The disruption and confidence-in-property-rights effects are potentially real, but mostly apply to sudden, high LVT.
Well, no. It applies to sudden SIGNALING OF INTENT to a high LVT. Any move in this direction, even if nominally gradual, will immediately devalue the ownership of land. Nobody is going to believe in a long-term plan—near-future governments want the money now, and will accelerate it.
In a lot of human public-choice affairs, the slippery slope is real, and everyone knows it.
More accurately, it applies to a signalling of intent of confiscating other investments; we don’t actually care if people panic about land being confiscated because buying land (rather than improving it) isn’t productive in any way. (We may also want to partially redistribute resources towards the losers of the land confiscation to compensate for the lost investment—that is, we may want to the government to buy the land rather than confiscate it, though it would be bought at lower than market prices.)
It is weird to claim that the perceived consequence of planned incrementalism is “near-future governments want the money now, and will accelerate it”. The actual problem is almost certainly the opposite: near-future governments will want to cut taxes, since cutting taxes is incredibly popular, and will therefore stop or reverse the planned incremental LVT.
we don’t actually care if people panic about land being confiscated because buying land (rather than improving it) isn’t productive in any way.
Maybe I misunderstand. I haven’t seen the proposal that only applies to buying undeveloped land—all I’ve seen talks about the land value of highly-developed areas. You can’t currently buy (or build) a building without also buying the land under it. As soon as the land becomes valueless (because the government is taking all the land’s value), the prospect of buying/building/owning/running structures on that land gets infinitely less appealing.
Well, no. It applies to sudden SIGNALING OF INTENT to a high LVT. Any move in this direction, even if nominally gradual, will immediately devalue the ownership of land. Nobody is going to believe in a long-term plan—near-future governments want the money now, and will accelerate it.
In a lot of human public-choice affairs, the slippery slope is real, and everyone knows it.
More accurately, it applies to a signalling of intent of confiscating other investments; we don’t actually care if people panic about land being confiscated because buying land (rather than improving it) isn’t productive in any way. (We may also want to partially redistribute resources towards the losers of the land confiscation to compensate for the lost investment—that is, we may want to the government to buy the land rather than confiscate it, though it would be bought at lower than market prices.)
It is weird to claim that the perceived consequence of planned incrementalism is “near-future governments want the money now, and will accelerate it”. The actual problem is almost certainly the opposite: near-future governments will want to cut taxes, since cutting taxes is incredibly popular, and will therefore stop or reverse the planned incremental LVT.
Maybe I misunderstand. I haven’t seen the proposal that only applies to buying undeveloped land—all I’ve seen talks about the land value of highly-developed areas. You can’t currently buy (or build) a building without also buying the land under it. As soon as the land becomes valueless (because the government is taking all the land’s value), the prospect of buying/building/owning/running structures on that land gets infinitely less appealing.