So when you build a sewage farm on your back 40 you should get wealthier (while your neighbors thank you because their land tax went down), but if someone snaps a photo of your area that goes viral on {THE PLATFORM DU JOUR} thus making your county more popular and driving up a bidding war for postage stamp sized lots of land (leading to the land being valued at a higher rate than it was a year before) you suddenly have a massive tax bill because "we noticed you are living in a popular county" and the benefits of living in a popular place should be taxed away? Or do we need some kind of a standard for "more valuable" that deals only with tangible things? And if so, which tangibles?

No, we don’t need standards for “tangibles.” The price factors in all relevant variables.

> All improvements are excluded from a land value tax, which actually means improvements are even more incentivized.

I'm not sure what this applies to with regards to my original comment. Improvements, insurance, and taxes are capital expenditures which need to be managed. This was to counter that landlording "is simply owning an asset."

> Yes that is correct if you occupy land while your community makes it more and more valuable, you should not get wealthier and wealthier for no reason. All of that should be taxed away.

Why assume that the landlord isn't getting the brunt of the cost for making the community more valuable? I don't think there's a strong case for saying a property manager is a job while denying landlording being one. Assuming landlording is completely passive is as far-fetched as thinking that property management is completely passive (both may require irregularly tasks to be performed or require no involvement in the ideal case).

While we don't want to tax a landowber's capital investment and improvements, most of the land value is due to the agglomeration effect of the surrounding land. So land value is mostly not an individual owner's own work, but the sum total of the community's efforts and entrepenural spirits.

>but the sum total of the community's efforts and entrepenural spirits.

More like "was too rural or too poor in the 70s/80s/90s to indulge in the then trendy policy like zoning the crap out of themselves and passing a bunch of ordinances more akin to country club rules thereby making incremental growth and development actually possible in the 2010s and 2020s"

Because most development today seems to correlate with whether or not that particular policy bullet got dodged than culture or spirit or anything like that.