Why land value tax seems obviously better than property tax

have started exploring Land Value Tax and it's striking me with its obviousness different from property tax! it's a higher tax, but only on the value of the land itself, not additions so it makes it unprofitable to speculate and way less profitable to landlord

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Dec 18, 2021

Policy 15: Land Value Tax! This probably belongs near the top. I'm just starting to investigate it, but if it checks out, it's the no-brainest no-brainer ever. Solves 5+ problems at once (housing, labour, inequality, stagnation➔innovation, govt debt) astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-re…

Dec 19, 2021

when the rich buy goods or services this increases the amount of capital available for making those Tesla could never have gotten to making sedans without first selling roadsters to rich people when the rich buy land ........this gives money to whoever owned it before 🤷‍♀️

when the rich invest money in entrepreneurship (via angel/VC or indirectly/acausally via the stock market), that obviously makes it more possible for people to try creating new companies

Venkatesh Rao ☀️ @vgr · Jun 28, 2020

The word “invest” has 2 distinct meanings in relation to capital: Invest (1): Spend money to build a capability. Example: a bridge, a factory, a mansion. Invest (2): Spend money to acquire a formal stake in an existing capability. Example: stock, bond, lien. 2 now dominates 1

even when the rich invest in commodities, this still benefits people (I read something once that depicted someone opening up a magical window to a developing country through which they traded corn, & buy-low sell-high meant they were usefully moving it to a scarcer future)

when the rich buy land ........this gives money to whoever owned it before 🤷‍♀️ nothing is accomplished by this! no brighter future is being created it merely incentivizes speculation... *on something everyone needs to live*

to be clear, this is different from buying the stuff *on* the land, like the building or whatever, in which case you're incentivizing building, but as this article investigates, most value of urban land is the land "location, location, location" astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgis…

part of me is like "but if this is so obvious then why aren't we already doing it?" and I'm sure there are various nefarious reasons why we aren't but yo, the obvious isn't obvious til it's obvious!

priya rose @Prigoose · Jun 16, 2019

Corridors were invented in 1597 Everything around you was once a concept in a human's imagination

found myself wondering if the reason the idea hasn't caught on was in part because many countries had property qualifications > e.g. only landowners could vote but > (because the only tax for such countries was the property tax) so hmmmmmmm en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffrage