&gt; The interesting thing about land value&#x2F;rents taxation is that it cannot be passed on to tenants.<p>In theory. In practice the problem is that it gives governments a vested interest in rents remaining high to maintain their tax base, which makes them avoid policies that would lower rents (and thus the government&#x27;s share thereof). But maintaining high rents is extremely regressive, regardless of whether the money goes to the government, because rents are paid like a poll tax.<p>&gt; There is the Henry George &quot;theorem&quot; which states that land rents are always equal to the cost of government.<p>Things like that are weird because they have the potential to be &quot;true&quot; since a more prosperous country can afford to spend more on both government and housing, but then what is supposed to follow from that?<p>&gt; Curiously, I don&#x27;t really know how this interacts with zoning. I suspect zoning would be completely different if there was no influence from land speculation.<p>Well, it would turn the government into the land speculator, so they would be the ones trying to keep land values high and generate artificial scarcity.