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Comment by TimPC | Hacker News Reader

Some people argue no compensation is required but I think in reality an LVT at 100% reduces the price of all land to $0. Given that land is substantial portion of retirement savings in our current economy, completely obliterating land prices without any compensation seems morally dubious. Perhaps if you do it slowly enough that you give everyone time to adjust and make the market adjustments gradual enough that people who need to sell land for retirement can still get something like 90% of the value initially it could work.

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Nobody is arguing for a literal 100% LVT. You'd want to still leave a fraction of land rent (say 10% or so) untaxed, since this introduces a desirable market mechanism in property assessment - and George even acknowledges this. What's nutty is to let land speculators capture all of that value for no real reason.

I think the group that is capturing the most value is actually landlords, followed by speculators. I also agree that 90% LVT may be better in practice, although I do know people who still argue for 100% and various auction mechanisms to determine the LVT.

As much as I think LVT makes sense, having to go to some sort of annual auction for my own land does seem worse than just paying taxes. Along with that being a tedious process, that could put you at the mercy of malicious actors who may just dislike you and have enough cash to outbid you.

Any implementation would have to not include this for people to be able to have stable lives.

A yearly auction is overkill. Do it every 5-10 years with a fee the longer you delay the next auction. (Like banks charge more interest the longer a fixed rate loan is)

Eh still sounds pretty terrible really. The assessment people should be able to figure it out however they normally figure out taxes.

You could use "auctions" to capture that residual value if those were long-term land leases. But you'd still want to assess and tax land rent afterwards, because in practice high-stakes leases have proven vulnerable to government corruption.

Silvio Gesell proposed an auction mechanism but I honestly don't care about the details. You can lease land. Tax it or auction it off. There are so many good enough solutions that one does not have to be picky.

That's the gist of it. If land is so worthless even rich people don't want anything to do with it, why would it make someone poor better off to have it?

Because you can put structures on the land and capture the entire value of the structure?

There is a difference between something being intrinsically worthless and the taxes driving the market price to $0.

No, if land was worth $0 people would bid it up until the value of the land is how much they are willing to pay per year in taxes.

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