Which means if it is heavy (or even noticeable) for optimally extractive landuse, it is crushing for any substantially less profitable use.
The government is still free to ban or tax certain uses they don't like.
Well, no, its very different than having no LVT, and in a way which encourages, rather than discourages, wealth concentration; given the context in which it was suggested (specifically, in response to options for reducing wealth concentration being sought), that's a pretty salient difference.
> The government is still free to ban or tax certain uses they don't like.
A tax that makes certain uses generally economically impractical, as a heavy LVT would be, is effectively identical to a ban on those uses.
Could you please explain that?
LVT doesn't make any difference to land use. But it does make land owning expensive. So you could suggest it as a way to reduce wealth concentration. I don't see the contradiction?
> A tax that makes certain uses generally economically impractical, as a heavy LVT would be, is effectively identical to a ban on those uses.
Huh? Eg a moderate tax on petrol stations would certainly lead to fewer petrol stations, wouldn't it? Things happen at the margins.
The opportunity costs between different land uses is exactly the same with LVT as without.
To illustrate more:
Without LVT, when you use a plot of land costing x dollars that you own outright, you 'pay' the opportunity costs of not being able to employ those x dollars elsewhere (or rent the land out etc).
With LVT, the price of that plot of land will adjust to y << x, so that the total of LVT on a plot of land costing y and the opportunity cost of y, will equal the opportunity cost of x amount of capital.
(This discussion ignores risk and other taxes for simplicity.)
Slightly off-topic: I'm also against capital gains taxes. We want more capital employed, so that workers become more productive, and so that the different providers of capital compete. So if anything we should encourage more deployment of capital, and capital formation rather than consumption of wealth.
(Also thanks to international mobility of capital, I suspect that a big part of the burden of capital gains taxes mostly falls on the users of capital, less on the providers. But I am not sure there.)