Land isn't scarce, but economically viable and productive land is scarce. Economic viability is a moving target, but for the most part pretty steady.

The post I was responding to makes the distinction between things we can't create more of (land) and things we can (paintings). I used scarcity as an (erroneous) proxy for this distinction, even though obviously there are scarce things that we can create more of.

> Land is quite unique. It is the resource with the weakest argument that humans produce it.

I mean, not really. What about water or oxygen? What about carbon taxes insofar as they're related to the inherent value of the earth's climate? There are plenty of resources that don't require any human effort to produce, but that doesn't make them better suited to taxation. It just seems like an entirely arbitrary distinction to make.

I agree 100%. Originally land taxes were conceived as a correction for a more subtle bit of economic inequality: productivity of fields.

In today's world, where access to a city can dramatically change one's earning potential far far more, they are even more relevant.

The issue is both about the scarcity of access to a resource, such as the economy of a city, but also about where that resource comes from. With urban land, that resource is not the product of the individual land owner, but rather all the other land owners that made the city so prosperous and with so much opportunity.

For what it's worth, it's not uncommon for Georgists to also favor extraction taxes for natural resources like gold.

> Land isn't even scarce

Yes, it is (or, at least important subsets of land are.) If it wasn't, it would have zero value. Nonzero market value requires, and therefore proves, scarcity.