this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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No, i actually worked with economists, lawyers, and assessors on research projects. And everyone of them loved LVT in theory, but in practice sucked balls. Again and again, the research showed poor and awful outcomes when the direct implementation of the tax was studied and various municipalities that have tried it have totally and utterly failed and gone back to a property tax due, largely due to the overwhelming overhead costs involved with assessing and administering a LVT.
There is a huge gulf between theory and practice. Georgists sit around all day and theorize and idealize but never actually go into the trenches of tax law, tax policy, and tax enforcement.
Very interesting. Do you have any sources to share so I can read into that?
Also, I believe there are 2x publicly known sources for LVT being applied on a wide scale: Alaska and Singapore. Both are very successful and comfortably perform far above average compared to other US states / other countries. This somewhat directly contradicts your statements. So maybe your experience is not representative for LVT's performance, but rather your specific execution of it.
Just to be clear, LVT is just one form of resource tax. Actually all resource use including pollution and oil extraction etc. fall under my understanding of georgism.
No. It was 20 years ago but people I worked with included Karl Case. The guy who founded the housing index. You can go find your own search for the 100s of papers on the topic. In my 5 years working there I probably saw 30+ papers published relating to it. All the work was in the continental USA.
And I have no doubt it works in Singapore, because it's a city-state. Just like I said in another comment it works great in the context of small regularized parcels of land. Singapore also has super restrictive laws about land ownership. But you can't generalize that to the whole of the USA, let alone most USA cities/states due to the massive geological differences.
And yes, in theory if you just abolished all existing laws and land rights and property values and just divided up the entire USA into 1 acre square parcels, it would make sense to use a LVT. But again that's an ideal theory that in no way will ever become reflecting of reality. Land ownership and use and regulations are highly irregular in America and often subject to 4-5+ levels of government regulation.