Doug MacKenzie,

Clearly reasonable people can debate what the size of government should be.
I also agree that there are certain countries, with big oil producers being 
the
obvious examples, that might be able to fund themselves solely from such a
tax, even with pretty large governments, although most of those are not 
bothering
with a site tax and just more directly taxing the oil revenue stream, or in 
many cases,
the producers are nationalized entities, so the taking is even simpler.

For countries that do not have such obviously high rent income or a 
willingness
to downsize their governments, the use of a site tax is clearly more 
feasible at
lower levels of government, especially local, and especially if it is to be 
the single
source of revenue.  In that regard another aspect of this practicality issue 
is that
it is much easier for local units of government to do the assessing needed 
to levy
such taxes than higher units, just as they do for the property tax, which is 
much
less used by higher levels of government.  The idea of the US federal 
government
attempting to track property or site value assessments is pretty horrifying, 
although
I recognize that Doug at least considers much of what goes on right now to 
be
pretty horrifying in terms of the level of government spending and taxing, 
:-).

Barkley Rosser