Comment by dullcrisp
1 year ago
You can fit a bodega inside a skyscraper. The bodega owner wouldn’t be paying the land value tax.
But if there were a free-standing bodega on land where you could build a skyscraper, you don’t think it should be taxed the same as a skyscraper?
A skyscraper can be built practically everywhere. Thus the same tax for everybody everywhere. Everybody can hang a Van Gogh painting on their wall, thus every wall to be taxed the same.
Right. This is one of the many flaws in the LVT.
Someone now has to make a subjective decision about the theoretical highest and best use of the land at a given point in time, and the last people I want making that decision are local bureaucrats.
Why would tax forcing towards maximum efficiency or value creation from land use be the right objective?