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Notes -
The recent Georgist uprising in the rat-sphere seems to be spreading outward, and gathering steam if anything. Lars Doucet, who wrote the original ACX post that blew up, is now releasing a book called Land is a Big Deal which summarizes his writings thus far.
There was also a major takedown of Detroit land assessment practices by a major land parcel data collector, ReGrid that dropped a few days ago. Major takeaways:
In addition, some fairly mainstream political candidates such as Chloe Brown who's running for Mayor of Toronto, seem to be gaining steam. Land value tax is a large plank in her platform.
I got interested in land reform through the original series of ACX posts, and frankly I'm surprised how interesting the problem is and how overall neglected the topic seems to be. Even extremely intelligent and well read folks I talk to about it are surprised when they learn that land value is usually just pulled out of thin air - the industry standard is to just take 25% of the purchase price and not give a shit about location or any other factors, which seems bizarre upon a critical review.
I've seen some discussion about Georgism/LVT here, but curious if anyone else has been following this?
Also, what are the arguments against LVT, besides low-effort "taxes are always bad and raising them is evil?" Genuinely curious for well thought out reasons why an LVT would be a bad idea.
Edit: For those new to this idea, a Land Value Tax in it's most basic form simply says we should tax away the value of the land, and only let people who sell land profit off of the 'improvements' they make, such as buildings, restorations, etc. For instance if you bought a piece of land and tried to sell it 1 year later off pure speculation, doing nothing to the land, you would not receive any profit.
Public choice problems are a good place to start, since (a) Henry George understandably did not consider them and (b) they are a problem even if Georgism is correct.
LVTs are highly contestable - has the land value really increased? - and have strong constituencies against their consistent application - the people at risk of losing their homes. The latter are concentrated interest groups, while the benefits of a LVT are dispersed across society. It's not clear to me that a LVT can be effective as a revenue raiser in the long run, while some of the natural ways to make it politically viable also introduce deadweight losses, e.g. waiving LVTs for people who have lived in a certain area for more than x years. That's a deadweight loss, because it creates an incentive to stay put after x < years, because otherwise you start paying LVT again.
So, even if we accept the Georgist arguments for the superiority of an ideal LVT, it's dubious that an ideal LVT is sustainable, and the deadweight losses from a non-ideal LVT may not be worth it. This may be why 100% LVTs have, AFAIK, never been used, and LVTs tend not to last (or at least not raise much revenue). Wealth taxes have similar problems.
Just to clarify: aren't all these arguments against existing property taxes?
Property taxes also suck
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