The current issue of the Saint Paul Legal Ledger (article not online) offers a short profile of a state representative, who asks an interesting question:

Chris DeLaForest (49A) has been thinking a lot lately about taxes and asks a disarmingly simple question: Why does the state tax property?

He paints a hypothetical scenario about a blue collar couple living on 20 acres they bought two decades ago .... The property is worth at least $2 million, making the taxes unaffordable to a family of modest means.

'I wonder if Minnesota just shouldn't stop taxing property,' he says. 'Property taxation is absolutely divorced from the notion that a person should pay taxes in some relationship to their wealth. Seeing property as a proxy for wealth comes from an agrarian society that doesn't exist anymore.