Property taxes. Property rights are created by the state and a resource tax forces people to make the underlying assets work.
I could almost agree that a property tax on land makes sense, considering government protection is supposed to extend across a domain, except that the usual penalty for not paying (the loss of your land) makes it unconscionable for me.
I disagree that the state creates property rights. The way you've worked that out, you're effectively saying only the state can really own anything, and people have no moral basis for disagreeing with any thing a state wants to do with it's property.
The fact that corporations are *literally* state-created entities is why I have little problem with them being taxed.
In the common law system, all land rights are derived from the state and in the event that the owner dies intestate, the state takes it back. Things like a freehold ownership of a farm or a 999 year leasehold interest in a building or an easement over a riverway are literally state-created entities and we should have any problem with them being taxed.
Yet common law as it currently exists isn't some manifest destiny of societal arrangements.
As I see it, an objective look between taxing corporations as active, functional entities and taxing, well, the ownership of personal land makes for a clear choice as to which should be preferred.
*Why* would you opt to tax land over corporations? Do you feel corporations being taxed creates problems that taxing personal land doesn't? Or do you have issues with some people paying no direct taxes (or with some other philosophical/ideological aspect of it?)
For the sake of simplicity, lets assume I can only choose one form of taxation.
I personally have an aversion to hoarders of land and resources. A resource tax that forces people to either use an asset, say land in a city centre, or to sell it to someone who will use it, seems like a good thing to me.
Corporation tax is a form of indirect tax on consumers. If there is no resource tax, it may be that the economy is under-performing due to idle assets. Under these circumstances, taxing consumers, directly or indirectly, is going to make the problem worse.
Who's to say what "use" is?
Freedom and prosperity are directly correlated with the personal right to own things.
Where you cannot own things, or where the state can freely take away your property - you don't have prosperity.
A resource tax forces a "use" that generates income. The resource owner is free to do what he wants and if he is rich enough to leave the resource idle, he can do that.
So you'd be against Nature conservancy groups in principle?
