A more common example is the preemption of space on streets and highways by vehicles. Many modern Georgists have a blind spot here.

• They recognize the wisdom of parking meters, and see them as an example of applied Georgism.
• They have more trouble seeing that moving vehicles also occupy scarce, valuable public space, and should pay for it. The Georgist tradition is to see things that move as productive, and to avoid hindering them. It is a good reflex, a needed antidote to the more general bias of our tax systems and other institutions to “shoot anything that moves.”

The problems are formidable of designing optimal taxes on and controls over moving vehicles; and even moreso when we see them in holistic terms, as part of recasting our whole approach to mass transportation, and integrating it with massive reforms of land settlement patterns. Those are, however, the modern problems we should address. In doing so, we can do no better than think of ourselves as applying George’s principle that land – space on the surface of the earth – is common property.

Offroad vehicles are another obvious example. Part of our great secular superstition about property is the notion that a piece of capital equipment is as sacred as, or more sacred than persons themselves: that the vehicle endows its owner with more rights to public space than the simple possession of two legs. This may hark back to centuries of deference to mounted warriors, but is also encouraged today by merchants who see motorists as bearing more cash than pedestrians. Above all, those who foster this attitude are the makers and sellers of vehicles, fuels, and paving materials.