Well by those terms, the more tax you owe on a property the more productive either it and/or you have to be to maintain it - as the taxes increase, so do the incentives for you to put the property to work (as a rental), so that it helps to cover the cost of its own existence. It's similar to the incentives around NIT in Europe - if you have to pay money to the bank for them to store your Euros, you have more of an incentive to find productive capital investments instead.