Here's an online version of Progress and Poverty, written more than a century ago by a once famous man named Henry George, a contemporary of Samuel Clemens. Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Leo Tolstoy, and John Dewey supported his theories.

You should read this book:
If you work for a living (Ch. 9)
If you think an increasing global population is a bad thing (Ch. 6)
If you worry about a coming Depression (Ch. 13)
If you think the solution to our problems is more/less government programs (Ch 15.)
If you think the cause of poverty is laziness or lack of thrift (Ch. 15)
If you think that more education will end poverty (Ch. 15)
If you wonder about unionization, tariffs, cooperation, a progressive income tax, etc. (Ch.15)

If you have libertarian, green, republican, democratic, socialist, or communist tendencies, you should read this book.
If you believe that taxes on income and productivity are unjust, prone to manipulation, and hurt the economy, you're halfway there.
If you also think that economic progress should mean an improvement in conditions for all concerned, you're getting closer.

So, give it a read, and then debate:

Would shifting taxes off of productivity* and onto land** improve or hinder our economy?

* Wage, payroll, income, corporate, sales, estate, import, export, building, personal property, real estate improvement etc.
** Land value, exclusive rights granted by government (extraction, broadcast, long term patent, certain licenses, pollution)

edited to try and remove plural 's' from 'recommendation' in the subtitle.

We've disagreed on tax issues before, SWM, but I have to agree with you that George's views are worth considering. Land is indeed a unique commodity, in that (for practical purposes) it cannot be created like other forms of capital. Every other form of physical capital derives ultimately from land, creating a debt from the owner of that other capital to the owner of the land; since land also provides food and we all must eat, land is also necessary for the creation of non-physical (e.g. intellectual) capital. Ownership of land was the basis of the old aristocracy, and there's no compelling argument that those dynamics have changed. At the same time, land is the one commodity that the state is undeniably involved in protecting (though they call it territory) already. The idea that land cannot be owned but may only be leased, with the lease revenues going to the state and reducing (or outright eliminating) the need for taxes on income or sales, does have a certain appeal. Taxing what people do and create seems far more injurious both practically and morally than taxing what never required human effort to create.