(author here) Another thing I've noticed is that you never know how or what will happen until you try. I was following legislation in one state and learned that literally dozens of people from all kinds of organized opposition came out to testify against a proposed bill and it quickly died in committee, exactly the kind of brutal pushback that demoralizes people against trying. Then, Jackson Arnold's experience in Kentucky was almost the exact opposite. He approached a local government official, who got excited about it but needed a state enabling law. The official in turn got in touch with a state republican, who basically went "seems fine," and inserted it into a giant omni bill, and it sailed through the legislature. Now they're working on local implementation.

You never know until you try.

> you’re much better off finding and working with people who are already interested in your principles

after five years in the trenches of local housing/urban policy in my city, this is my biggest takeaway. i don’t think i’ve ever even once changed someone’s mind who was a staunch NIMBY, even with a reputation as one of the most accessible and persuasive local policy advocates/writers. but I have been able to build coalitions of hundreds of people by finding people who were already mostly with me, and just shifting them from inactive->active.

there’s also a lot of power in the energy of building for the future. when we passed our big SFH elimination ordinance two years ago, we had a packed city council meeting that, numerically, had 50/50 of residents speaking for/against. but for the city council, watching a parade of retirees 65+ come up and say the same thing over and over again (“i’m not sure this is right for our city”) vs an equal sized but diverse group of people of all ages and life stages speak about all of their different housing needs and dreams for the future, the weight in the room was overwhelmingly in favor; the new zoning passed unanimously.

> But it's almost certainly the case that the only conversations that have really mattered have been with electeds themselves.

General public debates with people who disagree do matter a bit because the electeds must believe that there is a group of people who will stand up and defend them (convincingly) from pressure if they take action. A certain amount of background buzz is indirectly helpful.

But yeah, seriously attempting to convince keyboard warriors or hard opponents is a complete waste of time. There often aren't a lot of them and once someone has spent enough time on a topic to adsorb most of the arguments then there isn't any reason to expect them to change their mind later on. Persuasion is for people who haven't formed a clear stance yet and there are occasional rare wins when someone changes their mind although it shouldn't be counted on.

Which is maddening, given how much damage these existing policies are doing, and how many other zeitgeist issues (homelessness, affordability, robust economic growth etc) are downstream of this.

I wonder if this movement needs a form of performative extremism somewhere (think bridges being forcibly closed for causes), so that then the mainstream notices the sensible compromise and pushes for it. The YIMBY's have never played Overton Window games, but maybe they need to hold their nose and play it.

Just dropping by to say that you're doing gods work advocating for more housing. Its exhausting seeing amount of cynicism around how the status quo just can't be changed for this or that reason, but seeing the small, incremental, advocacy over decades pro housing groups put in is really inspiring. An incredible amount of progress has been made here

I haven't read anything about Georgism that would specifically argue for or against single-family zoning. I own a single-family house, I already pay high property taxes, and I pay high income taxes. I think it would be more fair to me and everyone else to drop both, and tax the land my house is on, even if that came out to the same amount of tax I paid per year. If that tax was used to provide a UBI to people who don't own land, great. And I'm fairly conservative. I don't think this aligns as a modern progressive or conservative issue.

That all being said, I find expropriation to be loathsome, and I think the movement to destroy single-family zoned neighborhoods is a species of evil that borders on satanic.

> The same thing is very true of public meetings; the turnout for comment at those things is almost never representative of the area's median sentiment. "No" turns out for everything; "yes" rarely does.

That’s the exact opposite of the experience I’ve had in my town.

It seems that money is the primary driver of turnout at town council meetings. I live at the top of a mountain with 1 real road and 2 smaller frequently closed roads down to the city below. Developers really want to build up here, but there’s no way to widen the road, and no realistic way to build more. There’s not enough flat land to build enough jobs, shopping, dining etc… up here, so increasing density just means more cars making the trip 30 minutes into the city.

Every single time there’s an issue about development, you get dozens of real estate agents, developers, and people who work in construction showing up because their bank account depends on it. Every local election, you have candidates bankrolled by out of town developers.

“No” is much less well organized and will only occasionally turn out in larger numbers than “Yes” despite dominating in elections.

Are you sure this isn't just 'turnout inertia' working in your favor? People who are relatively content with the zoning rules are probably not actively engaged on the issue. But swap them in a way that they become unhappy with (as you presumably were) and you see sharply increased turnout in the opposite direction.

Put another way, one of the historical critiques of democracy was that it ends up catering to interest groups whose interest may not align with the rest of society. At first that seems paradoxical, because a more knee-jerk critique would expect democracy to just turn into a tyranny of the majority. But the reality is that people generally don't act on things until they are sufficiently incentivized to do so. And that incentivization is often reactive in nature.

It strikes me that there is something slightly ironic to this point that he's making. It actually is useful for him to persuade the "overly online keyboard warriors" who frequent his writing that they should be focusing on local influence. It seems to me that the real lesson is that if you have a big audience, it is most useful to persuade that audience, but if you don't, it's most useful to work to influence specific people in the right positions.

>but rather to everyone quietly reading comments

as someone who reads a lot but doesn't comment much you've got the topshelf content here consistently, its so obvious when someone has a clue or doesn't if you're in the same areas, very easy to fool others with confident assertions (cough airline issues on HN) but for someone in the industry it's not at all

funnily enough this comment about zoning which isn't your or my field but get the feeling it's on point, is such a massive problem in the western world which has built up over decades, lets just copy someone elses homework in my opinion, Asia gets this stuff right: https://devonzuegel.com/north-american-vs-japanese-zoning

id guess the arguments you had to convince non-existent readers also helped make a stronger case to the electeds?

[flagged]

Is there any evidence to support this 'land banking' and 'ghost house' theory? I've heard it mentioned but the rate of unused housing in Auckland is low from what i can see.

good thing we have a political party in NZ campaigning for LVT + UBI then!

> we illustrate how conventional property taxes punish those who improve properties and invest in the city by providing housing and business, while those who own vacant lots or surface parking lots are rewarded for holding land out of use.

The reasoning makes no sense applied to land value tax though: people improve properties for their own profit, and the land value (on which the tax is raises) increases slower than the value of their own property so they aren't being deterred by the land value tax. People who don't invest on the other hand don't see increase in their profit while their taxes increase because the land value is being pumped up by those who invest.

Something I think most people miss is that LVT doesn’t increase directly because of the improvements. If you build a coffee house, the building and equipment are excluded from the tax. It just applies to the underlying land value.

But a popular coffee house can make the surrounding area more desirable. If that increases what people will pay for locations there, land values rise. At the same tax rate, that means higher LVT for nearby sites, and, potentially the coffee house’s own site. Gentrification by other means.

In a lot of ways, it depends on what the comparative LVT base is. If its just blocks or streets nearby -- a single happening place can push the value up. Spread out to the census tract, the city, the county, and now you can toss more and more of hot coffee shops in the same place with minor impact to the tax base.

I would think that lag, combined with the general public legibility of LVT, combined with the inertia of property transactions, would damp oscillations.

Gentrification and decay are already cycles, and maybe those cycles would accelerate somewhat; but a prediction that they would drop to below decade level would be a bold assertion.

I actually see a reverse problem.

Imagine that there's somebody who wants to build unpleasant things. Let's say there's a group "association of people for ugly and genuinely unpleasant buildings" who build their collections of ugly buildings, buying up the cheap land that becomes available as people who no longer want to live near them move out.

Well, that group is rewarded by this system.

I think the problem is really: LVT makes sense, there's no reason to tax buildings, but if it is to be fair, it must actually tax the unimproved land, and this means it can't punish people who buy things next to someone building something attractive and then not doing anything useful with it, so that particular goal, sometimes held up as one of the points of a pure LVT is not achieved.

> drawing more affluent people pushing up LVT driving out residents

Land value taxes only go up if the land value (and thus the demand) is overall going up. The taxes lower desirability, but are also proportional to desirability. So, it's more like a frictional force: inherently counter-cyclical, able to slow down a property value increase but not to reverse it.

So the theory says "nobody goes to the ballpark, it's too crowded" shouldn't happen. And even imagining weird time-delays, mismodeling, etc that could cause it, everything in your scenario is directionally the same with normal property taxes. If it happened, we'd see it today.

I'm no expert on Georgism but I think there are reasonable answers to your questions.

1. "Coffee shop draws more commence drawing more affluent people pushing up LVT driving out residents faster than even the spectre of “gentrification”"

This is an impossible premise. The relationship between the cost of the LVT and the popularity are directly and inseparably linked. LVT only goes up (and stays higher) when the neighbourhood is popular. It drops (and stays lower) if the neighbourhood falls out of popularity. In real life it would reach an equilibrium, but it might encounter some volatility along the way.

This is overshadowed by many more factors than a small increase in taxes, and I would propose that an LVT is a minor factor in the popularity of neighbourhoods.

2. Similarly how do you think about new uses for land emerging? If I lease desert land for a data center because it’s so perfect for it, instead of buying it … how (and when) does it show up in LTV increases? What if I trade you some other benefit to keep it out of LVT impacting records?

The tricky part about LVT is that it requires an assessment of value prior to realisation. Popular methods include using a combination of average of realised land prices in the area, against a velocity coefficient (the general gain/loss over a period of time), modified by negatively and positively correlated correlates like proximity to public transport and parks. There are countless ways proposed to do just this so I won't retread worn ground.

In the case of the desert data centre, it is likely that the land will not increase much in value. This is by design, because we want data centres (and similar industry) to move into the middle of nowhere so that scarce land is instead used for more productive enterprise like housing for workers so they can get to work easily.

3. Are you just costing the world coordination surplus by forcing high value enterprises to distribute themselves (inefficiently) just far enough apart that they don’t drive up each other’s LVT? That’s a deadweight loss.

This is the brilliant part of Georgism, and the reason I "converted." A well designed LVT imputes the social costs (implied by their economic costs) of the use of land. It then gives the businesses the fully informed choice of how to deploy their capital. It could be that the efficiency you allude to is real, and is worth remaining on high value land. So be it. The business is the best actor to make that decision. On the other hand, if the deadweight loss is lower than the LVT, then the land should be better utilised by another company which would have better utility for its location.

Georgism aligns social costs with business interests in a way no other tax currently does. Meaning that businesses act in their best interests, and in doing so, act in the best interests of society.

good question, the answer is: just as bad as it is with market value and current property taxes.

georgism doesn't solve gentrification. neither does anything else solve N people desiring limited things.

it solves many other issues around it though. the focus of the linked author is fixing the freeriders with lots of capital.

LVT is just another form of attempted centralized control of the market and it will be just as susceptible to government corruption, cronyism, lobbying, etc.

Well right now it happens on 20-30yr cycles which is enough for the people who implement the bad policy that stops the music to get paid and screw off to Idaho or Florida filthy rich leaving the next guy holding the bag.

Maybe if the tempo were increased the cycle would be so flagrantly visible that possible for the general populace to say "no screw you you and the ideas you peddle are bad"

Land means location in this context. Filling in seabed (which are literally termed "water parcels" as a term of art) to make dry land is technically improving it. The straightforward policy recommendation is therefore to exempt reclaimed land from taxation (perfectly in line with a policy of not taxing improvements) for e.g. the first 50 or so years (well past the investment horizon) and begin taxing it as conventional land thereafter -- this comports with George's philosophy for how to handle edge cases like e.g. landscaping that start off as improvements but over a long enough time horizon eventually become regarded as part of the permanent landscape.

Alternatively, reclaimed land is usually a state initiated enterprise in most cases. In those situations, the land can simply be leased out by the state. This is literally what NYC did with Battery Park city!

https://blog.landeconomics.org/p/georgism-through-land-leasi...

> one thing I've always wondered about Georgism and Land Value Tax is whether land supply is actually inelastic

It isn't actually perfectly inelastic, but looking at land reclamation (and erosion!) relative to the ease with which places to live can be added to a locale, the supply of land is relatively inelastic. Even then, that kind of misses the core of George's argument about land value.

George himself distinguished land from labor and capital by looking at it through the lens of whether the economic value of a piece of land needed to be attributable entirely to improvements undertaken on that land. This is his "all natural opportunities or forces," and those are where the constraint lies.

For land reclamation in particular, there are two things to look at: (1) the value attributable to the land reclamation effort; and (2) the residual site value. (2) is land rent, and the Georgist model really is predicated on the relationship the surrounding community has with a piece of land. As it goes, if the community's feelings toward, say, a reclaimed waterfront are tepid, that reclaimed land won't have much value (even if the land reclamation were undertaken at great expense!), and won't command high land rents.

Take the Netherlands as an extreme example of this; something like 17% of the country is reclaimed land. There's not many places you could do that.

Since unreclaimed "land" if it can be owned, can not generate any rents, it won't be taxed at all. But if all the additional value of making it usable were taxed away with a full LVT, it creates very little incentive to reclaim it and make it usable.

I think the best thing to do would be to exempt reclaimed land from land value tax for a period of time. Just like we grant monopolies for patents for a fixed value of time to incentivize sharing of the secrets.

If you got 50 years on reclaimed land without tax, it would heavily incentivize its creation.

> Cities can also lose land. Sometimes this is due to natural causes like erosion, sea level rise,

When there's a full LVT, the transactional sale price for land is very close to $0, because your land rents are taxed away. That leaves only the buildings as something that's lost to the natural disaster, so in many ways this might be far better for property owners.

It would also alleviate many of the challenges with relocation when necessary, from flooding, etc. Since the land is no longer the valuable part of the relationship estate, only the building must be moved/replaced.

You are confusing "location" and "dirt"

When georgists refer to land, they are referring to locations - not dirt.

Locations refer to the sections of physical 2D space that makes up a country. Why 2D when the world is 3D? Because parcels are allocated and segmented based on a 2D model.

Locations are best thought of as being similar to "spectrum" (what typically gets auctioned off every few years to the highest bidder) - there is a total fixed amount. Nobody made the physical space, and nobody will make more of it in the future. It all existed before life even began on this planet, and it will exist long after all of us are dead.

All that is true and I suppose there could be tax policies to encourage land reclamation, but this is more likely to run into environmental concerns. It’s literally an edge case.

The key is that land is accidental in a way - people don’t want “land” per se they want to DO something with the land - and if the valuations are high enough you get multiple uses.

The reality is that in the vast majority of places the valuations just aren’t there.

Random thought, would be it be good to extend land tax to use of all common public goods. E.g. radio frequencies, mining, water, CO2 pollution. Things you own, licensed or consume that take from the common good. Obviously this need constant tweaking E.g. as new tech makes different things valuable.

There was also a community in the deep south. And I once read a case study about a town that tried it in, IIRC, New Mexico.

Full LVT never works. It always ends up shot through with exceptions and loopholes and, in the case study, inducing corruption. And it's all predictable, too, if you know anything about taxation policy and American political culture. For full LVT you'd need to start from a blank slate, not just from a legal perspective but from people's expectations about property ownership.

> I think LVT does have a history in US, e.g Pittsburgh

Yeah, I looked at the map in the article and thought, wait a minute, why is Pennsylvania not colorcoded if Pittsburgh has a land value tax? So the map is only showing states that do? I didnt know there were any states that tax land. But do remember being confused when I moved to Pittsburgh by there being two separate taxes - for land and for property.

I also think that the pittsburgh example shows that LVT is meaningless. All homeowners care about here is their total real estate tax. How it is split between land and property nobody pays attention to.

It's the tax with the most positive impact AFAIK, especially when the other taxes are removed or at least adjusted accordingly.

But it probably is also a cooperation problem, thus we prefer a slow but accelerating apocalypse.

All these graduates need some value from their education after all, and if we reduce doing actively harmful things like the current tax system, others will be superior to us by transforming resources more quickly into waste.

Since the latter process is extremely profitable, and again, so many people have education in optimizing the resources->money->waste pipeline, it would be a luddite and anti-science thought to listen to the science and stop this.

Apart from that, there's a very common and profitable way of getting yield from people's everyday life while also rewarding them: cars.

Live somewhere, but everything you do requires a vehicle.

You'll see so many beautiful places.

But you also have to rant about the evil urban population that pays for your car, gas, roads, parking space and special subsidies.

It would be unlivable out there in the wilderness without this totally natural subsidization.

> If there's one thing economists can agree on, it's that land tax is better than income tax.

This is overstating the case by a lot. There is a lot of discussion about land value taxes being efficient for various means, but there are far fewer economists who would suggest that 100% LVT is a good idea.

It just wouldn’t be popular. It would instantly get filled with holes and exceptions and distorted until it tries to approximate something else.

Some of the high level economic features that 100% LVT advocates want, like forcing people out of their properties when they become too valuable for other uses, are actually extremely unpopular with people who actually live in homes. You would get a wave of cases where grandma got pushed out of her forever home because the LVT got too expensive and a developer bulldozed it to build a strip mall instead. Under the economic model this is a good thing because the land is being used for its best value, but people actually hate this stuff.

Land value taxes are also really bad at progressive taxation. The hardcore LVT people think this is a good thing because they talk about taxes as “disincentivizing extra work” but we all know that taxes have never stopped people from earning money. Going full LVT puts us in ridiculous situations where someone who earns $500K for a tech company but works remote from a luxurious house somewhere where land is not valued much will pay almost nothing in taxes, but a family with modest income who works a trades job (which generally requires being close to a population center) will have to live in some form of housing subject to very high taxation, therefore paying a lot in taxes.

If you still don’t see it, imagine the outrage when people realized that some billionaires are barely paying more in taxes than a family of four in a modest house in a city where land is valuable.

The more you read about Georgism you more you realize how it’s not as popular with economists as it’s portrayed. There is valuing in taxing land, but we already do that! The debates about eliminating other taxes and replacing them all with LVT is something else, and it’s not universally popular at all.

The fact that economically right wing economists like Milton Friedman supported LVT is a great argument against landlord type labelling LVT as far-left and attempting to push the idea outside the Overton window. I think the only valid argument against is it is that a significant LVT would punish those who've worked for their wealth as they've already paid significant income tax. But there are plenty of ways to introduce it gradually. Other arguments boil down to vested interests when I dig into it.

You can say that land tax might be better than income tax but it's hard to argue that both land tax and income tax is better than just income tax. This is the biggest reason why new tax modalities are considered unworkable.

[flagged]

Georgism does not assume that land is scarce, Georgism only assumes that land is in constant supply. E.g. that taxing land does not cause the land to disappear, unlike produced goods, where if you tax a shirt, for example, you get less shirts produced. That's the whole point. Because fewer shirts are produced, the price of each shirt goes up, and this is the mechanism by which taxes can be "passed on" to the buyers of shirts.

On the other hand, structures on the land are produced, they are not in fixed supply. Therefore Georgism does not advocate taxing the structure -- only the land itself.

Because land is in fixed supply, it is impossible to pass on costs to renters of land. In a market economy where prices are set by supply and demand, the only mechanism for sellers to pass on costs is a reduction in supply (since they cannot influence demand), because for all goods (not just land), the sellers always charge the maximum the market can bear. Once this price is established, they cannot "choose" to raise prices, because this suggests they were charging less than the market would bear before. Therefore threats to raise prices even more are always hollow. Landlords are not charities, they always charge the maximum that renters can pay, irrespective of the landlords' own costs.

In that environment, the only way for land rent prices to go up higher is a reduction in supply, as demand curves bend downward. But with land, supply is fixed so reductions in supply are impossible. This is the insight of Ricardo.

Now the argument is that land, encumbered with a tax, is worth less to the land buyer than unencumbered land, so that what happens as property taxes rise is that the land falls in value due to the tax burden. It never falls to zero, of course, even at a one million percent tax rate the land has some positive value, if even just a few pennies -- at which it will be sold, and so the result is the capture of the value of the land by the state, while people get to keep the value of what they produce (the structure on the land), which is not taxed. It's important to recognize that not taxing produced goods is an important part of Georgism also. This incentivizes people to invest in produced goods rather than non-produced goods, and to save by acquiring capital rather than land, as there is no social benefit for people to bid against each other for ownership of something in fixed supply like land, because no matter how many bidders there are, the same amount of land will be supplied every year, regardless of what price it is.

It's actually a really key part of the functioning of the LVT. It is fuel to grow the economy, just like the LVT is the stick that punishes those who hold back the economy by hoarding land.

At least, that's my opinion. Carrot based economic policies have a tendency of working in multiples of the money involved, and penalties a bit less than that.

[dead]

Responding to LVT in this way would require an unprecedented degree of collusion among landlords. That's unlikely to be sustainable, given that a lot of rental inventory is under smaller-scale landlords who will have a much harder time holding units vacant and therefore will be more eager to cave and drop rents back down to their actual market values.

Even if such a cartel could be sustainable (say, because the vast majority of rental units are under a couple of massive property management firms instead of thousands of smallhold landlords), it'd only “work” until people get sick of it and move to other cities, thus producing more vacancies, thus (under LVT) causing those landlords to hemorrhage more money.

Put differently: every landlord already knows every other landlord wants to maximize cash flow, so if landlords were actually capable of coordinating to the degree necessary to raise rents in response to LVT without bankrupting themselves, then why are they not doing that already? Why have they not yet all gotten together and decided “we're all going to charge infinity dollars per month per square foot”?

We also have examples with this. In London shortly after covid the interest rate on mortgages increased, and as a result landlords increased rent, saying it was due to the mortgage paid. This happened throughout the city. It might be though that this happened because the supply is limited, and thus we're in the case where the increase is passed to the tenant

> all land owned by the state, sold to private individuals with [99] year leases.

All land¹ is already owned by the state and leased to the “owners”; the only differences are in how much the state charges those “owners” for rent.

In light of this, the difference between a 100% LVT rate v. the state issuing land leases is just semantics.

----

¹ within any state's territory, of course.

Unless the state is renewing the lease every time you do non-trivial development work or actually undertaking the development work itself as in Singapore, short leases are a rather significant deterrent from making optimal use of the land. If you think developers hold back from developing land because it might be worth more developed differently in ten years' time, wait to see what incentive "the state will repossess it and everything you've built on it in ten years' time" has...

Singapore has freeholds.

I agree this seems like the most realistic way to implement an lvt. A pure lvt would need to have tons of loopholes to convince people to build industry in low value places. If a builder thinks their taxes will skyrocket in the future they will go overseas. The yearly evaluation is ripe for corruption(my city has tons of corruption in property taxes evaluations).

>...the 'taxing progressively higher any property a person directly/indirectly owns after first N properties' are seriously very much needed...

I don't see it in the article, but the progressive nature of the tax is important. It makes it harder for large landowners to pass along the tax, since they must compete with smaller landlords. The net effect should also stabilize land appreciation, which will no longer rise with rapidly increasing wealth disparity as it has in the past couple of decades. And we won't need clunky, patchwork solutions like the ban on home ownership by private equity.

> Suppose you see an area in upward economic trajectory, you buy a bunch of land/properties, then do fuck-all for the next 30 years while the hard work of everyone around that land causes your land's value to increase. You contribute nothing, while benefitting from others' contributions.

In a market economy, if it's a known fact that the area is in an upward economic trajectory, then the future increase in usefullness of that land will already be priced into the land today. You can't just make profit (in expectation) by going and buying land in an area that the market already knows is going to become more productive. Competition amongst investors will drive expected profit to 0.

The only way that you can actually make a profit as a speculator, is by bringing new information to the market. The rest of society thinks this area has no potential, but you have good insight that is costly to figure out, which tells you that the area is going to be more productive. You take a risk and purchase the property. You are compensated for the risk and effort you undertook, and if you're wrong, you are punished by losing money.

> rent seeking

I would worry that you just substitute a rent seeking landlord with a rent seeking government (local?).

What prevents the landlord rent seekers from just charging more rent? Wont they all uniformly raise rent, because they are all uniformly having their taxes increased?

This is the argument again Georgism I have the hardest time countering.

The headlines would be more along the lines of ”Grandma Jones is losing her family farm, because she refuses to turn it into condos and now the land is taxed as if there was development on it”

Georgism ignores how many voters are vehemently anti-development. Just visit any hearing where housing is discussed, people really hate the idea of getting more homes built.

Unfortunately, most of the political changes that I want to see go against some special interest. Examples include liberalizing professional licensing, reducing medical paternalism, and streamlining the litigation system. I can think of a zillion ways to do this, but every one of them cuts out some toll booth with concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, and our political system is not capable of dealing with such things in a reasonable way.

I am very open to be told strategies to fight this more effectively without becoming a full time career activist for years on end for one issue at a time.

This works at the office too.

He literally has an entire section of the essay on this question with two linked articles that explain it in more detail.

The country never has a say. We didn't vote for Liz Truss for example.

I do wish he had called an election though (I suspect he may still do that).

Author here. My actual point is:

- I've spent the last five years dutifully responding to each and every criticism I've found online. My entire original article series was about responding to the three most significant critiques of the movement. On my blog you can find many other such replies to critiques that have come in since then.

- This is important to do for epistemic reasons. However, it has nothing to do with actually changing things. You simply do not change the world by responding to your most hard-bitten critics. That's an entirely orthogonal problem.

Nobody changes their mind by reading a debate on the internet. They change their mind by experiencing things that are different to what they believe.

No, it's more like realizing that advocacy is the least effective form of politics but the easiest to engage in.

disingenuous comments such like these are, in fact, pointless to engage with

No, the goal is to facilitate optimal use of land. The fact that parking lots are inefficient is a coincidence and you will likely find that your "community center" is equally useless. By "unbalancing" this and that and whatever you personally prefer for ideological reasons, you are undermining the whole system.

Too soon to say apparently? They got some laws passed.

Yes, you did. Re-read the end of section III, around the part with the final two color coded images.

Take heart in the knowledge that more people have been pulled out of abject poverty in the last century, thanks to capitalism, than any other time in human history. *Billions* of people can afford food and shelter and clothing now, who would otherwise have died. We have eradicated diseases which have plagued humanity and caused incalculable harm. People are surviving all manner of afflictions like cancer and heart disease. We have harnessed flight, and billions of people can now afford to travel to the other side of the world to begin a new life, or just experience another culture. The internet has enabled the poorest people in the most remote regions of the world to learn advanced knowledge, start businesses, and improve their lives and the lives of their communities.

Anyone who lives in a first world nations lives an infinitely better life than even kings did just a century or two ago. I think it is easy to see the negatives that living in our world entails, but in truth, there are so many positives, and I think it behoves us to remember that.

Most LVT advocates would be in favor of letting these kinds of policies be more market driven.

But say there is an urban area that is 60% parking, by default LVT would probably make that uneconomical and the land owners would be incentivized to redevelop or sell.

A concrete example is I used to work at a warehouse in Boston as a teen that had hundreds of parking spaces… in one of the most housing constrained cities in the whole country in relatively prime real estate. I hope that lot gets turned into condos or something it would be a huge win for the city.

Then you should be able to rebut it. I cannot conceive of your rebuttal, so please lay it out for me.

I find hilarious that you call yourself anarchist and your first order of business is inventing the state's dream tax... invisible, unaudited, with one one Enter key, just for the institution you yourself just called an untameable thief. You didn't kill the tax man, you gave him a black card

Inflation does not hit everyone equally. Poorer people are disproportionately affected.

> One of the problems with many of these tax proposals is that it’s not accompanied by a reduction in taxes. So it’s basically just a tax increase

Done honestly, land tax replaces property tax. The problem of tax increases is orthogonal. Your paragraph doesn't address LVT, it addresses cities being broke.

> It's unclear to me what problem it seeks to solve

Unfairness of existing tax; rent-seeking; insufficient housing supply; unpriced externalities; take your pick.

> unearned wealth creation is common

...and, typically, taxed. I have a Capital Gains liability for mine, which comes due when i sell.

> Should all software engineers return the 50% of their salary that market forces caused to increase and give it to typists?

No; they were presumably taxed on it already; and it's currently dropping, also due to market forces. But that's beside the point. Their income, inflated or not, was earned. LVT is about pricing in an externality that currently goes unpriced, that is deemed to be owned because someone a long time ago planted a flag. We do not need to abolish the concept of land ownership, but we should question assumptions about it.

> I will probably believe it more when...

That's just insane.

> My concern is also aligned with Orwell

No, you merely quoted Orwell out of context. FFS. By all means borrow a pithy line, but don't claim an authority who doesn't agree with you.

Orwell was a passionately radical and progressive. He fought in the Spanish civil war. He wrote "Down And Out In Paris And London". I don't know if he ever wrote about LVT, but my bet is that he would have been strongly in favour of it.

The standard reform we actually pitch is a revenue neutral swap for existing property taxes. The tax we are reducing is the building tax, shifted onto land instead.

Any primary residence carve out creates a whole lot of bad incentives.

1) Families and marriages formally splitting so that each member can keep one residence

2) People selecting their highest value commercial property at cost as their primary residence regardless of practicality to exempt the tax.

3) Many of the best positive effects of the tax on gradually reorganizing urban geography are seriously lessened.

The market would stop it unless there’s an employment monopoly in which case you need more regulation.

If you ever played Monopoly, you were intended to learn a bit about it whether you knew you did or not.

This place has always had a soft spot for Scott Alexander, and in turn he loves to talk about Big Systemic Fixes.

It never ends.

Georgism has been mentioned many, many times in the 15 years you've been on HN. How could you not know about it?

Can you please make your substantive points without snark or resorting to the flamewar style? We're hoping to avoid those things here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry: serious question. What do you mean?

Austin does not have a land value tax.

You are confusing property taxes with land value taxes

It's already unaffordable for the average citizen to own a modest home in much of the country. Only if you worked and then moved to a cheaper place.

Also, I don't think it precludes a sales tax or tariffs, etc.

One of the main points made in TFA is it's important to communicate that single-family homes outside of city centers will tend to see lower taxes if you go from property tax to LVT, because in the city most of the value in your home is the land, but that ratio flips the further you get from the city center.

Obviously this assumes a single tax-base; if you are not in the same tax base of the city, then you're probably still fine, since if everybody has similarly valued lots, the taxes will be shared similarly between them.

LVT is assessed on land value. Your 13 rural acres aren't insanely valuable and would not be assessed a million dollars a year under a Georgian model.

Then your land would likely be priced at the nominal amount per acre x 13 since the demand for that area is low and diffuse. Not a horrible outcome, and, could encourage you to make the land "productive" to at least cover the tax. Tree farms are lovely.

Isn't the idea that it's a land value tax, and not just a land tax. The land in your example is not particularly valuable. Unless I have misunderstood the idea.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

You've been here a long time, and it's dismaying to see a longstanding user degrade the site like this.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

(I suppose I'd better add that this has nothing to do Georgism. You're welcome to make substantive points thoughtfully, but this was not that.)

[flagged]

Except... it isn't. You see, there's a limit how much a person is willing to pay in rent and since the tax puts pressure on non-productive uses of land, either the market gets flooded with land or with rapid development, which brings down the prices of rent. The only problem the author has is that it mistook the mechanisms which it will work, prices will come down because supply will go up, not because they pay less.

In most cases LVT would be the same or lower than current property taxes. Only empty lots would pay more.

TFA literally shows how it is better for homeowners

Carbon tax was great for me. I made money. Maybe you should have used less carbon.