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There are also people who realize that what the government is doing through taxation is basically theft, and their response is something like "Ok yeah taxation is theft, but the theft is for a good cause. Plus its not like a lot of other theft, and the word theft has some negative baggage, so you are just using the association to say that taxation is bad". That is sort of Scott Alexander's response if I remember him correctly.
It can be both a massive theft and the correct thing to do. But if it is a massive theft and you are treating it as just a minor adjustment in policy then that might lead to you misunderstanding the anger coming your way.
If I was going to justify a land value tax I would start with requiring the income tax to be abolished. And that the land tax would explicitly exist as a way of funding defense of that territory. There is a massive amount of tyranny and injustice around the income tax, and the idea that the value of people's work is literally being stolen from them on a nation wide scale. Returning people's freedom over the money they earn through work seems like a worthwhile tradeoff for taking away the ability to meaningfully own land. But thats not how this discussion started out.
I can get behind that framing, and I know many other Georgists argue for that. My issue with that promise though is I think an LVT should be phased in gradually. If you do that it becomes much harder to immediately wipe out income tax.
You could set them to ratchet down over time as an LVT increased which I think makes sense, but is far less appealing to the masses than “I’ll wipe out income tax and replace it with something else!”
All that said, interesting framing on the taxation is theft. I think we have common ground in that the main draw of the LVT is that it’s more fair and less game-able in theory.
Based on the implementation of previous tax schemes it would be highly unlikely for the income tax to be ever fully phased out. Its not like the US really got rid of any other taxes once it had income taxes. For a while they got rid of alcohol taxes by banning all alcohol, but thats about it.
Having income taxes and LVTs seems terrible.
I understand the pessimistic view of the government, but just because something hasn't been done in the U.S. before, doesn't mean we can't accomplish it. That type of worldview, status quo bias or whatever you want to call it, is self-perpetuating in that if everyone assumes something can't be done, it won't be done!
Strong agree on this point. Like I said above, main selling point for me is that LVT captures value better and has much better incentives than income tax.
Doesn't mean we can either. Status-quo bias is legitimate, inasmuch we can assume there is no barrier to achieving it in reality and the unforeseen consequences are already baked in. Better than nothing is a high bar.
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