I've brought this up a few times in other threads in response to tax systems I think are more painful than the taxes we have now.

I think that the best way to tax, the most ethical at least, is on the basis of land ownership and on the consumption of scarce, inelastic goods (energy, raw materials) and on pollution of the natural world.
The justification is mostly in that land and natural resources all must have been ultimately stolen. And they create unfair advantages that stick around for generation after generation. The greatest wealth disparity in the country involves the ownership of land.

A land value tax would help to address the unfair advantages of land "ownership" and also encourage people to build on less land. Since property tax as we know it would be eliminated in its favor, the overall expensiveness of the house would have no effect on tax. Only the amount of land used and the market value of that land used.

Other justifiable taxes are those that encourage conservation and efficiency... taxes on pollution, energy consumption, and the use of scarce natural resources. Since all of these things deplete from nature, they are unfair advantages of "ownership" of nature... The status quo encourages using these things as cheaply as possible rather than as efficiently as possible and seems to hold that nature belongs more to some people than to others.

The crucial component is the admission to the fruits of nature being different from the fruits of labor. Concerning the fruits of labor, the products people create, the market should be free. Sometimes the things involved in making those products should be taxed however to reflect that the resources belong to nature.

The taxes collected from the use of nature can be justifiably used for public goods and not be considered coercive in their taking. The taking of natural resources is coercive.
The taxation at least ensures that the gains of that coercion are given back to humanity as a whole.

The only problem with all this... doesn't lie in ethics.
I cannot determine just how well this can work in reality and whether these taxes can feasibly replace the myriad of taxes we have now.

And in any case, tax plans do not solve everything. They cannot make government more accountable and less corrupt. Only an active population can do that.

__________________
"Man lives in the sunlit world of that which he believes to be reality. But unseen by most is an underworld, a place that is just as real... but not as brightly lit... A DARK SIDE!"
-opening from Tales From the Darkside