I have hesitated getting involved in this, but... One is that while valuing site values in central cities can be done with not too much difficulty, the outcome can be somewhat arbitrary. I have looked at data series on vacant land sales in urban areas, and while there are thick markets and stable values near the edge of cities, there can be enormous variation of values near the center where markets are thin, variations up to an order of magnitude for essentially similar lots at similar times. So, the fact that assessors or appraisers may not vary that much does not prove that they are accurately reflecting the market. Nevertheless I have always had sympathy for the land tax argument in urban areas. Clearly it does not provide the negative incentives that other taxes do. The main problem with the old George proposal to replace all other taxes with a land or site tax is that governments are now simply too large to be funded out of the income that goes just to land. Maybe that would have worked in the 19th century, but no more. Regarding this issue about the nature of property in land, the old institutionalists are right on this. It is a very complicated matter of legal traditions and customs, and there is much more of a spectrum from full-blown state ownership to pure private ownership, involving all the various aspects of what one can do with land. So, even in the case of the US that Deirdre admires with supposedly full-blown private ownership, the state still retains the right of eminent domain to take land for public uses, supposedly with appropriate compensation, of course. In the original 13 colonies, the states are the residual owners of "unowned" land, and there is such land here in Virginia, where I live, whereas the federal government is the residual owner in the rest of the country, over 80% in Nevada and Alaska. In Virginia, the US Forest Service has a deal with the state that the state will give such land for free to the Forest Service in the areas supposed to become national forests, if the feds bear the transactions costs of verifying that the land is indeed unowned, which is a non-trivial issue given the weird state of old deeds from the colonial period and the 400 year history of VA. I would also note that not only can site ownership be separated from structures ownership, but so can underground ownership, even to the legal system used. So, in St. Louis, MO, surface and structure rights follow the US/British system, with the squares and rectangles laid down by Jefferson for the Northwest Territories Ordinance, whereas the subsurface rights follow the French land tenure system, the French having founded St. Louis. That system, followed on the surface in parts of Wisconsin such as near Green Bay and Prairie du Chien, has long narrow strips of land that go to the nearest river, which was, of course, the main route of transportation in the colonial era. Barkley Rosser