Comment by smallmancontrov

If you exclude others from a rectangle of land, you are imposing that exclusion on others and the others are due consideration. The rest of the property stack is good -- improvements require investment, investment requires returns, so binding the returns to the investment is important and creates incentives for good stewardship and skin-in-the-game decision making etc -- it's "just" the foundation that is problematic.

Georgists want to tackle this with a Land Value Tax, I tend to think it would be difficult to make this robust against highly motivated attack and the better approach is long-term leases with similar duration to building depreciation schedules. In either case, the idea is that capital appreciation of the dirt (which is really capital appreciation of the right to exclude others from the dirt) goes to public coffers, improvement value goes to the people who made the improvements. That's fair.

Of course, there's also the question of how to get there from here, and one way to do it without guillotines would be to tie the extraordinary tax treatment of property to conversion into a 99 year lease (and then, after 99 years, new issuance could target the ~30 year range). "Sure, you can have your 1031 capital gains tax exemption and pay no tax on the money you obtained by holding on to the right to exclude others from an increasingly popular rectangle of land, but only if you sign up to eventually be part of the solution rather than part of the problem."