@cshentrup taxing rents absolutely affects behavior. that's a good thing! the theory of a land value tax is that you don't have to worry about discouraging land production. but, for example, we do want to discourage the production of lawyers who file patent troll lawsuits. taxing the wages of that kind of activity — rent-seeking — certainly will affect the behavior!

@cshentrup that's a large part of why we want to do it! people get paid money for a lot of activities that are not socially useful, but that are a negative social contribution. we want to tax those flows, so that people do less of it. we want to tax the production of bads, which includes activities like exploiting pricing power rather than expanding production to increase profits.