Killer arguments against LVT, not (55)

Lots of LVT opponents fall back on the rather thin argument that LVT is somehow 'socialist'. Well it's not.

Part One:

We've tried socialism and it clearly 'doesn't work'. To take a practical example, in most Communist countries, farms were collectivised and run by Party officials and central planners who didn't have a clue about farming, and people had to work on these farms for fixed wages but without performance bonuses or anything. The inevitable outcome of all this was that agricultural output plummeted and people starved etc.

In a couple of Communist countries at different times, they did limited free-market experiments and allowed people to occupy or rent small holdings on which they could grow and sell what they liked. Rather unsurprisingly, the amount of crops grown per acre on these small holdings was vastly in excess of that grown on the collective farms.

Of course these people didn't 'own' their small holdings, but they had the most important things - the right to exclusive possession and the right to benefit from their own endeavours. That is what made the big difference between the small holders and the collective farms.

We observe much the same in Western countries; while UK farmers do a very good job, the amount of crops that they can grow per acre is a mere fraction of what the dedicated allotment gardener can grow if he or she is prepared to put the time and effort in. As it happens the rents collected from one acre of allotments is also a vast multiple of the rents that can be collected from one acre farmland (even though the annual rent for an allotment isn't very much, and far from the maximum that the council could get away with charging). As an aside, according to my sister, who has an allotment, somebody worked out that an average family could grow enough crops to feed itself on less than half an acre - so much to the mantra that 'we can't build any more houses because we'd endanger our food security'.

OK, LVT is the same as paying rent for the location. I personally don't think there's much point in collecting LVT from agricultural land because the receipts would be quite small and it's far more important just to get rid of the agricultural land subsidies, but let's gloss over that.

So a farmer who currently 'owns' land would in future be paying 'rent'. Is there any reason to assume that tenant farmers are less productive than owner-occupiers? Absolutely none, of course. Think about it - if tenant farmers were less productive than owner-occupiers, there would be no incentive for a 'landowner' to rent out his land - he'd be able to make more money by farming it himself or selling it to another owner-occupier.

So, as farmer, landowner, anti-EU campaigner and LVT fan Dr Duncan Pickard points out - at 13 mins 19 secs into this video - reducing (or indeed scrapping) income tax on farmers and collecting LVT instead would almost certainly increase our agricultural output and agricultural employment.