[sojsurf]

Interesting idea. What are your thoughts on the following questions:

- Who decides who gets the valuable land (high rent value) and who gets the land no one wants to use?

- What happens when the population changes due to birth/death/immigration? Do you rebalance every 10 years? Can children inherit their parents' land?

- If we rebalance regularly, how do we protect people who built a business on land they had been renting but which is no longer available?

[immibis]

I think it's not a specific parcel of land, but rather, the total land tax gets divided by the number of people, and everyone gets that much of a refund. So if you own land that costs an average amount of tax, you're paying net zero. If you own land that costs more than an average amount of tax, you're a net payer. If you own land that costs a less than average amount of tax, you're a net recipient.

The other thing that usually goes with this proposal is that there would be no land costs other than tax. Land allocation would be like this: Everyone would bid how much they want to pay for the land; the winning bidder pays that much into the tax pool, and gets to use the land. The details of this idea wildly vary depending on who you ask - it's an extremely difficult problem to figure out what exact rules would work well to stop, e.g. Elon Musk outbidding some elderly lady's family farm just because he hates her (yet still balancing that with the need to stop her heirs from blocking development in that area forever). Maybe it necessitates human judgement in such cases. That's getting into the weeds though. You can see how that general kind of system would work, from a bird's eye view.