Whose Land Do They Die For? The Cost-Benefit Asymmetry of National Defense and the Normative Case for Land Value Taxation (Moon, 2026)

Summary

"Whose Land Do They Die For? The Cost-Benefit Asymmetry of National Defense and the Normative Case for Land Value Taxation," by Haejun Moon, is a 2026 SSRN working paper making a normative argument for land value taxation from a channel distinct from the wiki's usual efficiency and Henry George Theorem-based cases: national defense specifically.

The Argument

The paper's full available abstract states: "National defense is a canonical public good. Yet there exists a structural asymmetry between the distribution of its costs (universal) and the distribution of its benefits (concentrated disproportionately among landowners). This paper analyzes that asymmetry along three dimensions." The core claim, as far as this thin abstract discloses it: defense spending is funded through general taxation borne by the whole population, but its principal benefit — protection of a nation's territory from invasion or coercion — accrues disproportionately to those who hold title to that territory's land, since land value depends on the security of the jurisdiction it sits in. On this reading, land value capture is not just an efficient revenue source but the normatively fitting one for defense spending specifically, since it charges the tax to those who benefit most from the specific public good it funds.

Relation to the Georgist Case

This is a genuinely distinct argument channel from the wiki's existing normative and efficiency cases for LVT — closer in spirit to geolibertarian arguments that public spending should be funded from the rents it makes possible, but applied to a public good (defense) the wiki's normative-case pages had not previously examined. It pairs naturally with Mason Gaffney's writing on corporate power and military spending and rent-seeking in global conflict, though those pieces approach the military/land relationship from a very different (corporate-power-critique) angle than this paper's clean cost-benefit-asymmetry framing.

Nuances and Limits

• Extremely thin sourcing — the weakest-verified item in this batch. Only a single, apparently-truncated abstract paragraph ("...analyzes that asymmetry along three dimensions") was recoverable despite an extensive independent search; the paper's "three dimensions" are never specified in what's available, and no working-paper PDF, author webpage, institutional affiliation, or any secondary discussion of this paper could be found anywhere online (C-claim). This page should be read as a pointer to a novel argument worth tracking, not as a developed summary of one.
• Purely normative/philosophical as far as verifiable, with no indication in the available abstract of empirical or quantitative content.
• Author identity and credentials are unverified. No trace of "Haejun Moon" as an academic or independent researcher could be confirmed.

Bears On

• Concept: Henry George Theorem — a normative variant of the theorem's public-goods-fund-from-rent logic, applied specifically to defense spending.
• Concept: Geolibertarianism — shares the underlying premise that public expenditures should be funded from the land rents they help sustain.
• Research: Gaffney: Corporate Power and Military Spending — a very different (corporate-power-critique) treatment of the military/land-rent relationship, useful contrast.

See Also

• Henry George Theorem
• Geolibertarianism
• Gaffney: Corporate Power and Military Spending
• Gaffney: Rent-Seeking and Global Conflict

Sources

1. Haejun Moon (2026), "Whose Land Do They Die For? The Cost-Benefit Asymmetry of National Defense and the Normative Case for Land Value Taxation," SSRN Working Paper, DOI 10.2139/ssrn.6367198, posted 20 April 2026. papers.ssrn.com — fetch blocked (403) to this session 2026-08-29; the sole recoverable content is a short, apparently-truncated abstract obtained via the Crossref API — used for the cost-universal/ benefit-concentrated-on-landowners framing quoted above (C-claim; a single paragraph, no further content, author, or institutional context independently verifiable despite extensive search).