Why ask "if" if it clearly isn't?

From today's FT in response to a fine article by Samuel Brittan:

Sir, Why do enthusiasts for a land tax concentrate on one particular one particular type of property? If the aim is to tax wealth, why not levy an annual charge [on all assets], rendering both inheritance tax and capital gains tax superfluous.

Gareth Howlett, Investment Management Director, Brooks Macdonald Asset Management.

This is a typical example of Homey/Faux Lib propaganda. By pretending that the rental value of land is "wealth"*, they can paint LVT as a tax on "wealth", and thus draw the entirely incorrect conclusion that LVTers want to tax "wealth" generally, or even worse, that LVTers are "anti-wealth".

Far from it, the whole point of a full-on LVT system is to scrap all taxes on private wealth (such as income tax, VAT, NIC, corporation tax - inheritance tax goes straight out of the window and capital gains tax is only there to prevent people turning taxable income into tax-free capital gains anyway). So individuals get to keep all the wealth that they create themselves, and society in general gets to keep what society in general creates/generates.

* Simple logic tells us that land values are merely a multiple of land rental values; and that land rental values are merely a measure of the flow of individually created wealth from society in general/the productive economy to landowners/mortgage banks. For every landlord there is a tenant; one man's income is another man's expense; this is not net wealth.

Consider: ten families/tribes are happily sharing their little island, and each family/tribe has exactly enough land to feed itself; nobody can charge anybody rent and on the face of it, the land has no realisable market value.

But if there's an earthquake and one-fifth of the island snaps off and falls into the sea, the two families/tribes who have lost their physical land now have to rent patches from the other eight; the unlucky two have to farm it more intensively and hand over some of the value of their work to the lucky eight. So now the land owned by the other eight has a rental value and a realisable market value.

Can anybody honestly say that these ten tribes are collectively wealthier for having lost one-fifth of the surface area of their island?