Comment by andrewla

> Did you read the wikipedia page about LVT which describes how? Which part is impossible?

The wikipedia article describes some processes, including assessments, regressions, and interpolation from fixed landmarks.

Those are all means of estimating something, which you can call the "unimproved land value" if you are so inclined, but what exactly is the thing that they are estimating? How do you know if they are accurate?

You can implement a framework based on any of those measures, but crucially as above they are not an LVT, they are a "proportionate tax on total value based on extrapolating previous sales minus human estimates of improvement value according to a rubric" for example, and have different advantages and disadvantages than an LVT even theoretically, so every time you make an argument that "LVTs have such-and-such a property" you have to expand the definition of LVT to be the specific case and verify whether that property makes sense in the context of that particular methodology. As a shorthand it becomes useless.

My point is not that there are attempts to have an LVT that are approximations of the ideal reality; my point is that this ideal simply does not exist in any sort of cogent way so you might as well tax based on how much God loves the property or how many potatoes you could grow on the land.