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I've long advocated a land value tax. I would suggest that any reform of this nature, that eliminates private capture of economic rent, accompany one-time compensation to the parties that lose that economic rent, so in this case, compensation to make up for the loss in property value that a LVT would incur.

The same should apply to any other repeal of rent-seeking institutions: anti-labor-competitive laws privileging labor unions, licensure barriers privileging taxi medallion holders, etc.

The British used this method to end slavery throughout their empire, which meant: 1. much more rapid end to slavery, due to less political opposition to its abolition, 2. no costly civil war and enduring sociopolitical grievances that emanated from it.

Economic analyses indicate that compensating rent-seekers at an amount equal to the expected loss of economic utility over their lifetime from the elimination of their rent-seeking opportunity, as part of a reformation to end the institutions that enable their rent-seeking, leads to net economic gains, because the economic efficiency gains from expedited abolition of the rent-seeking far outweighs the cost of the compensation.

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We did economically recompense some former slaveowners. Not the slaves or their descendants, of course.

https://today.uconn.edu/2021/03/there-was-a-time-reparations...

Assuming by "we" you mean the United States, then we only ever compensated slaveowners in DC [0]. Notably, abolishing slavery in DC did not require going through a costly civil war as it did in (almost) all of the slave states.

Granted, it is hard to decide how to read this history. Specifically, the civil war did not start because the federal government tried freeing slaves; but because the eventual confederacy states feared it would. Abolition wouldn't become union policy until well into the civil war (largely due to the sunk cost of fighting the far). And, the 4 union slave states would eventually abolish slavery as well.

Still, given how costly the civil war was (both in terms of money, lives, and politics), it is worth considering the counterfactual where did a compensated abolition, which seems to have worked out better when it was attempted.

[0] The act to search for is District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act

Lincoln had always planned to compensate slaveowners in order to abolish slavery and drafted his first compensated emancipation plan in 1849. This was rejected by the southern states. http://www.mrlincolnandfreedom.org/civil-war/congressional-a...

How much would you pay to save 600 000 lives? Because that is what you sacrificed instead. If you forced slave owners to compensate their slaves the death toll would likely be a lot higher as they would struggle harder, would that be worth it?

I am rather skeptic of land value taxes, but I would like to hear your view of why land value tax is better than simply raising the tax on rent and property sales. The main argument that I see against land value taxes is that land doesn't generate any income by itself, which forces people to pay money in situation where they might not have any income to do so.

One could bypass this problem by putting in limitations, like an requirement to be high-income before the tax is applicable. One could also limit land tax to specific zones outside of low density residential areas so it doesn't go into effect when the land owner and the person living there is the same person.

>>I am rather skeptic of land value taxes, but I would like to hear your view of why land value tax is better than simply raising the tax on rent and property sales.

The article goes into the advantages of a land value tax over other types of tax, including a property tax:

The big question land value taxes help answer is: How can a government raise funds without distorting choices and possibly leaving people worse off? If you tax income, it provides a disincentive to work. If you tax property, it provides a disincentive to improve the physical buildings on top of the land. Sometimes the tax is intentionally disincentivizing an activity — think carbon taxes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or so-called “sin taxes” on tobacco. But there are also taxes governments want to levy to pay for valuable services without changing behaviors too much (or at all).

>>The main argument that I see against land value taxes is that land doesn't generate any income by itself, which forces people to pay money in situation where they might not have any income to do so.

Those people should be selling their land. We should not have a scarce natural resource sitting idle or under-utilized. From the article as well:

In small towns, vacant lots contribute to decline — and if there’s no valuable structure on a property, its delinquent landlords likely only pay a nominal property tax. This both lowers tax revenue and hurts neighborhood quality for everyone else.

In Allentown, Pennsylvania, the system worked! According to a 2019 Strong Towns article, after the city adopted an LVT (through a split-rate system that still kept some property taxes in place) in 1996, “construction returned to the city: the number of taxable building permits surged past neighboring Bethlehem, market investment returned and capital improvement reappeared in city budgets. ... The losers in this trade were absentee owners of vacant lots, who had to shoulder much more of the burden.”

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) is quoted touting the benefits of the tax: “The number of building permits in Allentown has increased by 32 percent from before we had a land tax.”*

> Those people should be selling their land. We should not have a scarce natural resource sitting idle or under-utilized. From the article as well:

If we have that attitude to people owning things, then the first thing should be wealth tax on jewelry, cars, boats, and other luxury items which if you can't afford to pay the tax then you should be forced to sell it. I remember how popular that concept where here in EU when refugees had their jewelry taken by the government in order to pay for expenses and basic living. People have this weird attachment to objects that defy rational thought.

I get the sentiment, but in term of winning popular support it has some distinct emotional drawbacks.

If we want to specifically address vacant lots within city boundaries, a tax on that seems fair. Not many low income home owners live in their property owned vacant lots located inside city boundaries.

>If we have that attitude to people owning things, then the first thing should be wealth tax on jewelry, cars, boats, and other luxury items which if you can't afford to pay the tax then you should be forced to sell it.

That actually makes sense if you want to avoid price gouging and scalping over the short term.

If you tax wealth then people will try to reduce the amount of wealth they have which is undesirable over the long term. If you tax land, people will reduce the amount of land they use, which is exactly what you want in an urban environment.

We don't have a housing crisis because of scarce jewelry that isn't being put to use -- and the same is true of luxury boats, fancy cars, and other luxury items. The issue is precisely that land is not a luxury item; but it is being treated like one, in that it's being used as a store of value.

I don't think this necessitates having that attitude toward owning things in general. Owning scarce natural resources is very different than owning man-made resources that have an elastic supply that can be expanded through production. A coherent moral framework can support the former being taxed, while maintaining that the latter should not be.

Private ownership of the latter is both just, because the original owners comes to own it by producing it, and economically advantageous, because ownership incentivizes production, which leads to its supply increasing. With land, there is no moral justification for private ownership, as no private party created the land, and private ownership does not have the economic effect of leading to the supply of it expanding, since land cannot be produced.

I have a hard time distinguish between people owning gold and people owning land, and in this discussion, we are not just talking about owning land but people owning a house on that land. Similar in how gold is turned into a jewelry that people form emotional attachment to, a home is built on land which people form emotional attachments to. In both cases we have a man-made resource, ie a jewelry and homes, and in both cases they got created from a scarce natural resources, gold and land. They are also both mental concepts that is a man-made product formed by using a natural resource.

Land cannot be produced but homes can be designed, constructed and built. If we want to tax land but not homes, and we want to tax gold but not jewelry, I would find that perfectly consistent. People rarely form attachment to unused land, similar to how people don't form attachment to solid gold bars or ingots. Incentivizes production of unused land and vacant properties is something I would support, while I am rather suspicious of taxing ownership of man-made resources.

Gold rarely appears in its valuable form in accessible natural settings. It is acquired through the costly process of mining, which increases its supply. So it is not like land with respect to either supply elasticity or the cost of initial acquisition.

>>a home is built on land which people form emotional attachments to

I would argue people should be encouraged to not form an emotional attachment to a house, because the land it occupies is part of a larger society which may come to need it more than the person does.

You may have grown up in a house your grandfather built, but the neighborhood of that house may have changed from a sparsely populated district of a small city, to the densely populated economic core of a major metropolis and regional shipping/trading hub. The land needs to be repurposed to benefit the greatest number of people, and I don't think a perpetual land claim stemming from the principle of first possession should trump that imperative.

Gold is a finite resource, like any other natural resource. The cost of gold is partially formed by the land purchase of the mining company paid. One can not just start digging and increase the supply of gold. You need land first and it need to be one of a few special locations on earth where such mining is profitable.

I don't think the distinction being present are convinceing me. I can agree that undeveloped natural resources might need to be treated differently than developed resources, on that ground that undeveloped natural resources are inherently limited, scares and in general useless unless developed. Undeveloped land don't serve anyone except as an investment, and thus special rules might be needed.

I will also say that while I can agree that people should not form emotional attachments to objects, and I will include here any object, it is part of human behavior to do so. Be that a house, car, boat, jewelry, guitar, a sport players T-shirt, or what have you. For most people a house is just a house. For others it a family heirloom, built and maintained for hundred of years by the same family. We don't generally repurpose objects in order to benefit the greatest number of people, and I doubt there is a very strong support for that.

>>Gold is a finite resource, like any other natural resource.

For practical purposes, gold is not finite for the time being. We can keep mining it to expand supply for a long time to come.

Maybe for some elements, it would make sense to apply a usage tax to discourage under-utilization of the existing supply, but that day hasn't come for gold.

>>You need land first and it need to be one of a few special locations on earth where such mining is profitable.

There are many places where one can purchase mining rights, and profitably mine gold. It's just a matter of investing the resources to do it.

If gold were actually being hoarded in such a way that it prevented manufacturing, and cities and states were passing laws that prevented gold from being used for other purposes -- requiring a ten year approval process to melt a gold "historic heritage heirloom" -- then we'd need to talk about policies for gold; but we don't have that problem! No one seems to have the idea that the government should protect our emotional attachment to gold; but they do want government to protect our emotional attachment to land.

> No one seems to have the idea that the government should protect our emotional attachment to gold

Denmark had a law in place during the mass refugee crisis in Europe, where if a refugee owned valuables then they had to sell that first before they were allowed to receive government help. The idea was that people should first help themselves if they could, and by doing so helped the greater good since then the government could afford to help more people.

Ask people to sell their wedding rings and people get a bit upset, and so people compared it to Nazi Germany when they striped people of valuables. A lot of people wanted that the government should respect and thus protect peoples emotional attachments. Desperate people can't eat gold, and you don't want to force people to sell the last remaining object of emotional attachment that they own. I think even some refugees spoke on the news that they would rather die than sell off their heirlooms.

George's moral framework would align with taxing the ownership of gold - "land" is not just literal land but all unimproved natural resources. On the other hand we don't seem to have pressing problems with gold that is needed for productive purposes instead being hoarded as a store of value. Its main function is to be expensive, so we don't mind as much that it is.

Gold is not actually inherently scarce. Refined gold is scarce because it is costly to find, mine and refine it. So I do think those who do go through the process to acquire gold are morally deserving of ownership over it. Moveover, this ownership is economically advantageous because it incentivizes the costly process of mining gold that increases its supply.

> We should not have a scarce natural resource sitting idle or under-utilized.

Does it make sense to always optimize for nothing but maximum ROI for each plot of land?

For example: imagine how many untold billions of extra value and tax revenue could be generated in Manhattan by tearing down Central Park and building it all full of dense housing towers.

But would Manhattan be a better place to live as a result?

I would much rather have Central Park, an enormous and high-value piece of public land which is a crown jewel of the community and managed by the government as such, than a partial public-ish interest in "open space" or something on each privately owned lot, which is constantly being negotiated between landowners and a planning commission and ends up "meh," and where you aren't allowed to actually go, just look at.

I think this would be an important component of a YIMBY or Georgist future, to have public open space and park resources owned and managed explicitly rather than implied on each parcel.

>>Does it make sense to always optimize for nothing but maximum ROI for each plot of land?

No, but we can have special provisions for public goods like parks. Outside of properties that generate these kinds of public goods, the revenue a property generates is generally a proxy for social good it does. For example, a condo building with 150 residential units and 10 commercial units on the ground floor will do more social good than a parking lot, and that is easily revealed by how much more revenue it generates.

I think we're significantly undervaluing letting land carry on with low-enough human involvement so as to promote biodiversity and resilience, as has been done in numerous cultures around the world for millenia. Sometimes we get too selfish and exploit resources for short-term gain. We're in a tough spot as a species, borrowing heavily against the wellbeing of future generations (I view the health of the air, water, land, and other life as essential to our wellbeing).

That's an absurd example. Central Park isn't undeveloped land. It's a freaking historical site and national treasure.

Why specifically is it absurd, in the context of what LVT tries to achieve?

LVT isn't about whether the land is developed or undeveloped. The idea is to tax it based on its maximally productive usage. So for example if a plot of land has a single house but it could fit an apartment building, it should have an apartment building.

Of course Central Park is a treasure! But based on LVT, open fields in the middle of Manhattan is not the maximally productive economic use for that land. Filling it with high rise apartments would yield far more economic value.

Clearly I'm not promoting that it would be a good idea. It would be a disaster. But it's a great example of why blindly applying LVT to everything is not a good idea.

> But based on LVT, open fields in the middle of Manhattan is not the maximally productive economic use for that land.

I'm not sure this is true though. Manhattan wouldn't be close to what it is today without central park. It's not very hard to make the claim that central park provides more value than putting up apartment buildings would. Central Park makes that island some of the most expensive land in the world.

> Manhattan wouldn't be close to what it is today without central park.

It certainly wouldn't and I wouldn't argue the contrary.

But from the perspective of analyzing LTV and its implications, how would that be written into the tax code formula?

Surely it'd be possible to take some of the Central Park area and convert to highrises without meaningfully diminishing the benefits of having a Central Park. But how much area would be ok to build to maximize economic value? 1%? 5%? 50%? 80%?

Because at the end of the day, a tax law needs rules and formulas to compute the tax, so how do those get defined in a way that preserves open space but pushes for highrise development everywhere else (if that's the goal)?

> But from the perspective of analyzing LTV and its implications, how would that be written into the tax code formula?

I think the way it would work is the government would have to pay LVT on land it owns, and people would have to decide whether the LVT would be worth more than the current use through elections. Sure, NYC could probably get $10 billion or so a year (who knows maybe its $100 billion) if they sold off central park while under this taxation scheme. I think hardly anyone would want that though, and NYC would just continue to pay itself the LVT instead of collecting the money from citizens that bought the park land. By the way this is a gross oversimplification since the LVT collected from the properties surrounding the park, and probably all of Manhattan if not NYC, would be drastically lowered if the park was developed.

> pushes for highrise development everywhere else (if that's the goal)?

I don't think this is the goal. The goal is efficient land use. That might mean high rise development instead of empty lots. It might mean national parks that people cherish. It might mean a great big park in the middle of manhattan. What matters is that the question "is this land being used optimally?" is being considered.

If you tax rent, you are taxing the building which is not the point of a land value tax.

again, rents here are economic rents, not rent payments, which is an unfortunate name collision. economic rents are, by definition, unproductive capture of surplus. rent payments can fall into productive (for the provision of services, upkeep, and expansion) or unproductive (excess cash flow resulting from restrictive policy) uses, but that's really beside the point in respect to a land value tax.

the land value tax is aimed squarely at taking economic rents of real property down to zero via taxation. in the ideal scenario, the land value tax would be exactly equal to the economic surplus (generated by poor policy or anything else) for each property, to negate the ability to extract economic rents, leaving only productive uses to generate income (perhaps in the form of a rent payment).

Land value taxes fail on the basics.

Tax has nothing to do with raising money. It’s about releasing real resources for the public good - largely people to provide public services. Ideally the tax needs to be incident on the private sector entities that would otherwise hire the people the public sector needs to hire instead - military, judiciary, police, healthcare, education, etc.

Government has no need of land, therefore it makes no sense to tax it. Expecting the incidence to end up in the correct place requires a faith in fungibility that just isn’t borne out in practice.

>>Tax has nothing to do with raising money.

Taxation is entirely about raising money.

>>It’s about releasing real resources for the public good - largely people to provide public services.

What does "releasing real resources" mean, and how does taxation achieve that? And how does a land value tax fail to achieve that?

>>It’s about releasing real resources for the public good - largely people to provide public services.

I'm puzzled as to how you conceive of government not needing land, when many government services do in fact need it, or how you perceive other objects of taxation being needed by government in a way that land is not.

"Taxation is entirely about raising money."

It isn't. Government has no need of it. Taxes are essentially shredded and deleted.

All very simple when you realise there isn't a fixed amount of money and it grows and shrinks as required by the economy.

What is spent and what is taxed are inductively connected, not directly connected. That's how we have 'deficits'. It's a function of the accounting.

"What does "releasing real resources" mean, and how does taxation achieve that?"

If you tax employment directly, private firms offer fewer jobs because there would be insufficient money in circulation to employ everybody (wages are insufficient to purchase output due to the tax take). The public sector then hires those who can no longer get jobs in the private sector.

The LVT fails to target the areas required, and it lacks a countercyclical behaviour. An employment tax, for example, collects more when the economy is hot and less when it is cooler. That's part of the automatic stabilisation mechanism.

"I'm puzzled as to how you conceive of government not needing land, when many government services do in fact need it"

Government is largely service based rather than goods based. What it needs is people.

Georgism is based upon a view of money that isn't actually the case. So it doesn't work.

>>It isn't. Government has no need of it. Taxes are essentially shredded and deleted.

That is not what happens to tax revenue. I recommend you look at a government budget, and see the source of much of the money spent.

>>If you tax employment directly, private firms offer fewer jobs because there would be insufficient money in circulation to employ everybody (wages are insufficient to purchase output due to the tax take). The public sector then hires those who can no longer get jobs in the private sector.

Private firms don't offer fewer jobs when you tax employment. They offer less for the jobs they offer when you tax employment.

Government can hire people because it can offer wages competitive with those provided by the private sector, and it can offer those wages because of the funds it acquires through taxation.

Governments have no need to tax employment to hire workers. This is trivially shown by jurisdictions with no taxes on employment and many government workers.

>>Government is largely service based rather than goods based. What it needs is people.

Abstractly, people need land, so government can trade access to land for services rendered for the public, i.e. for employment with the government.

"Taxation is entirely about raising money."

I hope that it is interesting and noteworthy for you to learn that many, many smart and thoughtful economists do not agree with that. In fact, they strongly disagree.

Current thinking in modern economics - specifically in MMT[1] - is that money is created by loans and destroyed by taxes.

Which is to say, the government (provided it is a sovereign issuer of its own debts, like the US or the EU) has no particular use for revenues since they can just create whatever money they need. What is actually happening when money is taxed is that it is, effectively, destroyed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory

> Current thinking in modern economics - specifically in MMT

Modern economists by and large do not subscribe to MMT. It has about as much support amongst academic economists as climate change denial.

While MMT holds that taxes can reduce the money supply, it does deny that taxes raise money for the state.

Income taxes fail on the basics.

Income tax has nothing to do with raising money. It’s about releasing real resources for the public good - largely people to provide public services. Ideally the tax needs to be incident on the private sector entities that would otherwise hire the people the public sector needs to hire instead - military, judiciary, police, healthcare, education, etc.

Government has no need of private income, therefore it makes no sense to tax it. Expecting the incidence to end up in the correct place requires a faith in fungibility that just isn’t borne out in practice.

When the government uses income taxes to fund public infrastructure like a subway, it improves the land that is incident to that subway which raises the value of that land. The government created a lot of private value that could be taxed to pay for the infrastructure it built. As it stands right now, the government just takes your income with no incentive to actually deliver as it does not benefit directly from its own investments. This allows corruption to creep in as politicians would rather fund massive boondoggles that line up their pockets rather than small incremental improvements that increase government revenue in proportion to how much value it provides.

This scene gets the point across very clearly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL3n59wC8kk&t=1803s

The government invests in the commons. Access to the commons (proximity to infrastructure) is owned by private individuals who benefit from the investment. The government does not benefit from the investment it made. It's effectively running a charity for a handful of people.

i disagree that we should make landowners "whole" in some sense, as they went into their investment knowing that the value of their investment could go down. it's not up to the rest of us to bail out wealthy landowners in that way, which creates a perverse incentive to seek government bailout for any and all risk-taking.

enact the tax gradually, say over 5 years, and the property market will adjust accordingly.

I think when we change the laws, we should compensate those who lose out from the change. By giving people the assurance that the laws will either remain the same, or they will be compensated if a change in the law incurs for them losses in their investment, people will be encouraged to invest more of their time and money in endeavors in our society. Regulatory/institutional stability is a related concept and widely considered by economists to be an important contributor to economic development.

As for the moral argument, I find it hard to believe that individuals should know that the laws that society collectively agreed on and implemented, are unjust. To some extent we rely on society to inform us of right and wrong, and there is no clearer example of that expression than the laws and policies the government institutes through at the behest of elected representatives.

So I think the fault of unjust laws, where they exist, should fall on society as a whole, as opposed to those who as a matter of circumstance, just happened to make investments of time or money that depended on those laws.

Finally, not compensating landowners means far more political opposition to instituting such a tax, and therefore delays in doing so, and that in itself is costly. Consequently, insisting on landowners being punished for benefiting from the legal status of land ownership will be harmful to society. It would be a case of prioritizing vengeance over society's wellbeing.

no, investors need no additional incentive to invest. they squarely chose to take the risk, and will do so regardless of boondoggles like this, because they have no better alternative (i.e., opportunity cost impels them). it's the same fallacious argument used to keep progressive taxes at bay (oh noes, the rich people will leave america for... ???). let them fail. it's not a social problem in the slightest. the social safety net should cushion those at the bottom, certainly not those at the top, or in most cases, not even those in the middle.

certainly it means more political opposition in the form of money, but not in votes, which is the more pertinent metric.

>>no, investors need no additional incentive to invest.

That is not true. Greater incentives translates to more investment, and more investment is socially beneficial.

>>it's the same fallacious argument used to keep progressive taxes at bay (oh noes, the rich people will leave america for... ???).

There is nothing fallacious about this argument. Disincentives to investment lead to less investment. Less investment means less gains in productivity and wages, which also means less taxable income that can support the mandatorily funded safety net leftists support.

>>certainly it means more political opposition in the form of money, but not in votes, which is the more pertinent metric.

Historically, measures that threaten major special interests are difficult to pass due to the opposition they face. Ignoring that is putting ideology ahead of pragmatic results.

no, investment may move, but it doesn't simply vanish. wealth managers would be fired for holding investible funds in cash (which is what withholding investment means--that's the opportunity cost mentioned earlier).

historically, disenfranchised masses revolt, violently.

bonus point: a more equitable distribution of wealth would lead to smarter investment overall and a more productive economy.

>>no, investment may move, but it doesn't simply vanish. wealth managers would be fired for holding investible funds in cash (which is what withholding investment means--that's the opportunity cost mentioned earlier).

The percentage of income invested fluctuates, based on factors that include security of property rights and expected return on investment.

Creating a reliable regulatory and tax regime would mean greater annual inflow of money into investments.

>>historically, disenfranchised masses revolt, violently.

All the better then to remove the obstacles to the enfranchisement of the masses, by offering compensation to the current beneficiaries of rent-extracting institutions in exchange for recruiting them in the drive to abolish these institutions.

Violent revolutions that overturn power structures are actually quite rare and far more common is persistence of structural forces of rent-extraction for decades or centuries, and thus the threat of revolution is not an effective motivator for those in power to relinquish their privileges. The pragmatic reality is that we are more likely to get to a more just and efficient economy without these structures if we reach a settlement that removes the opposition of these structures' beneficiaries from the drive to eliminate them.

>>bonus point: a more equitable distribution of wealth would lead to smarter investment overall and a more productive economy.

Another bonus of eliminating rent-seeking institutions is that it reduces wealth inequality. Compensation to expedite the removal of a structural force that contributes to wealth inequality would likely be a net-gain for equity in the distribution of wealth, because the former is a one-time action while the latter has a recurring impact.

no, those are poor economic prescriptions that further entrench wealth in fewer hands to the detriment of the economy as a whole. investment will happen regardless. the money literally has nowhere else to go. this is really not a hard or controversial point.

investors and politicians, on the other hand, like to say things like "investment will go away", but those are lies told to the susceptible to get pet policies enacted, not to reflect reality, better the economy, or improve the lives of ordinary citizens.

history books are literally chocked full of governments being overturned, and it's happened dozens of times in the past century. it's anything but rare.

>>no, those are poor economic prescriptions that further entrench wealth in fewer hands to the detriment of the economy as a whole.

These are proven economic prescriptions that expedite the removal of costly encumberences to increasing the efficiency of the market and reducing rent extraction by the few.

>>investment will happen regardless. the money literally has nowhere else to go.

You don't seem to understand the point I'm making. Some percentage of income is invested. That represents investment inflow, that leads to capital formation. The percentage varies between countries and eras, based on factors like the average ROI rate, tax/regulatory stability, and security of property.

It stands to reason that more tax/regulatory stability would lead to a larger percentage of income being invested.

>>investors and politicians, on the other hand, like to say things like "investment will go away", but those are lies told to the susceptible to get pet policies enacted, not to reflect reality, better the economy, or improve the lives of ordinary citizens.

You're allowing conspiracy theories to overwhelm your thinking. Your certainty in bad faith motivating these arguments is causing you to not even comprehend the arguments before you reject them, as in the case of you not making the minimal effort to understand my point about a variable rate of investment that's dependent on multiple factors.

>>history books are literally chocked full of governments being overturned, and it's happened dozens of times in the past century.

There have been hundreds of states in existence at any one time for the last several millennia. Many instances of a type of event does not imply that this event is common. The fact is, relative to how many states exist, and how large of a time period most historical analyses cover, the number of successful revolutions by the lower classes is very few, and thus the event is rare in the context how likely it is that it will occur in any one country in a given era.

There is nothing to buy with your social safety net payments unless investors are taking risks on the businesses that make and sell it. You can't just abolish private property from within capitalism and leave it there. Once you have taken that step you have to go all the way to state-controlled production.

Although again, the Georgist point is that this is specifically not true for land: the land is there whether you invest in it or not.

One reason the West is prosperous is we have the rule of law. This obviously doesn't free investors from all risks but it does reduce political risks, i.e. being arbitrarily dispossessed by the government is mostly not something you factor in. In poorer countries it does get factored in: people take less risk and demand a higher premium for doing so, since why bother if it's just going to get seized? This goes a decent part of the way to explaining why they are poorer countries.

A Georgist would counter that land is special in this regard: unlike investment in productive enterprise, we don't actually need investment in land to create wealth. I think it's an open question whether markets would actually buy this designation, or see it as open season on all kinds of property. The latter would be very, very bad!

this isn't about seizing property, but about not giving away tax money to wealthy landowners every time our laws change against their interest toward the broader public interest.

> this isn't about seizing property

Eh, this is a fine line. If Henry had his way we'd have a 100% tax on land, which means unimproved land is now worthless since you can't make any profit off it. A true LVT tax is effectively the same as a seizure of your unimproved land, as its entire value has been collapsed.

Henry George’s LVT is a 100% tax on land rents. A 100% tax is also known as a seizure. Maybe there is some tax rate that would make this more in line with existing corporate or income taxes but setting it so low would also undermine its key benefits.

that's being intentionally obtuse. the tax is on rents, not the land itself (nor on productive use). again, rents are unproductive, while seizure is taking by force. make productive use of desirable and productive land or sell it if you don't want to pay the tax (note: no seizure here), and move to less desirable land if you just want to own land without that pressure.

less than roughly 1% of the land area of the US would have such pressures, so you'd have plenty of tax-free land to choose from, and it'd be cheaper to buy too. productive land should be put to its "highest and best use".

I like Georgist taxes, but it's unclear that tax incidence will fall entirely on the rentier class.

Important land is always unique, and therefore taxation would be have be incredibly dialed-in, no? A busy major international port would need to be taxed very differently than a sparsely attended beach just a mile away. This seems very difficult to get right.

Have there been practical applications that show that's not a concern?

> A busy major international port would need to be taxed very differently than a sparsely attended beach just a mile away. This seems very difficult to get right.

you could imagine that the taxation is tied to the value of the land, which can be calculated as the rent income, minus the value of improvements upon the land (such as any buildings, which can be estimated by the cost of construction and maintenance over the useful life time, which is already a figure that is needed for depreciation purposes).

This is the reason why LVT cannot be passed onto the renter, because if you increase the rent, you would pay more taxes as the value of the land must have increased if the renter accepts this higher rent without any changes to the building.

valuations are always subjective. you pretend it's like some sort of precise science, but it is not, never was, and never will be. ffs, the example is a major international port, not a cookie-cutter shoebox-sized condo.

The very first thing that will happen upon implementation of LVT is simple "rebranding" of "renting" into "mortgages".

What tax do you charge then? some LLC "owns" the port. some bank provides it a "mortgage".

What's the tax due on such mortgaged property? Previous rent? What if such rent was never charged and it was mortgaged from day zero? What then? What if there is no comparable entity to compare to? Just some half-ass guess?

What's the LVT tax on the Suez Canal? Panama Canal?

It's FAR from trivial.

The Romans had a solution to this. You self declare a value, the government gets a right to purchase your property at that value, which they exercise if they think you declared too low. Otherwise you are taxed.

Not everyone will likes that idea, but it shows that a non subjective solution exists, it and where there is one, there may be more.

Land taxes are certainly in use around the world. My "rates" which fund the local government are based on the "unimproved land value". If you are unhappy with the land value determination (presumably because you feel it is too high) you can object and present evidence - for residential property that isn't too hard because area sales records are available and the replacement cost of the improvements on the land are reasonably easy to estimate and subtract from the sale price. No doubt unique businesses like airports get professional appraisals that painstakingly put an estimate together.

The biggest problem with an LVT isn't when it's too low. Even a low LVT can prevent empty parking lots and abandoned properties. The problem with LVTs start when the LVT is too high as everyone abandons the land and nobody wants to acquire it. That is a real nightmare because of the extremely high valuations of land fueled by low land value and property taxes.

Transitioning to a steep LVT is difficult because the assumption is that the LVT drops the value of the land if the yearly tax payment is too high. A $1 million dollar plot of land isn't supposed to pay $50k in taxes. The payment you are willing to make is say $10k per year which means the value of the land drops to $200k. Making that jump is extremely difficult. It's only really viable if you started with the LVT from the beginning.

The reason why Germany can transition to an LVT is because the property taxes it charges are laughably low to begin with. Around 200€ to 1000€ per year. There is no plan to increase taxes to lower the value of land and put pressure to solving the housing problem.

There's several ways to look at figuring out the correct value. You can look at the value of the surrounding land, or you can look at the value of the improvements.

What's nice about looking at the improvements is we should always be able to figure out the cost to build the building initially, we can look at the repair costs.

Say we have a house that was just built. We know for sure that this cost $500k to construct. We have the bills. Make the market price of the lot and house cost $500k and the tax is perfect. Done. If the tax is above the correct value, the auction bid will be under $500k, that's bad! Lower the tax.

Now let's say it's 10 years later. There has been depreciation on the house. It's no longer worth the $500k. If we still tax the building as if its worth $500k, what happens? It turns out we under-tax the 100% LVT. But as we know, under-taxing is okay, not perfect, but okay. It's over-taxing that is harmful!

What happens if someone bids $600k for it? Now we know we are significantly under-taxing the area and have good reason to increase the tax, and send out an appraiser to look at it.

Lastly I just need to point out that in a LVT world, it is kinda going to be like the "Don't fight the Fed" line. If you know that bidding $600k on a $500k house is going to force a tax inspection, you might not be so happy to lose $100k, so you might bid less. You might even bid $500k simply because that's what the home is worth, you might fund the appraisal yourself so that you don't risk your $100k. As the speculation is driven out of the market, the values of homes will be much more steady than they are today, and land appraisal will therefore become much easier and uniform. Even Zillow could do appraisal's with a LVT.

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