>It seems the most fair as the wealth increase created from ex. owning lots of land If you want to charge people for profiting from land, it seems a land tax w

>It seems the most fair as the wealth increase created from ex. owning lots of land If you want to charge people for profiting from land, it seems a land tax would be the best way to do it. It's essentially a property tax, except instead of taxing the land and the improvements, only the unimproved land value is taxed. This allows capturing some of the economic rents by society as a whole in a way that has very little distortion and is essentially avoidable only by moving. Moving would mean not taking advantage of any of the benefits or improvements of the area, so the only way to avoid it would be to give up the benefits. A wealth tax, by contrast, could be avoided by moving wealth to another country. Since a large amount of wealth is tied up in land, a land tax is a sort of wealth tax by proxy, but with virtuous effects of promoting additional development and investment and punishing things like land speculation. It's a progressive tax too.