Killer arguments against LVT, not (63)

Uncle Tom, dismissing LVT over at HousePriceCrash:

The socialist solution to land issues, though attractive in theory, has been tried many times, and has always failed. Never forget that in the 20th century, more people starved to death as a consequence of socialist land reforms, than died in all the wars put together.

The second sentence is almost certainly correct, but irrelevant. I responded to the first as follows:

1. [Evidence shows that] the state should not take control of means of productions (whether through ownership or, in a Western European context, through regulation or INCOME TAX).

2. The collective farms failed because they were badly run and no incentive to individuals working on them to increase production.

3. What Russia & China did, in limited fashion, was rent off small holdings to individuals, who were allowed to sell their crops. Surprise, surprise, these small holdings were infinitely more productive than the collective farms.

4. What the quasi-socialist EU does is dish out subsidies simply for owning land, these do not increase food production one iota (if anything they push it down), they merely reward land ownership and push up rents and prices.

5. There is no economic difference between a small holder renting a field from the state [or from a landlord, for that matter] or paying land tax (which would be considerably less than £50 per acre per annum for UK farmland) in exchange for the state guaranteeing exclusive possession.

6. From the point of view of somebody who wants to go into farming, he will be a lot more motivated to do it properly if he just pays £50/acre per year LVT and has no income tax on his profits than if he has to borrow a lot of money from the bank to pay mortgage interest of rather more than £50/acre [or pay rent to a private landlord] AND has to pay INCOME TAX on top of that.