There's a huge blind spot in only applying that Adam Smith quote to private landlords - the government. Functionally they own all land, between property taxes which act much like rent, and more extreme measures like eminent domain, the government has staked a claim to all land and offers us the privilege to live on it as long as we play by their rules.
We have to pay rent in the form of property taxes. We have to pay taxes on any value crested from the land, and often have to get licensed and/or inspected when doing so.
Adam Smith's writings are much better used as an argument against many of today's government structures rather than against private land owners renting it out to other private citizens. And it makes sense, Smith was writing in opposition to the monarchy of his time.
I'm not saying that there aren't plenty of terrible private landlords or that our housing market seems reasonable. But if we stop complaining about private land ownership at the point of the individual we haven't gone far enough. The government shouldn't be claiming ownership over everything and everyone within its borders. Fix that, then we can really worry about what any one land owner does with the smaller pieces of land they own.
And how to we make sure that such a tax doesn't just push us further down the path of using as many natural resources as we can? A land tax is based on the assumption that all land should be used to its maximal financial value. I don't know about you, but I fundamentally disagree with that and don't want to live in a world where we've codified the need to use up whatever we have.
> just push us further down the path of using as many natural resources as we can?
Using more surface area is using as many natural resources as we can.
Energy = mass * distance. The further people live away, from each other, the more energy is consumed, for doing everything.
A land value tax would incentivize density, and density reduces the use of as natural resources.
The people living in 10x10x10 homes in Honk Kong are using magnitudes less natural resources than hundreds of millions of people in US suburbia and exurbia.
That only holds if things stay just as centralized as they are today. If people live further from each other they have more potential for producing their own goods. That also means everyone around then has that potential as well. For example, living in a dense area means any lumber you buy was shipped in, and likely even crossed national borders. Living in a less populated area can mean access to lumber from a local lumber yard that processes trees grown locally.
I think the real challenge we have today is that we are stuck in the middle, our society is neither designed for dense populations or low density populations. There's nothing that I've seen that can definitively show that dense populations will always work better than less dense, more independent populations. Either can work well and either can be much better utilized than what we have today.
What I really take issue with is a central authority forcing one approach on us. Because we can't show why one path has to be the best, and because we don't know what we don't know, the decision should never be made at all by those in charge. The beauty of a federal model is to allow smaller regions to go their own way and try different approaches. I wouldn't balk at all if Los Angeles wanted to try a land value tax, let's see what happens. I personally don't think it will work well and I think there isn't a good answer for how to appropriately value the land, but I also don't live there and as long as my federal tax dollars aren't given to LA I have no dog in that fight.
I think this is extremely unlikely because it is so much cheaper to mass manufacture and ship things across literally half the entire world than to make them locally.
Energy/resource usage is not dominated by low frequency lumber trips, it is the every day push and pull of the mass of people, water, sewage, garbage, food, etc.
Without reverting to 1400s lifestyle where you only consume stuff made within a few hundred miles of you, I don’t think there is any way a modern populace consumed less by using more space.
There's a sawmill I get lumber from about 10 minutes from my house. He gets all his logs from arborists within a few hours of here. They all give him the logs for free because the alternative is either burning them or having to pay by the truckload to take them to the dump. I don't live in the 1400s but I do very much appreciate the ability to get lumber that was milled locally and would otherwise have just been dropped in a hole with a bunch of garbage.
Land value tax proposals would mostly just change things in urban areas, where land is scarce and valuable. There are no lumber mills there, just rich people who own the land from either having inherited it or an REIT owning it, waiting for it to appreciate.
I’m assuming you live in a rural area, which have (relatively) low land values.
It’s the strip mall suburbs that are highly inefficiently developed due to no penalty on the inefficiency (caused by low density).
I raised a local mill as an example of how a less dense area can also lead to higher efficiency and lower resource use.
I was responding to the idea that we need a land value tax to push us towards higher density living because that's the most efficient. Its only efficient if we have centralized infrastructure that will always have to be shipped across the country or around the globe to get basic goods to people. I used my local mill as an example of how lower density can lead to resource efficiency that will simply never be beat no matter how efficient a centralized industry and shipping is.
Does it scale? Well I have no idea. Do people want the life in a less dense area? Again, no idea and I think most people living in a dense area don't really know what that life would look like to answer that question. I have plenty of uncertainties for either approach, what I don't want is for a central planner to push one path on us when its not clear the right way to go
It is not possible to not have this. Land plots and road grids and design have to be designed for dense living, or less dense living, or rural living. You can’t mix and match.
What we have now is the worst of all worlds, where a little, tiny bit is dense, and then there is an unsustainable medium density where people want to have their cake and eat it too (but physics does not allow for it). And that is where 95% of the population of the world is.
That's absolutely false, humanity existed before central planners drew property lines and build state-run roads.
It might be reasonable to say that we can't have what we have today without central planning, but that's a very different discussion. You don't even have to go back that far, most roads were created by people just trying to get from point A to point B, there was no central planner.
“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them. He must then pay for the licence to gather them, and must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labour either collects or produces. This portion, or, what comes to the same thing, the price of this portion, constitutes the rent of land, and in the price of the greater part of commodities, makes a third”
― Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations