This line of reasoning never made sense to me. If the value of the land is going up enough to make an impact on the month to month financials then it makes sense to dip into the equity of the property. Presumably the overall equity still goes up? Beneficiaries still inherit more in fiat terms? What’s the issue here?
Also datacenters are absolutely not going to be built on ultra desirable land, why would the developer ruin the land value that way?
Re:Does Georgism Work? Five Years Later
by HDThoreaun on Sunday September 27, 2026 @10:03PM
(#49872711)
Land is worthless under 100% LVT. Your land value going up just means you owe the government more in rent every year, since the government owns all the land rents. The only real solution to this problem is prop 13 I think which georgists hate. Nationwide prop 13(only on homes) + LVT is still probably better than the current system though imo, although it creates a huge incentive to never move
Re:Does Georgism Work? Five Years Later
by skew-aberration on Monday September 28, 2026 @08:10AM
(#49876743)
90 year-olds may well have bought land at a bargain and would therefore suffer somewhat under an LVT. It's a transition problem though - since in the 100% LVT world the couple didn't have to work 50 years (and pay vast interest to a banker) to get that house.
19 year-olds on the other hand already compete with businesses for land (especially corporate landlords - who pay more than datacenter owners) and are losing rapidly.
You do lose the option of speculation - buy early before a town or region is built up. In the current system, speculation is not an option, it is compulsory.
Also you can't force everyone out of their houses - people could simply reserve land for residential purposes (as is already the case). It is still a democratic system, after all.
Finally, western governments already use eminent domain to repurpose land. It's already a part of our system.
You're close to understanding why people wouldn't like it.
100% LVT schemes are basically a mechanism for letting the government force people to do things that the government wants. You want to live in your forever home that you and your husband worked for 50 years to afford? Sorry, government has other plans for that land and now it's too expensive for you to keep it.
The utopian use case that proponents talk about is replacing parking lots with high rise apartment buildings, which everyone loves because it feels like a win for the people and a loss for developers. The more realistic use cases would be much less popular, like the 90-year old couple getting forced out of their forever home because it's close to a substation, which suddenly turned that land into highly valuable property for data centers, which will happily pay those taxes and bulldoze the homes.
Every time I read a 100% LVT piece it's focused on the parking lots to houses type story. They either ignore the more obvious problems of people being forced out of their homes everywhere for businesses to take over, or they do a hand-wavey thing to say it's all for the greater good and we shouldn't care.
Every 100% LVT argument turns into an argument against private property ownership and in favor of a central planning type land reallocation, but with the final use case going to the highest bidder.
People do not actually want this.