I agree that a land value tax is great. But it won't, by itself, change how much development happens. That's the whole point of a land value tax: the opportunity costs between different land uses are unaffected by a land value tax, that's why it doesn't have any deadweight losses.

With or without a land value tax, if you don't use your land you lose the difference between leaving your land fallow and leasing it out to the highest bidder. The opportunity costs are exactly the same.

And Ironically across the sea in UK, to a smaller extent Ireland (and I'm not sure perhaps may be elsewhere too). There's been a concerted social media push by some folks to reduce inheritance taxes and portray them as bad. One visible proponent was Jeremy Clarkson, you know the large farm owner, it's quite easy to see why he would benefit.

Most states tax land at the time of sale and annually. It's just that the millage is low for raw land.

Taxing something based on hypothetical value is an extremely dangerous proposition. Why not tax people an imputed income tax based on what we thing a person's labor is worth? It makes more sense to tax money when money is actually made.

Land value taxes are fundamentally opposed to freedom and liberty by implicitly forcing an owner to do use the land for use that others want based on hypothetical uses.

The elites will go full throttle on "bullshit jobs" — after all, if unemployment hits 50%, who’s going to consume their crappy products? Give people a UBI? Hah! So they can start taking an active interest in politics? AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN.

Agreed. I was in France recently, and it's hard to overstate how much raw disagreement there is between the people there. You think left vs right is bad in the US, you haven't tried 4 or 5 different microshifted pov on either side, all completely in opposition with anything but their own candidate.

People there talk about needing a new constitution. Elections won't fix France, and neither will economic policy. The problem is fragmentation.

Just watch tomorrow.

Sadly their more spicy policies are optional if asked to form a coalition.

The UK tried it as part of the 1909 "People's Budget", coming into force two years later at an annual rate of 1p in the (pre-decimal) £, so about 0.4%.

There's an open question over whether anyone ever thought it would actually raise significant amounts of money, or if it was primarily intended as a tool to force a confrontation with the House of Lords. If the latter, it certainly did the job and helped establish the supremacy of the elected House of Commons over the unelected Lords.

In terms of revenue generation, though, it was much less successful - at the time it was abolished in 1920, the costs of surveying and valuing land had outweighed the amount of income generated so it was a net negative overall.

Singapore has a pseudo LVT in the form of property taxes with land value capture.

Taiwan.

A tax that prices 80 year old grandmas out of their homes and the whole area they've lived in all their lives is going to be extremely politicially unpopular.

1) LVT suppresses rent growth

2) LVT can fund reverse mortgages

> Any discussion about taxes is a complete non-starter. France needs less taxes, not more. Their entire society and business environment is completely taxed out and they still can't afford their public welfare and benefits. They need to reduce public spending in order to maybe one day, also reduce taxes.

Yes, most developed countries are overtaxed. They should get rid of nearly all of them and replace them with a high LVT. Near-zero regulatory complexity, paperwork, enforcement burden, or economic distortions.

> lots of elderly people can't afford the taxes on the house and property that they've lived in their entire lives?

I think exempting your primary residence from LVT (or capping it at the value of UBI, in that proposal) would not defeat the purpose of LVT, and would eliminate such problems.

Nothing. Because LVT is never proposed for non-rent seeking homeowners who live in their own home.

Singapore uses a system that is economically ~identical. Nearly all the land is owned by the state and leased to private parties on 99 year leases who pay "land rents" to the state.

An LVT is a way to produce the same economic effects without the starting point of "the state owns the land," which is hard to transition to from "the state does not own the land."

As I understand it, the point is that land rent is a large and stable rent, where taxing it has few supply-side side-effects, not that land rent is the only rent.

The second paragraph of the Georgism Wikipedia page mentions other rents,

> Georgism is concerned with the distribution of economic rent caused by land ownership, natural monopolies, pollution rights, and control of the commons, including title of ownership for natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g., intellectual property).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

The passing costs on to renters is a bit of a fallacy. Rental price is market related, with the obvious question being, if a new tax would make them raise rents, why don't they just raise the rents right now and turn a larger profit?

Fact is that the rent is currently set at what the market is willing and able to pay, regardless of what the cost to the owners is.

It's an interesting topic. So let's say many people get laid off as automation takes over. If we have UBI that covers mostly bare necessities (as an example), shouldn't supply and demand stay basically the same? Or demand even lowers if people can't afford what they previously did.

If people have more money (or population grows) so that demand grows while supply stays the same, prices will rise and find a new equilibrium where people can again afford less and therefore buy less.

I'm not sure if it's an option to just leave most of the population to starve either so what's the alternative to some kind of social security or UBI? Long ago, a factory called "nature" used to provide relatively more of our needs, but that's not feasible today. But this quickly gets philosophical and political, of course.

In any case, finite resources are finite regardless if we have UBI or not.

Your version would instead discourage zoning land for any productive use. Which is an issue in a democracy, where the same people being taxed elect the people who influence zoning

In a dictatorship your scheme would work, in a democracy it would just prevent even more economic activity

“ it turns landowners into renters from the government.”

With the caveat that “the government” should somehow represent the will of society (I know, basic democracy seems like a big ask today), this seems like how it should be. The land belongs to us humans together, and if someone wants to control it exclusively, there should be something in return for the rest of us.

> Wouldn't a better solution be to more heavily tax voluntary vices? Gambling, drugs, prediction markets

That's just taxing the poor.

Wouldn't it also screw over poor people in gentrified neighborhoods who had no control over the situation? People would be forced to sell early or risk all their savings drying up and then being forced to sell anyhow.

> more heavily tax voluntary vices

Australia is doing that with tobacco. It worked in that it has drastically cut smoking rates and deaths, but hasn't worked it has also made the market more lucrative for smugglers/organised crime. Illegal tobacco avoids the tax, so it can be sold at a lower price whilst still raking in the profits. Today 80% of tobacco in Australia is illegal, with a consequent 80% hit to tax revenue.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-29/expensive-cigarettes-...

The point shouldn’t be to just raise money simply by taxing things that you personally think are ‘bad’. This is the sort of pointless politics that’s being going on for too long.

Instead, the approach should be to diagnose what is wrong with our economies (and maybe our societies) and then use the tools we have, including taxation, to address those issues. This is where people are with (variously) land taxes, or wealth tax, or others.

(Whole societies and economies aren’t struggling because of people gambling, smoking, and drinking.)

The problem with taxing vices too heavily is that it incentives a black market to emerge... and all the crime that comes with it. Australia is a great example of a place where this is causing a lot of problems.

> Wouldn't a better solution be to more heavily tax voluntary vices?

Buy a pack of cigs in New York (I think it's almost $20, now). Most of that is tax. People vape, a lot, here. I know that pre-rolled cigarettes have been heavily taxed in many countries, for decades, so they sell loose tobacco and rolling papers.

Gambling also tends to get taxed a lot.

There's lots of folks that think prostitution should be legalized, so it can be taxed. The same argument was made for pot. I'm pretty sure that legal pot is heavily taxed. I have heard that illegal pot is cheaper.

It's not an easy solution. If it was easy, it would have been done, a long time ago.

"There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong."

"The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake."

-H. L. Mencken