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For what it's worth, it's hard to see a Land Value Tax as being unfair, it's extremely hard to hide your taxable assets, and it works well for people as well as corporations.



Land Value tax can be extremely cruel if you happen to be poor living in a neighborhood that suddenly became popular. You are basically forced to sell your home (also not in the best of positions - you need to sell fast and can't wait out for the peak price) and move out because you can not afford to live next to some rich person. While income tax and VAT are proportional to what you earn and consume, and can vary easily with income/consumption level, changing housing is much harder, and can put people in very bad situations through no fault of their own.


I would say that this argument seems to imply that no neighborhood should ever grow (for its existing residents would be priced out.)

This, however, is a fallacy-- the higher valuation of the land implies a larger return on the land, consistent with increasing the amount of people who can live there. (i.e. replacing a small house with an apartment building.) This allows more people of modest means to live in this neighboorhood, instead of less.

Compare to the Palo Alto model, where land never appreciates in taxable value-- people are able to stay in their home, but only those who were lucky enough to buy at the right time. The overall capacity of the city does not grow, and people are priced away from buying into the city.


Land-value taxation has much better incentives. Income taxes provide an incentive to be "poor", while land-value taxes provide an incentive to not use valuable space.




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