It’s an interesting idea, and I like it in principal, but I also like living in my house on my land knowing that I need to give permission before someone can buy it.
So basically you lock down the price in an auction once every 7 years giving you enough predictability and time to justify your investment.
This is how these groups operate in present day already
1. businesses renting space in cities - they lock down rent for say 10 years
2. individual apartment renters - price is usually locked down for 1 year
3. domain name system - you lock down piece of land in "string space" for a year
4. electromagnetic spectrum auctions (LTE, 5g spectrum bands for telephone companies) every several years usually when new technology is deployed
5. technology patents locked down for 20 years
6. Government LAND to LANDOWNERS - locked down once, with expiration time at infinity and passable down through generations
It helps to see what Georgists actually want to achieve with LVT - proper auction mechanism for something everybody needs and there is scarcity of it - land.
For political reasons they attack it from the position of tax, not from the position of an auction. Which makes it a bit convoluted and confusing unfortunately.
In the US there is $16T currency, $38T stocks plus a roughly equal amount in corporate internal valuation, ~$30T small business, $33T houses, $17T commercial real estate, plus commodities, any other mark to market securities, vehicles, collectibles, intangibles like copyrights, patents, operating licenses, and really anything else that a court can adjudicate possession of.
I would expect somewhere around $250-500T with defensive valuation, so tax rates <1%. If your house is worth $1M, it’ll cost you $800/mo. By comparison, a US top 5%-er pays the same in property tax, plus income tax of about $7000/mo.
And it seems amazingly efficient. List and pay. If you like it, pay more. If you want to sell, just pay less and somebody will inquire. Market liquidity and order book depth transparency would be amazing. Capitalizations would be accurate for liquidation rather than estimated by float pricing.
The big monkey wrench I see is privacy. I believe this can be solved with zero-knowledge proofs. Maybe this is my next project.
So if I don't value it highly enough myself, someone else can come in and take the land. But the house is on the land. So I'm going to have to adjust the price to the actual price of the house + land, or someone else will outbid me and take it, thereby getting both the land and the house.
Or else, when they outbid me, they only get the land but I keep the house. But how's that actually going to work in practice?
The net effect is that this scheme stops being Georgism. It becomes a tax on the total value of the land plus improvements.
Mansions and expensive property would be always on the market.
This notion of copyright has basically destroyed the idea of folklore in the last few hundred years, relegating it from one of the main areas of human expression to a corner of the internet.
I think even 20 + 20 copyright is problematic. People should be free to use characters and stories while they are still relevant, and create their own variations that may even become more popular than the 'original creation' (in quotes because so much of creativity rests on the shoulder of others).
1. Copyright that's not assigned value defaults to the public domain; this provides an avenue for copyright to devolve to public domain immediately which does not currently exist;
2. Copyright that's no longer maintained by its owner devolves to the public domain (similar to 1), taking it out of "copyright limbo";
3. Any group with sufficient resources can take a copyright into the public domain as a public good, e.g., "we" could buy Wolverine into the public domain;
4. Copyright can be maintained for very long durations for entities that choose to do so;
5. The ever-increasing cost means that eventually the copyright "buys itself out", that is, when the COST is assessed at 100%, the Fed has sufficient funds to simply buy the copyright outright (this is a choice, btw, the Fed could happily accept 130% of COST!); and,
6. Absurd copyright lengths no longer universally apply.
I think (but I've not completely thought this through) that such a system could help with patent litigation. Specifically, consortia of entities can buy out a patent if the patent is weaponized. Mind you, the patent holder can no longer "squat" on a patent for free: they must pay the COST of a patent portfolio! This naturally handles the asymmetry of costs between NPEs and regular old entities.
If you like 100 years of ownership, set the rate at 1% per year, calculated on the copyright/patent holder's self-assessed price. Every century, the polity collects 100% of the value. What the polity does with the money collected is up to the polity.
Any sizable company could easily bully any number of people out of their homes to acquire the land. It's hard to overstate how much people would hate this.
This idea is the problem. Taken to its logical conclusion, we get feudalism, where those who don't own land will forever pay rent the landed gentry, only because they were fortunate enough inherit land.
Property tax fixes this somewhat, but California decided to weaken that with Prop 13, and now is approaching feudalism. For example, in the apartment I lived in California, the rent paid would cover the landlord's property tax obligations in a month, and the remaining rent is the landlord's (minus whatever costs they have for maintenance).
Idea that you can buy a monopoly is generally a bad idea.
Consider what the government would do if a huge oil deposit was found under your house.
There were years, under Prop 13, when many people's houses -- that is, their land -- rose in value by more than their gross salary. Not their savings, but their gross wages!
And Prop 13 keeps taxes artificially low, driving the prices up. Normal turnover doesn't happen, so retirees stay in family-sized homes close to jobs they no longer fill, and young families are forced to "drive until they qualify" for a mortgage, and every workday thereafter.
Occasionally one sees a diner in a skyscraper neighborhood. Under LVT, their incentive would be to find another place to conduct business, perhaps on the 1st floor of a taller building, and let the site be redeveloped to meet current needs.
This idea could still be workable for unimproved land
Obviously you'd have to keep tracking the improvements over time.
It's called Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax (COST).
Land owner would self-assess the value of assets they possess, pay a tax on that value. The owner would be required to sell the asset to anyone willing to purchase them at this self-assessed price.
If you value the land high for any reason and want to keep it, you must self-assess the value higher than anyone is willing to pay for it and pay tax for it. If value it too low, someone might buy it.