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That’s a lot of assertions but one could also make the argument that vacant spaces have far lower land value because there aren’t large numbers of families living there. If this is true, it seems questionable that the people living there are benefiting only in a one-way manner.

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Yes, everyone contributes to society in some way, hence "outsized to their contributions." If you sit on a piece of land and wait 10 years in my city, you might have made $500,000 of tax-free land value gains, but without needing to contribute anything to achieve it. In fact, if you do nothing but sit on the land, you're a net negative on society because you deny access to that land from everyone else.

I just don’t see the “outsized to their contributions” part. The bureaucracy is built off the tax dollars of the people who first decided to settle there but you could probably reduce that tax burden and bureaucracy by a large percentage and the people living there, as long as they felt a good reason to do so, would continue to create a decent quality of lives for themselves. Either way, we’re basically just debating ideology at this point.

The easiest way to compare is to look at what a family of renters get vs a family of landowners. In a city with growing land values, the renters get nothing but the landowners get a lot, yet their contributions as "families contributing to society" would be equivalent.

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