I've considered that assumption before, but there are some problems with it. For example: what is the "government"? In every country the government has been recreated from scratch multiple times, or rather one group has stolen control over the "government" from another multiple times, so what is the legal basis for the ownership of the current group now? At least the old group who got the government stolen from them should be able to claim their right to the entire thing (in the US this could be the English royal family). But this raises another question: what is the legal framework that establishes the ownership of everything by the government? If you're talking about ownership that has to be based on some law: natural law, common law, or some higher authority, right? Otherwise it's something else, it's some absolute control by force, maybe, but that's not property or proper ownership. Another issue with this "taxes are rent" stuff is that you're basically just coming up with an excuse for the government that it doesn't want to do itself. No government claims to own everything and rent it to citizens. Something else is going on, but whatever is going on the government doesn't want to say clearly (probably because not even the people who control the government at each time know), instead the government continues to deceive and insist on spreading falsehoods such as claiming that people own their property and that taxes are a collective agreement made so everybody is made better. Finally, one nitpicky issue, not very relevant, but your analogy is not that great because the government doesn't only charge taxes on land, it charges all sorts of arbitrary taxes based on arbitrary criteria, so it's not "just rent". And it not only charges taxes, it imposes all sorts of other arbitrary things on everybody. So at least the analogy is very shallow, but also this highlights the fact that there is no greater legal framework, as there should be, governing this rent relationship between tenant and landlord, or citizen and state.