[adwf]

Indeed, the biggest problem with LVT is who exactly gets to value the land and how. It's an extraordinarily difficult issue which would require a very precise implementation.

Once you start assessing peoples property in such a wholesale fashion, you almost end up in a classic "managed economy" situation. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" failed due to the combined difficulty of assessment + corruption of the assessors. LVT is the same principle applied to land.

I think that LVT will end up as one of those ideas that is great in theory but doesn't work in practice.

[chillacy]

There have been some interesting market driven pricing schemes mentioned in this thread where your property tax is set based on an auction model, though that seems to have the opposite problem where the person with the largest bank can steamroll everyone else. High capital efficiency though.

[amanaplanacanal]

Except that it appears to have already been implemented in many places and it seems to work just fine. See the Wikipedia article on it.

[adwf]

Seems to be either standard property taxes listed (with a bit of variation) or minor deployments as experiments?

That's the gist of why I was comparing it to communist economics - it works great in small communities, but when either the scale is large, and/or the stakes are high, it will be subject to inefficiency and corruption.

LVT experiments on the small scale have people highly invested in making it work. On the large scale, this will just be a matter of everyday bureaucracy and any competence will revert to the mean.

On the large scale, it will be subject to the exact same corruption seen elsewhere. Certain industries will carve out exceptions to the tax, certain people with influence will get their historical properties excluded, etc.

By and large I've heard of LVT being a replacement for Sales/VAT style taxes. Whilst those are often regressive, at least they are relatively simple, 20% VAT is 20% VAT.