The Lockean premise of equality among human beings implies that no individual can own another individual, and that therefore each individual owns his or her own self. This principle of self-ownership extends to labor and the products of labor, including physical capital, so that the government should only tax wages and returns to capital under strict conditions, including democratic majority support across income classes. But self-ownership does not extend to land, since land is not produced by labor. The Lockean premise of equality then implies that human beings are in an equal moral position with respect to the benefits of land, the common heritage of humanity.

For one person rightfully to claim more than others of these benefits would put him or her in a superior, unequal, and therefore unethical position. To establish equal benefits from land, it is sufficient to establish equal ownership of its natural rent, which can be achieved by requiring that those who have exclusive access to valuable land pay for that privilege into a common fund through land taxation This is then not a redistribution of earned incomes from the private owners of factors, but instead a return of unearned incomes from the private owners of a property right to its proper owners, the community.

In a free market capitalist system, everybody has to pay the same for the same services; we can't have a system where the government decides that favored groups get certain things for free and that others have to pay through the nose; or even worse; favored groups are given certain rights for free which they can sell on to unfavored groups for inflated prices and to pocket the difference.

In a functioning land/housing market, the tax rate of property, preferably on just land, would be at the market rental rate for the ground rent of the property. By holding taxes artificially low, you are essentially allowing the landed to have a huge discount on a place to live and produce, while renters are forced to pay full market price. That is not a functioning free market, that is a gamed market in favor of a select few. That artificially low rent for owners allows for land speculation to happen which leads to market failure which is the root of the boom and bust business cycle (which intuitively makes perfect sense considering all wealth and capital is derived from labor upon the land).

"It is in vain in a Country whose great Fund is Land, to hope to lay the publick charge of the Government on any thing else; there at last it will terminate. The Merchant (do what you can) will not bear it, the Labourer cannot, and therefore the Landholder must: And whether he were best do it, by laying it directly, where it will at last settle, or by letting it come to him by the sinking of his Rents, which when they are once fallen every one knows are not easily raised again, let him consider." - John Locke

"Thus the form of assessment which is the most simple, the most regular, the most profitable to the state, and the least burdensome to the tax-payers, is that which is made proportionate to and laid directly on the source of continually regenerated wealth (land)." - Francois Quesnay

"Ground-rents, and the ordinary rent of land, are, therefore, perhaps, the species of revenue which can best bear to have a peculiar tax imposed upon them…. The annual produce of the land and labour of the society, the real wealth and revenue of the great body of the people, might be the same after such a tax as before. . . . [A tax of this kind would be] much more proper to be established as a perpetual and unalterable regulation, or as what is called a fundamental law of the commonwealth, than any tax which was always to be levied according to a certain valuation." - Adam Smith

"A tax on rent falls wholly on the landlord. There are no means by which he can shift the burden upon anyone else. It does not affect the value or price of agricultural produce, for this is determined by the cost of production in the most unfavourable circumstances, and in those circumstances, as we have so often demonstrated, no rent is paid. A tax on rent, therefore, has no effect other than its obvious one. It merely takes so much from the landlord and transfers it to the State." - John Stuart Mill

" Landlords grow rich in their sleep without working, risking or economizing. The increase in the value of land, arising as it does from the efforts of an entire community, should belong to the community and not to the individual who might hold title." ~John Stuart Mill

"Another means of silently lessening the inequality of [landed] property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions or property in geometrical progression as they rise." - Thomas Jefferson

"Our legislators are all landholders, and they are not yet persuaded that all taxes are finally paid by the land… therefore, we have been forced into the mode of indirect taxes. All the property that is necessary to a man for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species, is his natural right which none may justly deprive him of; but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public." - Benjamin Franklin

"If all men were so far tenants to the public that the superfluities of grain and expense (meaning "surpluses") were applied to the exigencies thereto (meaning "community needs"), it would put an end to taxes, leave not a beggar, and make the greatest bank for national trade in Europe." - William Penn

"The labor of the tiller of the soil gives the first impulse. That which his work makes the land produce beyond his personal needs is the sole fund for the wages which all the other members of society receive in exchange for their work." - Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques

"The earth, therefore, and all things therein, are the general property of all mankind from the immediate gift of the Creator. ...There is no foundation in nature or in natural law why a set of words upon parchment should convey the dominion of land." - William Blackstone

"The least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of the land, the Henry George argument of many years ago." - Milton Friedman

"Our ideal society finds it essential to put a rent on land as a way of maximizing the total consumption available to the society. ...Pure land rent is in the nature of a 'surplus' which can be taxed heavily without distorting production incentives or efficiency. A land value tax can be called 'the useful tax on measured land surplus'." ~Paul Samuelson

"In terms of buying land, you would be entitled to develop it, yes, but to keep the ground rents, no. Buying shares of a monopoly doesn't justify monopoly, does it? You could buy a slave, but that wouldn't justify slavery. You could buy stolen goods, but all you bought was a bum ethical title. Only things made by labor are ethically own able, and last I checked, none of us made the land." ~Steven B Cord

"Men did not make the earth.... It is the value of the improvement only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property.... Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds." - Thomas Paine