When I was younger, and a more disagreeable libertarian, I was staunchly against almost all taxes. And not just all taxes in general. Each type of tax was a specific affront to human dignity in its own egregious way.

• Sales taxes represented government meddling in private contracts.
• Income taxes represented government stealing people’s time.
• Property tax represented that living on land was a privilege provided by the state landlord. Private property was a myth.

I won’t win the fight over whether the state governments should be spending money. But, given that we have to pay for services, I can definitely opine on the desirable and undesirable traits of one tax or another. Economists tend to like sales taxes because they encourage saving, investment, capital formation, and greater output. Maybe that’s a good idea. But it’s not clear to me that we should incentivize consumption tomorrow at the cost of consumption today.  There is no singular right answer to that tradeoff.

I would love to have a per-adult lump sum tax in which everyone pays the same dollar figure no matter what. I would also love to receive a million dollars – and that ain’t going to happen either. In lieu of a lump sum tax on people, I think that the next best thing is a lump sum tax on land. Each acre in a county can pay the same tax bill. On the margin, firms would economize on land and tend toward density. That would bring lots of agglomeration and economies of scale. Jeremy wrote recently about land taxes, which have a lot of proponents. I share the concerns about estimating land value and I think that it’s a non-trivial challenge.

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