> The only people this is appealing for are people who fancy themselves analytically minded economists with no interest in the practical humanity

Most states in the US do not have Prop-13-like laws and get by just fine. For the few states that do, they are less restrictive taxation-wise than California's.

Prop 13 has completely distorted the housing market; it is, perhaps unintuitively, a co-cause of CA's housing unaffordability issues. (Prop 13 discourages new development, and is an enabler of housing NIMBYism.)

We of course shouldn't just abolish Prop 13 overnight, or lots of people will get displaced, also overnight. But we should absolutely reform it and phase it out over time, while building more housing, as fast as we can (something that will be a little bit easier to do as all the NIMBYs realize that if they keep shooting down housing projects, their property taxes are gonna go up a ton).

This is how the government countered the people demanding the end of debtor’s prison. And it’s not “transferred on death” it’s whenever the house is sold whether the owner is alive or not. Property tax is just rent paid to the government and the taxman always gets their dues one way or the other.

The linked study in OP shows that the single biggest beneficiary of Prop 13 on a category basis was vacant land.

Most of the other states have not seen the rise in population growth and real estate values seen in CA. There are still places where homes are like 250k or less. There is also way more value drop off outside the metros in most other states with high cost cities such as MA or NY. You could be 30 mins drive from boston in a great 400k home. Try and find that 30 mins out from SF or LA. There just isn't really that fall off in california that you might expect from real estate markets elsewhere. It is like the rising tide has lifted all boats.

>A land tax means that you don't own property but rent it.

A few comments:

1) we already have property taxes so I don't understand the objection; a land value tax is just a property tax with a different way of assessing value.

2) I don't think this idea of "not owning property, only renting it" is actually that crazy if you take a long term view over it. Land is a finite, shared resource. We already acknowledge that you don't have absolute rights over land that you own in the same way you do over, say, a toaster. We place all kinds of restrictions on what you can do with it, we tax its ownership, we have eminent domain laws, etc.

The idea of treating land as a pure asset has had a lot of negative social effects and ultimately will lead to a kind of neo-feudalism where the megarich own everything and the underclasses are perpetual renters.

If you can own land, what happens when all the land is owned but newly born people need some?

If you're a professional landowner and investor, and the taxes on one parcel of land in your portfolio went up because someone built Disneyland near it, this is fine. You might want to sell that parcel out of your portfolio now; or you might want to do something like build a hotel on it catering to Disneyland-visitors, which will earn you enough in profits to more than make up for the higher land tax.

If you're an ordinary person who owns the home you live in, and they build Disneyland next to it, most of the ways that the value of the land your home is on increases are useless or actively harmful to you. It's actively bad for you if you have to sell your family home and move somewhere else because you can no longer afford the taxes on it. You're probably not a professional real estate developer who knows how to effectively use the land as an investment, after all, you just wanted to live somewhere stable.

In fact, the increase of value of your land and the consequent tax increase under Georgist land value schemes, would be so bad for you, that you might decide to protestthe construction of that Disneyland to begin with. This is typically called "NIMBYism", and it happens all the time even under current property-tax schemes because the negative externalities of many different types of construction are bad for the quality of life of existing homeowners.

Liquidity is a value of its own. 10% equity in a $1M non-fungible residentially-zoned lot is much less valuable than $100K in cash, ready to wire at a moment's notice.

Why is it assumed true that individuals do not contribute to the increasing appeal of their neighborhood?

What if I voted for pro-theme park politicians? Or what if I volunteered my time to clean up the community parks and shared space? What if I helped improve the reputation of my child’s school by volunteering and donating to the music department?

My taxes fund the maintenance of public infrastructure and services, and my actions support the civic good. If I vote to be cheap or generous with taxes, or choose to be lazy or ambitious in community support, that all contributes to the desirability of the land around me.

What if the person who owns the land is working class? That’s who property taxes hit the hardest, working class people with a mortgage.

If you exclude others from a rectangle of land, you are imposing that exclusion on others and the others are due consideration. The rest of the property stack is good -- improvements require investment, investment requires returns, so binding the returns to the investment is important and creates incentives for good stewardship and skin-in-the-game decision making etc -- it's "just" the foundation that is problematic.

Georgists want to tackle this with a Land Value Tax, I tend to think it would be difficult to make this robust against highly motivated attack and the better approach is long-term leases with similar duration to building depreciation schedules. In either case, the idea is that capital appreciation of the dirt (which is really capital appreciation of the right to exclude others from the dirt) goes to public coffers, improvement value goes to the people who made the improvements. That's fair.

Of course, there's also the question of how to get there from here, and one way to do it without guillotines would be to tie the extraordinary tax treatment of property to conversion into a 99 year lease (and then, after 99 years, new issuance could target the ~30 year range). "Sure, you can have your 1031 capital gains tax exemption and pay no tax on the money you obtained by holding on to the right to exclude others from an increasingly popular rectangle of land, but only if you sign up to eventually be part of the solution rather than part of the problem."

They can't use the same land anymore.

We’re all on this world for a little while and then we die and leave behind the detritus of our lives.

For some people that’s a house full of crap that their kids need to clean out after the funeral and for others that’s a dilapidated apartment building that’s soon to be condemned and will require asbestos abatement and demolition.

That's what Georgeism is?

What if your only relationship with land is that you rent an apartment, but from that apartment you build a $10M/year revenue social network? How should that be taxed? Should it at all?

I'm pretty certain Henry George would be very happy with pigovian taxes like a carbon tax as well.

Income tax it's definitely something he'd not prefer because it reduces incentive to do something we want you to do. Better to tax windfalls and undesirable things

My understanding is that Georgism opposes the kinds of tax you mention.

I don't mind land value tax! Like you, I think it's one of many valid kinds of tax that a government can put on its citizens to achieve various social goals. Hence, I am not a Georgeist.

The onus is on you to describe some mechanism by which abolishing almost all taxation will magically fix wealth discrepancy.