It’s interesting when you think about it, the ideas we have about property, where they come from and how they are backed up in society.
If you go way back to the dawn of mankind, you’ll find that the only things you could own are the things you can effectively protect with your own hands. This puts quite an abrupt limit on how much stuff you could ever possibly own without undue risk.
As societies developed we decided that the community as a whole should protect each others property via law. If it’s legally someone’s property, then everyone else should respect that. Today we have the same basic law that says your property should be yours to do with as you wish without interference; but we have it applying without limit and balance.
Instead of the costs of asset retention increasing exponentially with the acquisition, we have the earning power of assets increasing exponentially and the costs burdened by society as a whole. Even when hoarded assets would damage societies interests and the economy as a whole.
So what could possibly make the mathematics work? Well I’m very big on liberty, I don’t believe society has the right to steal property in a sort of robin hood style arrangement. All you get there is resentful rich and an unscalable taxing problem.
Whatever we do, it must be some changes with the mechanics of how capitalism works. It’s the machinery that really needs the tweaking. If it were me in charge and I felt I could get away with tyranny: I’d tax asset ownership of housing over a single property in a proportional value of the houses by the number of properties, but not it’s earnings over that time (rents and so on).
I’d try and redress the balance of resource acquisition by placing all natural resources into the public commons, people who wish to take from the land or pollute the air would be required to compensate the public, scaling it with the amount of resources left in their natural place. All resources would be counted too, if you wanted to dig open a hill side, then the beauty and environment of the spot would add to it’s value that you wish to destroy.
And finally I’d try and create a system of market share taxes which would effectivly make monoplies uneconomic. If you have more than 10% of any given market over state or wider area, then you’d be liable to pay a scaling tax to the profit of that venture in that market place. God help you if you own 90%, that kind of monster should never happen again in such a system.
Obviously these are just intellectual exercises. I don’t expect very many people to agree with them, especially considering how much they differ from the status-quo.