The public is the rightful owners of natural resources, and that value of which should be used as the sole source for public income. It is also the means to ensure that a parasitic class of rent-seekers is abolished with their expropriations redirected to productive investment. As Rousseau warned: "You are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to no one."
Confucius: "When the Great Way prevailed, natural resources were fully used for the benefit of all and not appropriated for selfish ends... This was the Age of the Great Commonwealth of peace and prosperity."
Goethe and Kant, said "The great ones of the world have taken this earth of ours to themselves; they live in the midst of splender and superfluity" and "All men are originally in a common collective possession of the soil of the whole earth and they have naturally each a will to use it". In the New World, Thomas Jefferson argued "The earth is given as a common stock for men to labor and to live on. ... Wherever in any country there are idle lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right", whilst Thomas Paine - echoing earlier words from the Dutch philosopher Spinoza - said: "[I]t is the value of the improvement, only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated lands, owes the community a ground-rent for the land which he holds"
Harriet Martineau, compared land rents to slavery, "The old practice of man holding man as property is nearly exploded among civilized nations; and the analogous barbarism of man holding the surface of the globe as property cannot long survive." The freethinker Robert Ingersoll, said "I am satisfied that all human beings are entitled to the essentials of life, that is to say, to water, to air, and to land",
Adam Smith correctly argued that the owner of natural resources extracts their rent from the worker and was the first to realise that a tax on economic rent would not effect productivity: "It would fall altogether upon the owner of the ground-rent, who acts always as a monopolist and exacts the greatest rent which can be got for the use of the ground", he said. Following this David Ricardo bluntly pointed out that the interest of such monopolistists "is always opposed to the interest of every other class in the community...". John Stuart Mill "No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the whole species. Its appropriation is wholly a question of general expediency. 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."
Modern economists agree. In a standard university textbook on economics, Paul Samuelson, a Nobel Prize winner in the field, along with William Nordhaus explain the issue: "The striking result is that a tax on rent will lead to no distortions or economic inefficiencies. Why not? Because a tax on pure economic rent does not change anyone's economic behavior. Demanders are unaffected because their price is unchanged. The behavior of suppliers is unaffected because the supply of land is fixed and cannot react. Hence, the economy operates after the tax exactly as it did before the tax--with no distortions or inefficiencies". Samuelson and Nordhaus are far from alone; another Nobel prize winner, William Vickey accurately states that "Economists are almost unanimous" on that issue, across the political spectrum with figures as diverse as Milton Friedman, Herber Simon, James Tobin, Franco Modigliani and James Buchanan being among other Nobel Prize winning economists who also concur.
All taxes come with an administrative cost (someone has to do that paperwork) and a deadweight loss through a reduction in trades - except economic rents.
A history comparison can be made with the "People's Budget" of the UK in 1909, which included a proposal for a national land tax. The Conservative-Unionists, who included a lot of large landowners, opposed this, arguing that welfare expenditures should be raised through tariffs on imports. Notably tariffs are very beneficial to large landowners, especially in agricultural produce. The lords of the UK profited very well indeed whilst the poor starved during the Great Potato Famine of Ireland and Scotland.