I disagree with the fundamental premise on both parts.

> "You didn't do anything to make that happen" is a useful generality and not a prescription of every single individual in the community.

In fact, everyone does contribute, positively or negatively, to their community. Either through involvement or absenteeism, or somewhere in between.

> Your fixation on this point reveals a very fundamental misunderstanding of the goal of an LVT

The goal is obvious and not a misunderstanding. The goal is a bad goal, precisely because it punishes positive involvement in the community. To improve the community means to increase your own cost of staying.

Imagine someone wants to avoid displacement due to their taxes increasing beyond their ability to pay. I don’t know why they would want to stay in their economically “inefficient” house, but perhaps it’s because home is where the heart is and they have sentimental attachment to their home.

If they want to keep your housing costs down, the best thing to do is poison the ground (metaphorically or literally) because it decreases the “productivity” of the land. Box stores in America famously pay low property taxes because building a box store actually decreases property values - they’re expensive to demolish and limited in utility, while being an eye sore that makes the neighborhood higher traffic and less undesirable. Mississippi as a state is cheap because the voters used the government to destroy public services - it’s in someone’s best interest to do this in a Georgism world if they don’t want to be regularly displaced.

Quite the contrary, it rewards positive involvement in the community and it punishes anti social involvement in the community (leaving your lot empty, letting your neighbors create a vibrant community you do not contribute to, and then selling at a large profit anyway). The reward is the taxes you're not paying on the positive productivity you're bringing to your community (which is how we're currently punishing those who make their communities nicer).

Please just look at the pictures and decide if it peaks your interest enough to read the post: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-five-yea...

Link with highlighted text (It's a single paragraph): https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-five-yea...

> If they want to keep your housing costs down, the best thing to do is poison the ground (metaphorically or literally) because it decreases the “productivity” of the land

Yes, if you collapse multi-dimensional problems into a single dimension you can find many logical oddities. If I wanted an easier time finding a doctors appointment, I should murder every non healthcare professional in my local area until all of their calendars are totally clear. Wanting cheaper healthcare is evil! You're really saying things for the sake of saying them and I'm not going to engage further or explain to you when you're saying irrelevant things.

> it’s in someone’s best interest to do this in a Georgism world if they don’t want to be regularly displaced.

Under the majority of proposed LVT policies (and the ones I support) the vast majority of American housing would see a decrease in net property taxes paid since the majority of American's Building / Land value ratio is orders of magnitude higher than the average parking lot, land speculator, etc.