> 1. It's owned by governments at some level. I think we can all agree this would largely be a disaster at any sort of scale; Henry George enters the chat: ht

> 1. It's owned by governments at some level. I think we can all agree this would largely be a disaster at any sort of scale; Henry George enters the chat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism There's a reasonable philosophical case that land ownership is a very odd concept, probably wrong at some fundamental level -- people may feel a sense of possessiveness over a place, but most territory isn't a fruit of anyone's labors and attempts to base claims on "improvements" run afoul of the problem that (a) what constitutes and improvement is fairly subjective and (b) really not a matter of the underlying territory claim anyway. And in some sense, having land as property at all is married to the idea of a social order which can assign its disposition, which is close enough to the idea of property itself that it starts to become clear that all property is at some level also government property. Now, whether it's practical to treat it that way is a different question, but a system where people own and trade in leases that they pay to the state as a tax is also... pretty similar to existing property tax + private leases, it's just that a lot of the private leases would essentially become a public revenue source. And it gets especially interesting if you try to envision an economic system where that's the primary tax. Personally, I think it could work at least as well as the current system, but the transition might be politically intractable, and it's not a hill I care to die on, so...