It’s an interesting idea, and I like it in principal, but I also like living in my house on my land knowing that I need to give permission before someone can buy it.
In the US there is $16T currency, $38T stocks plus a roughly equal amount in corporate internal valuation, ~$30T small business, $33T houses, $17T commercial real estate, plus commodities, any other mark to market securities, vehicles, collectibles, intangibles like copyrights, patents, operating licenses, and really anything else that a court can adjudicate possession of.
I would expect somewhere around $250-500T with defensive valuation, so tax rates <1%. If your house is worth $1M, it’ll cost you $800/mo. By comparison, a US top 5%-er pays the same in property tax, plus income tax of about $7000/mo.
And it seems amazingly efficient. List and pay. If you like it, pay more. If you want to sell, just pay less and somebody will inquire. Market liquidity and order book depth transparency would be amazing. Capitalizations would be accurate for liquidation rather than estimated by float pricing.
The big monkey wrench I see is privacy. I believe this can be solved with zero-knowledge proofs. Maybe this is my next project.
So if I don't value it highly enough myself, someone else can come in and take the land. But the house is on the land. So I'm going to have to adjust the price to the actual price of the house + land, or someone else will outbid me and take it, thereby getting both the land and the house.
Or else, when they outbid me, they only get the land but I keep the house. But how's that actually going to work in practice?
The net effect is that this scheme stops being Georgism. It becomes a tax on the total value of the land plus improvements.
So basically you lock down the price in an auction once every 7 years giving you enough predictability and time to justify your investment.
This is how these groups operate in present day already
1. businesses renting space in cities - they lock down rent for say 10 years
2. individual apartment renters - price is usually locked down for 1 year
3. domain name system - you lock down piece of land in "string space" for a year
4. electromagnetic spectrum auctions (LTE, 5g spectrum bands for telephone companies) every several years usually when new technology is deployed
5. technology patents locked down for 20 years
6. Government LAND to LANDOWNERS - locked down once, with expiration time at infinity and passable down through generations
It helps to see what Georgists actually want to achieve with LVT - proper auction mechanism for something everybody needs and there is scarcity of it - land.
For political reasons they attack it from the position of tax, not from the position of an auction. Which makes it a bit convoluted and confusing unfortunately.
Mansions and expensive property would be always on the market.
