I have been parking in my neighbor Mara's driveway since June. Mine is empty, but hers is eighteen paces closer to my front door and doesn't sit under the sycamore that drips sap onto my windshield. Mara says the driveway is hers. I agree that the concrete is hers; she paid to resurface it last year. The location of the concrete is another matter, and Henry George was unusually clear about that distinction.
The value of a site is not created by the person holding the deed. Our street became desirable because the city repaired the bridge, a bus route started running every fifteen minutes, and other people planted trees, opened businesses, and agreed not to let their houses fall down. Mara did not manufacture those advantages. What she owns privately is the improvement; what she is trying to exclude me from is the socially produced location rent. I am not proposing to drive onto her patio. I have kept all four tires on the portion attributable to the community.
A land-value tax would collect the unimproved site's economic rent while leaving her free to profit from improvements. We do not have a full land-value tax, which is why I have been conducting a small, decentralized approximation. The city can tax a vacant lot without reducing the supply of land; similarly, my parking there does not cause the driveway to cease existing. On most weekdays Mara leaves at 7:15 and does not return until after six. During those hours an exclusion rule converts a useful parking surface into idle inventory. The deadweight loss is visible from my kitchen window.
Mara asked why I could not use my own driveway. I can, but this is an argument about marginal allocation, not absolute capacity. Putting my car under the sycamore imposes a real cost: last month I spent eleven minutes with rubbing alcohol removing sap from the driver's-side glass. Her driveway has no tree. Given two parking spaces and one car present for most of the day, the efficient assignment is obvious. She seems to think the fact that she paid for a space gives her a claim to leave it empty, which is exactly the kind of speculative withholding Georgists have criticized for a century and a half.
There are externalities, and I have priced them. My tires add perhaps nine cents of wear per weekday to the concrete she purchased, and I offered to settle quarterly at that rate. I initially omitted the inconvenience of moving my car before she gets home, because she had never specified an arrival time and an unspecified cost is difficult to put in a model. She has since specified it repeatedly. On Tuesday I was in the shower at 5:52 when she pulled in with groceries, so she parked on the street for twenty-three minutes. I have entered twenty-three minutes as the upper bound; she says the groceries were melting, but the ice cream was still cold when I helped her carry it in.
Some people distinguish taxing land rent from granting the public a right to occupy someone's driveway. I understand the legal distinction. The moral distinction is less convincing: if an entitlement rests on an unearned location premium, requiring a payment to a city treasury does not magically make every exercise of exclusion just. Mara could establish a credible need for the spot during my parking window, and I would update. So far the evidence she has offered is that it is hers, which is the proposition under examination, and that I am an asshole, which is not a theory of land tenure.
My wife thinks this is about avoiding sap, and she has asked me to stop bringing George into it. I have pointed out that a material incentive to discover an injustice does not make the injustice less real. Plenty of people came to Georgism because they disliked paying rent. Nobody asks them to stand under a tree until their motives are pure. My own contribution has been to identify a highly localized case of inefficient enclosure, offer compensation for the capital improvement, and remain willing to move the car when the social product of the space is demonstrably higher elsewhere.
Mara installed a folding bollard yesterday. It was made by a company three towns over, transported on a road paid for by everyone here, and anchored in a driveway whose location owes its value to the rest of us. I parked under the sycamore while she fitted it. When she finished, she asked if I finally understood what private property meant, and I asked her who paid for the road the installer used. She has not answered, but there is sap on my windshield again.