alt Hacker NewsRandom thought, would be it be good to extend land tax to use of all common public goods. E.g. radio frequencies, mining, water, CO2 pollution. Things you own, licensed or consume that take from the common good. Obviously this need constant tweaking E.g. as new tech makes different things valuable.
Replies
You're kind of describing two different ideas: pigouvian taxes, and taxing The Commons.
What both have in common is that economists from all different schools of thought widely agree that they're the least distortionary taxes.
This is Norway's approach with Hydropower and Petroleum: https://blog.landeconomics.org/p/book-review-the-natural-div...
The good news is that as different things become valuable their value changes, I guess? So if radio frequency stops being useful, the LVT put on it also drops pretty hard.
The bad news is now you have to assess the value of a lot more things in order to do this (the value of clean waterways in a certain state, the value of IP taken away from the common culture) that may not have a direct market value.
Yes, pricing negative externalities is a good idea. Unfortunately some are more or less expensive to price/enforce
Other replies supporting taxing externalities and scarce resources are correct, but it can be generalized as taxing undesirable behavior to disincentivize it.
Yes, it's been suggested that all scarce inputs to the economy should be taxed. And yes the idea of Georgism is to let market set the prices and tax based off of that.
It does become complicated when the scarce inputs are things like highly specialized labor. Georgism wouldn't tax that monopoly, though our current systems (progressive income taxes) do. Many people would want a system which penalizes businesses for buying up e.g. all the veterinarians in a city and charging monopoly prices.