“I own this property and pay $1,000 in taxes to the government” is a very different situation from “The government leases me this property for $1,000″.
“Property” is a large bundle of rights that does not boil down to cash flows.
You end up in the same place in this hypothetical. OrphanWilde postulated a situation where the same situation could be described as taxing people on property they own or the government leasing property. If these are in fact two different framings of the same situation, it follows that in this hypothetical, the government has an unusual kind of lease that does grant the kind of rights you are referring to, even though a normal lease would not do so.
Of course I may be steelmanning too much and he may have just not noticed that his hypothetical requires a very atypical kind of lease.
In practice, you don’t end up in the same place.
“I own this property and pay $1,000 in taxes to the government” is a very different situation from “The government leases me this property for $1,000″.
“Property” is a large bundle of rights that does not boil down to cash flows.
You end up in the same place in this hypothetical. OrphanWilde postulated a situation where the same situation could be described as taxing people on property they own or the government leasing property. If these are in fact two different framings of the same situation, it follows that in this hypothetical, the government has an unusual kind of lease that does grant the kind of rights you are referring to, even though a normal lease would not do so.
Of course I may be steelmanning too much and he may have just not noticed that his hypothetical requires a very atypical kind of lease.
Mexican land trusts are a good example of a “lease” arrangement that behaves identically to ownership as we typically regard it.
I think that would require considerable violence to the words “own” and “lease”.