I don't understand why you say this. Under your system, people would be free to go to Mars and use its resources, but they would have to compensate other Martians to the extent that their use of the resources deprives those other Martians, and this compensation would be specifically in the form of LVT paid to a government which uses the tax money to provide public services, and the tax would be negligible (or maybe even zero) for land which there's no competition to use. My system does exactly the same thing! The major difference is that I offer secure tenure only for 50 years, while you offer secure tenure for eternity.
And what are the privileges which the landowners enjoy in my system? Remember, all the land is jointly owned by all of the citizens (which are all the people who have signed the founding contract, which is effectively the Constitution of the Government of Mars), administration of the land is done exclusively by the government, and everybody is free to be a citizen (and thus a joint owner of all the land) in exchange for simply acknowledging the legitimacy of the government and its authority over the land. For all practical purposes, the land is only "owned" in my system in the same sense in which it's "owned" by the government in your system. A "privileged" class which consists of everybody isn't a problem, and the only people who aren't in that class are the ones who voluntarily exclude themselves by denying the legitimacy of the government.
If by "landowners" you mean the planetary landlord, remember that everybody, except those who deny the legitimacy of the government, is a member of the class which constitutes that landlord. All of the land rent is spent on government services, the same as in your system, with any surplus rent distributed as a citizen's dividend, which you've said is a reasonable thing to do with the surplus. If by "landowners" you mean people who have rented parcels of land for 50-year terms from the planetary landlord and then subleased it, the same pocketing of some of the rent would occur in your system too; the only difference is that you prefer to officially revalue the land somewhat more frequently than every 50 years.
You already agree that justice is satisfactorily served by compensating people for their infringed rights, such as providing government services to people in exchange for excluding them from use of certain parcels of land. In my system, people who improve land are compensated for the loss of private ownership of those improvements by the reduced pre-improvement rental value of the land, and they themselves decide what the just compensation is, by bidding less for the land than they would if their future improvements would remain perpetually their own. How is that unfair?
If that still doesn't satisfy you, then think of it another way: during the auction, people aren't just bidding money; they're bidding money _plus improvements_. Money is paid to the government every year, and improvements are paid to the government every 50 years.
My system has another benefit: by auctioning rental privilege and offering secure tenure only for 50 years, my system more effectively accomplishes the geoist goal of preventing perpetual concentration of control over land than does the traditional geoist mechanism of eternal security. After all, under the traditional geoist system, if the government is taxing a landlord no more than what he can recover by renting his land out to the highest bidder, then he can still acquire and keep an arbitrarily large amount of land without losing money on the enterprise, so if many other people are foolish enough to sell to him, then he and his descendants can hold the land forever, and discriminate against particular members of the landless class at their whim, or discriminate against particular uses of the land, by rejecting their high bids to rent parcels of land, and pay only a relatively minor monetary price (the difference between the high and next-highest bids) for the privilege to sporadically discriminate like this. In contrast, under my system, such a landowning dynasty would be economically unfeasible, because the dynasty would have to defend each parcel of land in an auction every 50 years, which makes it impossible to break even by renting it for the purpose of subleasing it, because the high bidder by definition pays more than anybody else was willing to pay; if nobody else was willing to pay that much to rent directly from the planetary landlord, then nobody will pay that much to sublease the land either.
Ironically, eternal security of tenure in the last vestige of the concept of land ownership, and the traditional geoist system fails to abolish it.
What do you say would be the right way to establish a legitimate government for the Martian colony?
Do you say this just because my system officially revalues each parcel of land only once every 50 years (which requires bidders to predict value that far in advance), whereas your system revalues it more frequently, or is there some other reason?
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