I actually love this idea, although I would just do a wealth tax. Anyone who owns wealth gets taxed a bit. If you only taxed land, then lots of people would just move all their assets into stocks instead of land.
Someone still has to be owning the land though, and paying taxes on it in proportion to its value. In most cases that’s going to be corporations. If I own stock in a corporation that owns land and the tax burden shifts from corporate income taxes to land taxes, on the whole this isn’t much different except for rewarding corporations that make efficient use of land and punishing ones that make inefficient use. Similarly, if I sell my land to a corporation, everyone who collectively owns the corporation is now paying what used to be my land taxes.
Seems like the price of land would drop and the price of stocks would rise such that the yield on improved land (after taxes and mutatis mutandis) would match that of stocks.
