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A Step Against Land Value Tax
Blog Alt10

This is a really interesting thought (which I will be using in future) but I think it arises from the fact that the tax incidence has to terminate on someone at the very end. Like say income tax (and a wealth tax), depending on how you cut the pie, there are multiple different options for the set of cash flows and corresponding total tax amounts. Moving the assets / cash flows to a business / trust / a separate business / an offshore business / another person all throw a wrench into the works. When we try reconcile infinitely complex real world processes onto paper, there will be problems.  

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A Step Against Land Value Tax
Blog Alt10

I mostly disagree with your example (the use of RV's is nice, although I think it changes the equations too much) but I can grant you (and Malcolm Ocean) the point:

>Yes, this is the standard Georgist position, and it's the reason why land owners mainly capture (positive and negative) externalities from land use _around_ them, not in their own land.

Might we agree that positive externalities outweigh negative ones as evidenced by high land prices? If we take this position at it's best, at the end of the day, how is taxing the capture of a positi... (read more)

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1Ape in the coat
Taxing creation of value leads to existence of less value. Taxing capturing of value by land leads to less value been captured by land. The latter is much better outcome because both having more value is generally good and land capturing value is generally bad - its the source of huge amount of problems with the economy. There is one case where land capturing the gains of economic actvity can at least seem fair. A Disneyland scenario - where you own a lot of land in close proximity and create all the economic activity on it. But in absolute majority of cases your land is capturing the fruits of labour of other people. Other people create businesses and amenities around you and you benefit from them twice - both by consuming the products and amenities that you want without needing to travel and by having your land increase in value without you doing anything. This creates opportunities for rent seeking behavior. And land speculation, which itself leads to even greater land prices. And therefore progress is followed by poverty.  You seem to be confusing citation and the referent for "surrounding land". Let's say that you live in land A0, surrounded by land A. You would rather move to less less dense neighbourhood, to land B0, surrounded by land B. When you do so, you stop calling land A as "surrounding land" and start calling land B as "surrounding land" and can say that the density of the surrounding land has decreased. But actually, the density of both A and B stayed the same.