> So you collect the money for the infrastructure project by land "tax" before you begin with construction.
No, you use land taxes after completion to pay back the debt incurred to create the infrastructure. Adjustments of valuations based on the advantages of the infrastructure result in a greater burden of that repayment on those that receive the greatest benefit, but everyone contributes.
Or you'd have to say that the military is part of your "last resort". But then you need to raise enough money to pay for all your last resorts. If LTV is your method, the numbers may not work (as others have said here).
Or, instead of raising all that money, you could say that we don't need that big of a military. That's not an insane position. But using desire for an LVT as the basis for deciding on the size of your military seems to me to be putting the cart before the horse.
If you mean defence part of it. Invading other countries is likely profitable for select groups so who else should pay for it if it gets approved.
But let's focus on defence. It's not that much individual people, who need protection, because they can flee to another country in case of war.
What actually needs protection is property which you cannot take with you. And voila that happens to be real estate (locational value).
So who should be footing the bill for defence more than owners of land who are desperate for its protection when shit hits the fan?
Similar argument can be used to justify LVT for funding of other protective services such as police and firefighters.
No, the military is there to protect the people, not just the wealth. So your post seems like it's trying to rationalize a not-up-for-debate position, rather than actually reasoning based on reality. Georgism claims to be motivated by compassion for those who are at the mercy of rentiers, but your position shows an immense lack of compassion. "Let them flee to a different country" is the most cold-hearted thing I've heard in a long time.
Second: that wasn't my point. My point was, let's see the plan where you actually produce $800 billion (or whatever the military budget is) just from a land tax. Let's see what the actual rates would have to be, and what the effects of those rates would be.
If your military is too expensive and not covered by LVT, just go ahead and add a specific tax to fund your military. If you can justify that it'll protect everybody then people will be fine with it.
Idea of LVT as a single or zero tax is a political move to get you thinking about better government funding schemes. You should think of "paying for specific services" instead of "pooling money and allocating them according to wishes of select few" as is the case of current tax systems.
You know, if you had said that up front, we could have had a more productive discussion. But everybody's been saying "This is The Right Way(TM) to do taxes!" When non-true-believers point out all the problems, then we get "it's just a talking point".
In fact, I suspect that a number of LVT supporters on this thread don't agree with you. I suspect that several of them believe that it's the answer.
Both snidane and I assumed that there would be danger to civilians in case of an invasion. The invader doesn't have to intend genocide for that to be true.
This is absolute nonsense. It's somewhat true for roads, provided you can efficiently price every single piece of road (which you can't). But it's horribly wrong for things like the police or fire fighting.
They are efficient at not consuming too many resources while producing a lot of value? Probably shouldn't pay much then.
But this applies not only to big tech companies but to individuals too - they shouldn't pay much if they don't consume or extract from others.
Taxes are only a last-resort mechanism to raise money in absence of proper funding model.
If you can price government provided services appropriately then you don't need taxes.
Eg. to build infrastructure (roads, networks) you can predict that it'll benefit owners of nearby properties. They will benefit by landfall increase to the value of their property because the land on which it stands becomes more valuable.
So you collect the money for the infrastructure project by land "tax" before you begin with construction.
("tax" because it's not a tax but payment for exclusive land ownership rights)