You can pull on those heartstrings in either direction, as it were.

In economic terms what you're arguing is that investment efficiency should always outweigh allocative efficiency.

> pay [...] much more than your neighbor, who objectively speaking may have a lot of equal value.

All land is unique, so I don't think adjacent land of equal value exists. The difference may be trivial, or it may be substantial.

But yes, it's all a tradeoff. Some might prefer a centralized government authority decreeing a given value, others might prefer market-based price discovery.

I'm not trying to convince you or anyone else either way, just pointing out that fair price discovery for a self-assessment LVT isn't an unsolved problem.

> All land is unique, so I don't think adjacent land of equal value exists. The difference may be trivial, or it may be substantial.

I don't understand how this relates. My point would stand even if the neighboring lots were slightly different in value.

> just pointing out that fair price discovery for a self-assessment LVT isn't an unsolved problem.

Yeah okay I'll give you that. It's just that we can't ignore how tax policy must match a society's values in a democratic society, else it'll be voted out. I'm saying this probably wouldn't work out since voters put value on the idea that at least some people will be able to get a good enough job to afford to bring up their kids in a stable home.

> I don't understand how this relates.

I'm agreeing with you (along with the "heartstrings" comment) that all land is going to have both objective and intangible value, e.g. the view, and that someone grew up in that house.

But I think you're imagining that any intangible interests in the land are going to favor the incumbent.

I think for residential lots that's probably more true than not on average.

But we can easily come up with examples where a prospective buyer has a stronger intangible interest.

E.g. maybe you own it, and don't really care about the land or house per-se, but it saves you 1 minute on your commute v.s. the next lot.

Whereas I used to live there, and was forced to sell the house during the last recession. I've got a deep emotional connection to the lot and house, and my dog's buried in the backyard.

I'd like to buy the house back. You don't want to sell.

Does my interest outweigh yours? Maybe, maybe not.

All I'm saying is that a self-assessed LVT with an auction mechanism (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37909570) will enable both of us to set a price on those intangibles.

I agree that probably nobody's willing to try this out any time soon, for what it's worth the authors of "Radical Markets" suggest phasing in such a system by starting with commercial lots (and perhaps it would never go beyond that).

lots of discussion about the topic in Radical markets if you're interested. I forget how exactly they address that concern, but they do talk about it.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177502/ra...

> What's more, even if you pay more than you ought to, you'll never feel secure in your home, knowing that at any time you may be forced to sell.

That can already happen right now with conventional property taxes..

Indeed, and the mechanism for adjusting any unfairness in assessment you encounter there is always going to be more byzantine than a fair self-assessment, and probably impossible in practice.

E.g. let's say you live in a neighborhood where everyone's paying a premium for fanatic views. Except your house is the only one that doesn't have that view.

Even in such an obviously unfair scenario the government is likely to stick to some assessment that's going to be unfair, e.g. some mean sale value of the N lots adjacent to yours.

Also with land value tax without the proposed land valuation method. The difference is how in one case you're never secure in your home even if you can afford your theoretically fairly assigned tax bill. There is always someone out there rich enough to uproot a family from their home, even if you're otherwise financially secure.

Your weird scenario can happen with most other assessment scenarios either.

If Warren Buffett wants to increase the value of my land, he can bid up all the surrounding plots, and make bids for my land. Any sane assessment method will see that the value of my land has increased, and will increase my property tax or LVT, and I'll have to pay or face the consequences.

(In the self-assessment case, you can give people the right to refuse to sell, if they are willing to eg back-pay the difference of LVT to the higher price for the last year or so. So people can opt to pay the tax instead of moving out.

To be extra fancy, give the would-be-buyer 1% of the extra tax take to incentivise people hunting for undervalued homes and to compensate for the buyer having had to secure funding.)

I don't see that as a fair comparison. The number of people who are rich enough to buy a particular home for more than the hypothetical actual value is orders of magnitude greater than the number of people who can afford to buy up all the lots around a home at a premium and affect its property value. As a result, the perceived threat to the homeowner is substantially different. I also think you're ignoring the psychological costs of this. It doesn't actually have to happen, just the potential that it could happen would be a real fear for many people. Moving is one of the most stressful events in people's lives, much less unplanned moving. There's also empirical data showing negative outcomes for children.

If that kind of fear is a problem for people, it will just be reflected in lower market prices for land.

Someone who has more of a fear for can put up her self-declared land value. They'll pay a bit more in recurring tax, but would get a significant windfall, if their fear were to come to pass: Yes, there might be some psychological downsides to moving, but getting a extra few million dollars (or whatever) has psychological upsides, too.

I'm from the younger generation who's been economically forced to move every couple of years because the older generation made it too hard to build houses. So I'll shed few tears for boomers being forced to move once after 20 or 30 years.

The point was that with the parent poster's method, every generation is potentially forced to move at all times.

House prices don't change at the drop of a hat. If gentle changes in taxation are too much for a person, they might just have purchased a house they couldn't afford in the first place.