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And if you don't pay taxes in a Georgist system ... what happens?
In the current tax system they often take possession of the things they claim to be owed.
Taxation of a thing is ownership of that thing, including the right/ability to take possession of that thing if the taxed person doesn't pay up.
Ownership also implies the right to take possession of the thing regardless of whether the person pays up. If I own a home and rent it to you, then I can choose not to renew your lease and repossess the house, even if you've never missed a payment.
Sounds like eminent domain.
But I'm not dead set on whether the government owns everything and rents to people, or the people own things and the government just constantly steals from them.
I am not more strongly against a land tax then I am against income tax. I consider them both a bit abhorrent in their implications.
The government has to pay you for the property in order to exercise eminent domain.
It has to pay you at "fair market value" and not what you are willing to sell it at. So it is setting rules for itself on how it uses its own property, but its still their property.
Nonetheless -- if you own property, you don't have to pay its fair market value to take possession of it.
I get that you prefer a more libertarian oriented government (or so I'm inferring), but it feels like you're just trying to catastrophize non-libertarianism with your word choice. Income tax is what it is; insisting that "taxation is theft" or "the power to tax is the power to destroy" doesn't persuade anyone, and doesn't accurately carve reality at its joints. We don't live in a communist society, private property does exist, the state doesn't own everything, we aren't slaves or serfs, taxation is a meaningful burden but not analogous to ownership, there are constraints on the exercise of state power, we have a right of exit, etc.
Language is hard.
Lets imagine a separate scenario. A religious fanatic group believes that anyone killed by a special certified true believer goes to an eternal heaven. Anyone who dies from some cause other than a special certified true believer goes to an eternal hell.
When one of these religious fanatics kills someone they call it "sending them to the eternal heaven". Sounds kinda nice. Everyone not in the cult of course just calls it murder. If 99% of the people in this hypothetical world are part of the cult, are they correct to call it "sending them to the eternal heaven"? That isn't a rhetorical question, I'm not sure what the right answer is. However, If you are not in the cult, it seems pretty silly to use their term. And if you are a non-cult member talking to a cult member it might be easier to use the term "sending them to the eternal heaven", when arguing against it. But by doing so the non cult member has already surrendered a bunch of ground in the argument.
I'm not sure if you are aware, but these are two very different phrases. The first phrase is a libertarian calling card. The second phrase is a partial quoting of John Marshall's ruling in McCulloch v Maryland which is part of the foundational legal precedent that allows the federal government to exist. The case specifically prevents states from taxing a national bank established by the federal government.
Hard to carve reality at any joints when reality in this case is a nebulous blob of human concepts and preferences. You might as well accuse me of not objectively describing "justice".
I was thinking of where to start with this sentence, but realized its just a summary of the entire argument. So I'll summarize my argument in turn: The traditional and common concept of "ownership" is not compatible with taxation. Either taxation is a theft of a person's property, or the taxation is an exercise of ownership by the state.
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