But he starts from a different angle: he's interested in economic efficiency. So he wants a system that moves economic goods into the hands of people who value it most (and compensate the previous owner fairly at market prices).

He proposes a system where people declare the value of their various possessions with two incentives for accuracy:

- You have to sell to any comer at the declared price. Thus guarding against overvaluation. - You have to pay a small percentage of the declared annual price as an annual fee, thus guarding against undervaluation.

That concern about economically efficient allocation is mostly interesting for monopoly goods and rights, because anything else we can just produce more off.

In Georgism it's customary to name these after their most typical representative Land (sometimes with the capital L to emphasis the generalisation). It's not much of a stretch to include eg things like licences for magnetic spectrum.

I'd be wary about mixing things like insurance against theft in here. (It might be possible to give a unified system, but I am not sure it is. Look at http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/legal_sy... for some source of interesting ideas about legal systems.) My wariness comes mostly from the fact that insurance that pays the declared value encourages people to overdeclare. Better let the market sort that out. (However paying the taxes for a specific declared value for years on end is a pretty good argument to convincing any court or insurance arbiter that you really valued something at that price.)

In the system I sketched above, Hanson described some scenarios were some entrepreneurs might be on the lookout for undervalued properties, buy them, and then just try to resell them to the original owner (or someone else).

As a special case, that scheme is especially lucrative if you are looking to buy a eg a house in a specific area anyway and don't care too much about which one; then the risk of not being able to sell the property you just bought on is not a problem: you just keep it.

I'd be more wary of using such a system of wealth taxation for eg cash. If you have a working central bank with an inflation or nominal GDP target, an individual holding cash even under their mattress is essentially free for society: the central bank just prints more money to make up for the portion you are holding out of circulation. And once you bring it back into circulation, they just print less money for a while. So for society it's great if people are holding cash: they did something for the rest of society to get their hands on the cash, but didn't get anything in return (yet). Very nice of them.

(Even better would be a free banking system, where essentially the same nominal gdp stabilization happens automatically because of market forces. George Selgin has some good stuff on that, see eg https://www.alt-m.org/2017/09/14/did-free-banking-stabilize-... or https://mises.org/library/less-zero-case-falling-price-level... )

The 'you have to sell at the declared value' requirement is somewhat similar to your idea: if you don't declare eg your house, it means you implicitly declare it to be worth 0. Someone stealing something worth 0 from you, will get a slap on the wrist at most in any sane system---or they can even just force-buy it at that price from you!

The other thing to keep in mind is something called 'tax incidence'. It's the study of who actually has to bear the burden of a tax. That's often different from who has to fork over the money. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence . The other thing is deadweight losses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss).

But yeah, I like the basic idea of using a monopoly rent tax to fund a basic income. https://medium.com/basic-income/why-land-value-tax-and-unive... has a similar idea, and some worked numbers. (The author has at least one article for the UK and one for the US.)