For anyone wondering, there is a simple reason for this: Public investments can increase land values. Typically when governments fund public goods, the increase in land values goes to landowners instead of society, which locks public bodies out of accessing the land value increase they created while forcing them into harmful taxes on the people’s production.

This culminates in something known as the Henry George Theorem, which states that in specific conditions the aggregate increase in land’s rental value due to public investment can outpace aggregate spending put into that investment. This means that governments can fully fund their public expenditures off recapturing those land rents through something like a land value tax.

What this shows is that governments should be looking to the land and all the value increases caused by public investments in that finite natural resource as the way to fund public investments; instead of taxing what people make. Right now, places like New York City are trying something similar in land value capture as a way to fund new transit lines, and hopefully more will come.