You're not "forced" to sell it. You just have to pay a tax relative to its actual market value, as opposed to paying a tax on only the value you purchased it for plus negligible increases in your property tax percentage based on that rate.

Just pay the tax, and you're good to go, even if you never develop it. The idea of a LVT is to make it less palatable to let the land go unused or under-utilized.

I don't want you to have to leave your land or be forced to sell it. But you should be paying taxes based on the actual value of it. Not on what it was 30 years ago when someone built it. California's proposition 13 is hiding actual values of many wealthy people's homes from the tax man; being able to transfer them without triggering new valuations used in taxes is a key problem.

> I would be forced to sell the land that I want to keep and sell later for appreciation value.

This is the literal point of the LVT: to make it more expensive to hold land unused for speculative purposes, and thus incentivize doing something productive with it instead.

If you want to go property rights absolutism that’s fine, as long as on my land I can build a five story condo building.

I think the provocative thing about Georgism in the present context is, while NIMBYs have gotten a lot of mileage out of a theory of community interest in keeping uses low-intensity that supersedes the rights of owners, we can actually articulate the same kind of community interest in making those uses intense and productive. A vacant lot is anathema to a vibrant block in the same way that an industrial plant is anathema to a residential neighborhood.

It would be fine from my perspective if those two simply cancelled out and we reverted to more individual autonomy.

No one is forcing you to sell it. There will be a tax on the land based on the value of the land. If the value of your land goes up, and you haven't developed it, then you haven't done ANYTHING to actually increase the value of that land.

Thus the equitable way to distribute any wealth gained is to give it back to society, since the "public" helped give your land value.

This is the most disingenuous argument I have ever heard.

there's a finite amount of land and taxing it doesn't reduce the amount of land there is. if you tax services there will be fewer services. if you tax goods there will be less goods.

land is both inelastic and valuable and that is why land tax is perfectly economically efficient and creates no deadweight loss.

the fact that it is also necessary for life and production while being finite is what makes it a moral imperative to redistribute land rents to the proper owners (i.e. society and not an individual, who pays society for the right to a local monopoly over a piece of land).

for me lvt is not about building condos, in some areas it will incentivise that, in other it wont. it's a fundamental moral and philosophical issue on par with slavery; it's about transitioning away from a feudal model and towards a freer market and more participatory and empowering society.

for the true believer lvt must replace other taxes, and in theory all taxes come out of rent, so abolition of sales or income tax will increase lvt even more, in a virtuous cycle.

the appropriate amount to tax land is as close to 100% as you can get.

It's interesting to list out all the entities that would be immune to such an LVT and why.

> Just another socialist redistribution scheme.

Yeah, praised by socialists like Milton Friedman.

Granted I think LVT is kind of dumb too (saying this as a communist, fyi). I think the incentives it sets up are interesting and could make sense in a lot of cases in a market system, however short of a country run by an oligarchy of economists, it seems to me nobody would willingly turn over their property so such a system. Also, I can't help but think about how value assessment would actually work...seems it would be an easily corruptable process.