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enough that I have to be more specific with my responses. I apologize for not doing so earlier, but getting bogged down in the details doesn't make selling someone the idea that their much of their nest egg should be valueless any easier.
1) title gives you the right to keep your factory there, or your house. Your property would be assessed at a similer rate to similar properties. If the assessment isn't EXACTLY correct, there will be non-zero sale price. Of course the assessment is never going to be perfectly accurate, and with this knowledge, the assessment goal wouldn't even be 100% of the annual rental value, but rather only 90% or 95% of the annual rental value, leaving some positive residual value. On a lot with no improvements, it wouldn't be much. On a lot with improvements, it wouldn't add much to the sale price of the improvements. However, the small positive value means that the government doesn't have to allocate land, a market mechanism still exists. Should this small price get large, it would be an indication of poor assessments.
2) Currently property taxes take a rate, and assess that rate against both improvements and and unimproved property. A tax against improvements is one of the most harmful and unfair taxes there is. This is why a property tax should have two rates, one for land, and one for improvements: the rate for land should be higher than the one for improvements (if improvements are taxed at all). This is a change that can be made at the local level, and, if revenue neutral, benefits 70-75% of homeowners (people who keep nice houses).
3) The disparity between assessed value and appraised value is largely due to politics. Incremental changes would allow us to fix the politics as such a tax becomes more and more important. Removing improvements from the tax equation means that people could check the fairness of their assessments with a map - until 90%+ of rental value is taxed, the a absolute accuracy of the assessment process is not important, only the precision of it. In other words, as long as I'm paying about the same as my neighbor, I don't have much of a complaint. I have no intention of the federal goverment collecting property taxes, not only is it unconstitutional it's illogical. However, the Federal government could collect 'rents' on broadcast spectrum, fishing rights, timber rights, mining rights, etc. Being a local tax means that revenue is spent local to it's collection, in many cases capturing it's own investment.
4) The mechanics of separating land and improvements isn't known by me, but it is known by assessors, appraisers, insurance agents, and real estate agents. If it is important enough, a property could be bought, the lot cleared, and the lot auctioned. The majority of Commmercial land isn't owned by the same owner as the building. The builders of the Empire State building didn't own the lot, they leased it. Your tax argument is EXACTLY why land values should be taxed: it's valuable because all of the public and social investment nearby. To claim that owners have paid for it is disingenuous, it's been paid for by income, sales, federal, and other taxes as well, as well as private investment. What a better way to close the loop on social spending than by recapturing the very value created by public goods?
My view of land is that most people should live in cities. My theories date back to pre-revolutionary times, but then again they were recommended to Gorbachev by several nobel laureate economists. The heyday of such a theory was at the peak of the industrial revolution. When do the theories of isolationalism and mercantilism date from? When does the theory of tribute date from? Who cares?
5) you are completely confusing improvements and land values. Your rural greenfield would cost very little to keep, because you couldn't do much with it. If you built an office building, it'd remain vacant. If you built an apartment building, no one would want to live their. OTOH, if you got a downtown lot, it'd be expensive to keep. To pay the rent you'd have to build an apartment building, or office building, or whatever the market was demanding. If you abandoned the downtown lot, how could IT decay for a reassessment: it's taxes aren't based on what's on it, but rather what's near it. If YOU abandoned it, someone else would take it -else the assessment was too high (and would be lowered if no one was willing to pay it).
6) The government isn't landlord, private owners are landlords. It's just that the government takes most of what the landlord makes for mere ownership of the parcel. If the landlord makes an attractive building, he can rent that to his heart's content. If you continue to view land as an asset, an investment, you'll view such a tax as confiscatory. If you view land as a gift, as part of the natural commons, you'll see such a tax as a libertarian means of sharing the commonwealth. This theory doesn't require angelic intentions nor particular brain power. Land assessments are much harder to finagle than, say, corporarate income taxes. It's impossible to offshore land. It's impossible to hide land 'assets'. It's hard to issue special favors via a land value tax (it shows up on the map).
"Of and by the people". A land tax would lower the value of your lot, AND convert it's capitalized value into annualized value, AND eliminate the payment for interest. The median home price in the US today is somewhere around $200,000. Of this price, usually 30% or so is 'land value', or $60,000. Reduced and converted, this represents far less than $5,000 a year in annualized costs. The median household income in the US is about $44,000. Payroll, Income, and State and Local taxes will take almost $18,000 from this. $18,000 vs. $5,000. You pick.
Where's the rest made up? How about the L-curve of wealth? The top 1% of owners own 80% of the wealth, and they giggle when the masses clamor for their property protection.
You can have absolute ownership of land, as you wish, but you can't have both absolute ownership of land and absolute (self) ownership of labor. If you allow absolute ownership of land, then labor must pay a tribute to use the land, occupy it, or even pass across it. If you allow absolute self-ownership of labor, not only do you improve the returns to labor, you must limit the ownership of land. It seems far more moral and far more free, to support absolute self ownership rather than absolute property ownership.
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