Georgism? On my Hacker news? What a time to be alive.

Basically this means that all land is effectively rented from the government. It's an interesting proposal, but how would price discovery occur?

There are still sale prices, the difficulty is separating the land portion from the improvements portion. This is currently performed for many purposes, including insurance, which has the benefit of being tied to somebody's valuation, rather than a standard assessors estimate.

However, this idea originated from a time before we had zoning restrictions like we do today. Which also means that any change in zoning would result in a big change in land value too. One could also imagine transferring zoning allowances, much like air rights are sold in NYC, so that people that don't want to change their property can instead give their greater density allowance to person down the street that wants to change their duplex into a fourplex, or something. Such transfers would also be near to zero dollar activities.

But given our current difficulty with handing out any sort of zoning change to allow more people to live in high demand areas, I start to think that this idea is hopelessly poisonous to land politics of entrenched powers (land owners). Still, one can dream.

Sale prices are part of a feedback loop with taxes.