many paintings are worth a lot more than most 10k acres. The paintings also have the benefits of being able to contribute to shared experiences all over the world, and fulfilling more challenging needs.
Obviously I'm assuming an equal monetary value of paintings vs land; my point is not about how many acres equal how many paintings but about the impact on other people that taking $1M of paintings vs $1M of land out of circulation has.
With respect to your second point, I think that taking each out of circulation has different effects. I would guess that most assets have a value of about what they're worth (i.e. the price mechanism works). I think Georgism is at least a valuable paradigm, and would be in favour of at least some pseudo-Georgist measures, such as only taxing land, to encourage higher-value uses rather than land+structures, and taxing all sorts of land at the same rate.
I'm not convinced; after all these collections are often already in public ownership. If there was something more beneficial to the public to be done with them, one would hope that would already be happening.