[nostrademons]

Individual voters don't have to be rational as long as their errors cancel out. This is the "wisdom of crowds" / "central limit theorem" argument: statistically, you can get a very good approximation of the true value out of very unreliable individual measurements as long as you have a large number of independent such measurements.

Whether this theorem is robust against systematic cognitive biases is another matter. I don't know the answer to that, but it seems like voters are more likely to eg. vote for a tax that falls on someone else but gets passed along to them as higher prices, which would be an argument against an LVT ever being enacted.

Also, elsewhere in these comments are good arguments why an LVT is very difficult to "bolt onto" and enact a government once it's already been formed, which may be why we don't have one. That's simple path-dependence: Georgism didn't exist when most modern industrial nations were first formed, therefore it can't exist now.

[naravara]

>Individual voters don't have to be rational as long as their errors cancel out.

This, incidentally, is the function of propaganda. You introduce an influence that biases the system to encourage certain classes or error and discourage others, thus skewing the consensus-forming process.