Not a Tax at All!

see also: Charles Root: Not a Single Tax!

Charles B. Fillebrown: A Catechism of Natural Taxation, from Principles of Natural Taxation (1917)

Q1. What is a tax?
A. A tax is a compulsory contribution of individual product or the value of such product toward the needs of government.

Q2. What is meant by the single tax?
A. The payment of all public expenses from economic rent, the normal revenue, thus eventually abolishing all taxes.

Q41. Why would the single tax be an improvement upon present systems of taxation?
A. Because: (1) The taking for public uses of that value which justly belongs to the public is not a tax; (2) it would relieve all workers and capitalists of those taxes by which they are now unjustly burdened, and (3) it would make unprofitable the holding of land idle.

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Fred E. Foldvary — The Ultimate Tax Reform: Public Revenue from Land Rent

Frank Chodorov, a fervent individualist and founding editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education and still a leading libertarian journal of ideas, became in 1937 director of the Henry George School of Social Science in New York City, serving until 1942. Like most followers of Henry George, Chodorov regarded a charge on land value as not a true tax, which arbitrarily extracts wealth, but a “payment for the use of a location, determined by the higgling and haggling of the market, and it makes no difference to the land user whether he pays rent to the city fathers or to a private owner.”26 Explaining the value of a location derives to a great extent from community services, rather than the efforts of the landowner as such, Chodorov noted “it would seem logical that this value — which we call land rent — should go to defray the expenses of these common services." ... read the whole document

Frank Stilwell and Kirrily Jordan: The Political Economy of Land: Putting Henry George in His Place

Indeed, one could say that the term ‘tax’ is a misnomer because what is really involved is value created by the community being retained by the community rather than being appropriated by private landholders. For example, under current arrangements landowners receive ‘windfall’ gains when the market value of their land rises as a result of publicly provided infrastructure being built nearby, or when local government zoning decisions reclassify their land as appropriate for further development. In this way, individual landowners stand to reap huge benefits at the expense of community-generated processes. Such arrangements create an odd incentive: allowing landholders to appropriate the unearned wealth generated by rising land values, thereby rewarding this unproductive activity, while taxing productive endeavour. The Georgist land tax ‘remedy’, by contrast, would eliminate such perverse incentives and thereby more effectively align private and public interests in the use of society’s resources. ... read the whole article