What about cultural institutions and assets? If all land belongs to everyone (through rents), what’s to stop someone deciding that the land currently beneath the colosseum in Rome would be better used as the foundations of a supermarket? They outbid a heritage organization, demolish the building and start their supermarket? Is this a loss? Maybe not…
Currently we have the opposite problem. For example I went to a school in a random suburb in not particularly exciting buildings a couple of hundred years old. They were marked as cultural heritage and so it was forbidden to knock them down and rebuild even though the school desperately needed more space. So some random people can prevent an extremely successful school from expanding because they've decided they like the building.
Under this proposal they would have to pay to stop that happening, and you'd suddenly discover they value the cultural heritage of the building far less than they claimed.
1Yair Halberstadt
I would argue that if people across the world are not willing to pool enough money together to save the Colosseum, then for all their claims that culture is important to them, it clearly just really isn't. I'm reminded of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/21/the-economics-of-art-and-the-art-of-economics/
What about cultural institutions and assets? If all land belongs to everyone (through rents), what’s to stop someone deciding that the land currently beneath the colosseum in Rome would be better used as the foundations of a supermarket? They outbid a heritage organization, demolish the building and start their supermarket? Is this a loss? Maybe not…