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

Also Georgism is 100% LVT -> A land tax alone has been the recommendation of many economists before and after George - From Smith, Riccardo, Mill to Friedman. Across classical, neoclassical, Keynesian, Austrian schools. If there's one thing economists can agree on, it's that land tax is better than income tax.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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