Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (171)

I think it must be pretty obvious that everybody has to live somewhere, even land value taxers, so Homeys can always play the man not the ball; if a land value taxer is a tenant or only owns a small house, they'll say he's proposing LVT for his own personal advantage; if on the other hand, a land value taxer lives in a big or an expensive house, he is accused of rank hypocrisy.

The Daily Mail plays the man with naked glee:

He is the man who believes* that millions of Britain’s pensioners are, to put it bluntly, taking up too much space. Last week Angus Hanton and his Labour-backed think-tank** launched a report saying that ‘empty nesters’ should be ‘encouraged’ through a new land tax to downsize. This, it was argued, would help make room for younger generations...

After hearing him outlining his radical ideas on the radio, they might have spared a thought for Mr Hanton’s own elderly parents. What kind of shoebox dwelling did he have them holed up in? In fact, The Mail on Sunday can reveal that Alastair and Margaret Hanton live alone in a £1.5 million five-bedroom home in one of London’s most desirable suburbs.

So has their son – himself a father of four who, incidentally, lives with his family in an £850,000 house nearby – tried to harangue them into vacating it? After all, his organisation’s report, Hoarding Of Housing, says there are 25 million unused bedrooms in England alone and eight million ‘under-occupied’ homes...

In the instant case, I'd take this as evidence that he is being quite sincere about his proposals, but on Planet Home-Owner-Ist, logic is there to be twisted.

* It's not a question of 'what he believes', he trawled all the available statistics and published them here (pdf).

** The IF is no such thing, at least, there is no evidence for it.