There's the usual rag bag of KLN's in the comments at Tim Worstall's:
sam // May 8, 2013 at 4:23 pm.
I don’t know anything about LVT. Does this mean that farmers would be hugely hugely taxed but you could own a penthouse flat in kensington worth eleventy squillion quid and be exempt? Cos that seems a bit silly.
Sam doesn't even know about land rental values, let alone about tax. The rental value of a single Kensington penthouse is one or two hundred times as much as the rental value of an entire typical UK farm, so the LVT on the penthouse would be one or two hundred times as much as the tax on the farm (to the extent that we even bother collected LVT from farmland).
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Jim // May 8, 2013 at 5:47 pm
Its quite simple – under income taxation your labour belongs to the State (or rather a proportion of it, the proportion to be decided by people like RM). Under LVT your property belongs to the State and you may live there as long as you pay the rent (which is what LVT effectively is), the rent again to be decided by people like RM. Don’t pay the rent, get chucked out by the Landlord.
Personally I find the former less of an imposition as one can at least stop working so hard if income taxes rise. It's considerably harder (and more inconvenient) to move house every time the LVT goes up. And the idea that you can no longer own property free and clear of State interference for me is the worst part of it of all.
Arsehole.
Your earned income is derived from your genuine personal property (i.e. yourself, a wasting asset) and you can, for example, take it abroad with you if you wish. Land rents are not and can never be your personal property as they are derived from the existence of a stable and law-abiding society, which in turn requires "State interference" or the threat thereof to protect the value of those rents and have a legal system for deciding who owns what and for "chucking out" people who don't pay the rent to their landlord. Try buying, selling or renting land in Haiti, Somalia or Afghanistan.
And why is somehow better for people to pack in working in response to an actual or perceived tax increase rather than for them to trade down to a cheaper home, freeing up their old home for somebody who is working and is prepared to pay for it, i.e. is putting their personal property to best use and making optimum use of land?
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SadButMadLad // May 8, 2013 at 6:47 pm
“The value of land for taxation purposes should be based upon its optimum permitted use, so farmers would not be badly hit, while landowners sitting on developable land could build it out or cough up.” So all land will be taxed as if it was fully developed with tower blocks on it then? Because all land can be developed. The only thing holding it back is planning...
Like Sam, he doesn't have the first clue about land values either or even about planning. Very few people actually want to live in tower blocks (they'd rather have a house with their own front door and own garden) but they will put up with living in a tower block if it is in a very favourable location, i.e. in a city centre. That's why cities look like they do.
People are not be interested in living in a tower block in the middle of nowhere. In the absence of any tax or planning system whatsoever, nobody is going to build a tower block in the middle of nowhere, he'd end up losing money (simply hooking up the site for mains utilities would probably bankrupt him).
The only place where building tower blocks is commercially viable is in city centres, and even a lot of those lose money for the developer and his initial financiers. In economic terms, the optimum permitted use of 99% of farmland is, er, as farmland. So the extra potential rental value of farmland in the middle of nowhere which happens to have planning permission for a tower block is exactly £nil, and if every field in the whole country had planning for a tower block, it would be even less than that.
And nobody said that having LVT means you abolish all planning laws. LVT works perfectly well with or without planning restrictions.
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john77 // May 8, 2013 at 10:08 pm
@ Lotus 51 We are not discussing the classic LVT which is based on the actual (realisable) value of ALL land (to which kaalvtn’s comments relate as a parody of the ill-founded criticisms, while pretending the well-founded ones do not exist) but the vote-grabbing variant proposed by CLASS. See my previous comments. If you cannot be bothered to read the thread, don’t post on it
Another arsehole. If he really has an "well-founded criticisms" he's free to post them over at kaalvtn in the comments. Only he hasn't done, so we can safely assume he has none (and his previous comments were drivel as well).
