How to Tax Tech Monopolies

The question of how to distribute the fruits of the economy’s production is central to economics. Many take a utilitarian approach: Let the private sector produce what it wants, and then tax the wealthy to help the poor. Utilitarians don’t spend much time worrying about who deserves what; the goal is simply to maximize human happiness. Marxists tend to take a more class-based view, believing that the fruits of production ought to belong to workers.

Then there’s Henry George. George was a 19th-century American economist who believed that land was the source of human inequality. As the population and the economy grow, he reasoned, land remains scarce, so rents go up. Landowners don’t actually produce anything that benefits the economy, but they capture much of the value created by workers and businesses that do use the land. Thus, land ownership is a vast engine of human poverty and concentration of undeserved wealth.