If I inherit some land, you want to argue I don't deserve that, as it was at some point arbitrarily bestowed etc etc. Okay cool, agreed for sake of argument.

But by the same logic, what characteristics, if any, of a man makes him able to earn higher wages than someone else, if not also things he arbitrarily inherited external to himself from the world?

• Intelligence: you may think it's genetic or you may think it's how you're raised and schooled or fed or incubated in the womb, but no matter which of those or which blend of those you maintain, they are ALL external to you and arbitrarily inherited any way you slice it.

• Strong work ethic: some combination of genes, parenting, teachers, etc again.

• Marketable skills: If you're an electrician, did you invent electricity and switches and generators yourself from scratch in a cave raised by wolves? No, 100% of all those skills were obtained from your environment, combined with your ability to soak them up with your also inherited intelligence and work ethic

• School system quality: For almost everyone, a matter of where they were born and raised

• Connections that helped you get jobs: If they were family connections you were generally born into them. If they're your own, how'd you get them? By being raised well to have good social skills, by having good social role models, good teachers, maybe a dash of some DNA again in there (big ole empathy lobe or whatever), and so on.

• Sometimes blind luck applying for the right place at the right time: needs no explanation

And so on and so forth.

How is any of that arbitrarily obtained heritage any more or less reasonable to tax at all than the also arbitrarily obtained heritage of land in the world?

This George fellow seems to have more or less just randomly picked one feature of the world, and fixated entirely on it despite it being functionally not really any different than any other kind of asset in the regards he says are important.

Upshot: when you (rightfully) expand the concept gradually over time to include "anything else regarding externalities" as a "pigovian taxable thing", that will eventually lead you to end up including labor since labor quality is also an externality, making income tax also a pigovian tax.

Generally, for anything at all in your life, the only way you could NOT trace it back to externalities eventually (and thus NOT be "pigovian taxable") is if you have some sort of magic soul that injects personality into your body from some sort of private pocket dimension where something unique to you was forged fresh out of the void, which is something science has as yet not discovered.