Your arguments about the impracticality of assessment are a straw-man. LVT can be implemented in practice using Vickrey auctions to price land values and a Harberger tax to price improvements, separately.
Not only does your argument fail to carry the conclusion LVT has a "fundamental problem," you blatantly failed to do any research into the substantial peer-reviewed evidence of the efficacy of LVT in historical practice.
"Land-Value Taxation around the World," Andelson (2000).
Your arguments are sound to be careful not over-valuing land, but to me you did not provide an argument against under-valuation. Sure, we'll have to resort to distortionary taxes, but we already do, and we won't have to resort to them as much as now.
Also, I don't see the goal of LVT as solving the housing crisis. For me their goal is just to fund public goods (in a non-distortionary wat).
I am not at all a specialist but I'd tend to estimate land value by subtracting the property values at different locations with similar improvements. To be precise, this would estimate the difference in land values between locations. Then you arbitrarily set to 0 the land value of the cheapest location. This convention helps to not overvalue land.
Finally, I don't think the parallel with the carbon tax is a good argument against yours. Because the uncertainty on the optimal carbon tax does not call not to tax, but to prudently choose the tax level. You claim to argue that both under- and overtaxing land would be bad, so it's not a question of imprecise level for you, but of taxing at all. (If it were a question of imprecise level, you could implement a LVT at the lower bound of plausible land value; and we're back to my second point: I don't get why you oppose this.)
I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Theoretically, land value equals the net profits of an entrepreneur who uses this land for some purpose, right? Revenues-Cost-Land Value = 0 —> Land value = Revenues-Costs. This means that in a competitive market (of goods, not land) one would be willing to pay as much as one can profit from using this land. I have three questions:
1) what’s the meaning of “Land has no market, government coming up with price of its own”? Obviously, land has a market. Government may set a price too high, and then there will be zero buyers, and it may set it too low, such that everyone will want to buy it. The willingness to pay for the land is directly related to the net profits one can extract from this land.
2) What’s the meaning of “Wealth today is not a function of how much land you own as economic production is not as tied to land like it was when we were an agrarian society.” What’s agrarian has to do with it? In what way economic production is not as tied to land as it was? This is observably not true. I can’t make sense of any of it.
3) what do you mean by “housing prices are monopoly rents”? Land is fixed, but housing services are not. Housing do react to prices, but land doesn’t. I don’t understand your explanation as to why are those monopoly rents.
I’m sure I misunderstood or missed something, so I would much appreciate your answers.
> what’s the meaning of “Land has no market, government coming up with price of its own”?
There are essentially no pure land sales in developed areas. Take, for instance, Center City Philadelphia. Most of it is developed - like 99% of it. There is a market for developed land, where people bundle together both the land and the property on top of it. When you buy developed land, you're buying a combination of land value and property value.
Land value (which I use synonymously with land price) can't be inferred because there's only a market for developed land, not a market of undeveloped/unimproved land, which is what Georgists mean when they say "unimproved value of land".
>What’s the meaning of “Wealth today is not a function of how much land you own
When Smith and George were writing about land value taxes, how much land you owned was vastly more important to how wealthy you are than today. Economic production back then was largely agrarian, so the landed elites were incredibly wealthy. Indeed, one of the reasons why it is unconstitutional to pass a property or land tax at the Federal level in the United States is because the Southern states were run by massively wealthy land owners who didn't want their wealth taxed away.
Today, the wealthy aren't rich merely because they own land. Sure, *some* are, but not like it was back in the 1700s and 1800s. Take for instance Jeff Bezos. He is rich because of his consumer goods company. Bill Gates is rich because of Microsoft products.
Even the well-to-do middle class is largely wealthy because of 401k investments. Much wealth is tied up in *housing* (which is why people oppose liberalized zoning laws, as it would eat into their wealth) but that has to do with housing scarcity, not land scarcity.
>what do you mean by “housing prices are monopoly rents”?
Housing today is expensive not because there's too little land, but because there are too few houses. In economics, when something is in short supply with lots of demand, the good seller is said to have "monopoly rents". Not that there's a *fixed amount* or *one seller* of the good, but rather that there is *pricing power* relative to a fair, competitive market price.
Take the current egg shortage as an example. Avian flu has caused a decrease in egg supply. For those with chickens unaffected by the avian flu, the cost of their chickens have not increased but their good is in short supply so they can charge higher prices. Ergo, we'd say they have monopoly rents due to the short supply of eggs - they can charge prices that greatly exceed their cost to produce the good.
1) That’s not a satisfying answer. An entrepreneur will be willing to pay for the land the net profits he can get from the property that’s on top of that land. I understand that it might be hard to asses, but that’s a really long way from saying that “land has no market” and that “government coming up with price of its own”. And of course, there are entrepreneurs that don’t want the property that’s currently on top of the land, so they destroy it and use the land for something else. How much do you think they will be willing to pay for the land?
And how will they react if the government that’s “coming up with price of its own” setting a price that higher/lower than their willingness to pay?
2) Ok. But that means that economic productivity isn’t as tied to land in the 17th century as it was a thousand years before, right? If i understand your point correctly, than any improvement in agriculture, for example, would mean that economic productivity isn’t as tied to land as it used to be.
This point doesn’t really matters honestly, but in my opinion, it’s nothing but unhelpful semantics, and it teaches nothing.
3) I’m really not following here.
No, in economics, high demand and low supply are not “monopoly rents”. Since high demand and low supply are not well defined, those are obviously not the criterions. “Pricing power” doesn’t come directly from from “high demand” and “low supply”. without free entrance or with a heavy regulatory burden, sure, you can claim there are monopoly rents, but it surely isn’t the conclusion from your explanation.
About the eggs - I think you are very wrong. At max, you can claim that in the very short run, egg suppliers have some monopoly rent, since supply hasn’t yet adjusted. But even then, what makes you think the market isn’t competitive? What would happen to the supplier that raises his prices well above the new market price? And by the way, what happened to the price of chickens themselves after many of them got affected?
By the way, out of curiosity, are you an economist or a pure data scientist?
this is trivially obviously incorrect. for one thing, you're talking about a tax with literally zero deadweight loss. If your ballpark estimate is even 10% or 20% off, that's still a phenomenally efficient tax. hell, even if it's 80% off, that's more efficient than productivity taxes.
but it actually turns out you don't Even need to be very accurate with the land value assessment to avoid deadweight loss. literally the only thing you need is to make sure that the assessment isn't based on anything the owner has control over. that is, it can't be based on any of the built structures on the land. so you could just assign a tax based on the number of acres, regardless of where they are located, and that alone would be sufficient to avoid deadweight loss.
and to the extent you want to solve it accurately, you can use a pretty straightforward system of linear equations solving to take a bunch of nearby properties and compare their price to the amount of land and the amount of square footage in the homes, and solve for x and y quite trivially.
I don't think your critiques are wrong, but it seems like we do the same thing with property taxes, no? We assign a value to properties even if they have been off the market for decades. As you mention in the footnote, you can compare values when it's sold: but that doesn't tell you if prior assessments were correct. So far, this doesn't seem to be an argument against shifting from property taxes to land taxes, at least.
Also, it seems that land rents are a big issue. There are places where they build a lot of housing: is the value of housing not mostly land in those places? I think it is. Your note about Japan is misleading btw: look at their CPI and growth, of course housing prices haven't increased!
I'll be reading the rest of this series with interest, though!
Yeah, we do something similar with property taxes for properties that haven't sold for awhile! My criticism of land value estimation would extend to valuation of properties off market.
Indeed, one of the issues I've thought about when doing some property valuation data science work is that the kinds of properties on the market - even controlling for things like number of bedrooms, bathrooms, etc - are different than the ones off the market. With some exceptions, homes on the market are likely *nicer* than the ones off market (i.e., you repaint the walls before selling, fix up the leaky faucet, etc) and that's unobserved. So we likely overestimate the values of off-market properties (especially ones off the market for a long time). And its hard to put bounds on how off we are.
Anyway, no, I don't advocate against shifting from property taxes to land taxes. I think that, despite all the issues I've raised, that we should shift to a split rate system. I am just less enthusiastic for land value taxes than most other Liberals and don't think they're a magic bullet for our social ills like many make them out to be.
Lots of housing is indeed built in areas of high land value! But the value of that housing isn't the land itself. A lot goes into housing that's valuable such as the quality of the build, amenities in the building or unit, etc. For renters, part of your rent is transferring risk of property ownership to a landlord (of course, there are far too many bad landlords that do not do their socially useful purpose and maintain properties).
As for Japan, if CPI is flat and housing prices are flat this would still imply zero real growth in prices. If Japan had 2% inflation and 2% increase in housing prices each year, that'd imply no real growth in prices as well. When I talk about "housing prices" I implicitly mean real (inflation adjusted) prices, though admittedly I use nominal prices when talking about observed prices.
Hello, Cory. I have a few thoughts on your article, hopefully worth engaging with.
I'm glad to see you understand the basic theoretical underpinning for LVT, and have only practical counterarguments (sort of). That's usually the heaviest lift.
How do I know LVT will perform in the real world as well as in theory? Notwithstanding others' comments on the academic literature, I don't agree with this standard because LVT hasn't been tried transparently at scale. There are plenty of localized attempts, and they all seem to work to the extent they've been tried. There's not to my mind any evidence that unintended or contrary effects occurred. For example, Altoona repealed its LVT a decade ago allegedly because the effects were too limited and people and businesses didn't understand it, thinking Altoona just had high property taxes. The challenge for LVT isn't putting theory to practice, it's producing demonstrable effects quickly to convince people that it works. It's unfair, but that's life.
I am not concerned about estimation problems because LVT doesn't need to beat the bear, it just needs to beat the deadweight costs of other taxes. For example, if a parcel is taxed at 105% of land value (analogous to your overtaxing carbon example), it would do some economic harm to marginal locations, but I don't believe it would be worse than an income tax that in theory motivates people to move away or a sales tax that causes people to make their purchases elsewhere.
"Economic production is not as tied to land like it was when we were an agrarian society." This misunderstands the theory. LVT isn't just a good policy idea in the urbanist toolbox because it looks good on supply/demand/excess-burden-of-taxation charts that the proles don't get because they didn't go to college (Henry George didn't). Rather, "land" here appears to be misleading you into thinking that land rents exist when people do land-y things, like farming, logging, or mining, so its persistence in urban areas is an artifact.
No. "Land value" here really means "location value," the benefit of controlling a space relative to others without strict reference to any properties of that space itself. Location rents are the fundamental surplus of an economy and are necessary for increasingly sophisticated activity. For example, looking at BEA data, the New York-Newark-Jersey City MSA produced in $1.6 trillion in GDP in 2021. Your Philadelphia MSA created $400 billion. This is somewhere around 20 percent of GDP in urban areas that are a fraction of the country's size. It happens because of the value of the locations it occurs in.
Moreover, I recommend familiarizing yourself with the principle that all taxes come out of rent ("ATCOR" in the literature). That is, all taxes suppress location rents to the extent of the tax. The reasoning is that the government takes the first cut of people's incomes, so the location monopolist can only charge on what remains. To put it differently, the issue isn't which tax is the best; rather, it's how much damage does a tax do to an economy before it taps location rents. (One book is The Losses of Nations.)
As for global warming, I think there's more of a connection between carbon emissions and land rents than you might think. Wealthy people take up more space than poor people. They own real estate, stocks in companies that own land, and participate in land-guzzling nonprofits, like golf courses. Consequently, they emit more carbon based on their lower-level land uses and lifestyles than the poor.
Finally, it's not substantial, but I thought neoliberals were in favor of cutting taxes and deregulating and privatizing natural monopolies. Seems like LVT would not be up their alley.
Your arguments about the impracticality of assessment are a straw-man. LVT can be implemented in practice using Vickrey auctions to price land values and a Harberger tax to price improvements, separately.
Not only does your argument fail to carry the conclusion LVT has a "fundamental problem," you blatantly failed to do any research into the substantial peer-reviewed evidence of the efficacy of LVT in historical practice.
"Land-Value Taxation around the World," Andelson (2000).
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3487821
https://www.wiley.com/en-sg/Land+Value+Taxation+Around+the+World:+Studies+in+Economic+Reform+and+Social+Justice,+3rd+Edition-p-9780631226147
"Taxing Land More than Buildings: The Record in Pennsylvania," Cord (1983).
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3700954?&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
"A Markov Chain Monte Carlo Analysis of the Effect of Two-Rate Property Taxes on Construction [in Pennsylvania]," Plassmann & Tideman (2000).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S009411909992140X
"The Impact of Urban Land Taxation: The Pittsburgh Experience," Oates & Schwab (1997).
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/NTJ41789240
https://cooperative-individualism.org/oates-wallace_the-impact-of-urban-land-taxation-1997-mar.pdf
"Land Value Taxes and Wilmington, Delaware: A Case Study," Craig (2003).
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41954420
"Land value taxation and housing development: Effects of the property tax reform in three types of cities," Bourassa (1990).
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3487525
"Land value taxation and the valuation of land in Australia," Mangioni (2014).
https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/handle/10453/34111
https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/bitstream/10453/34111/1/nj214_mangioni_v01-1%20Final%20Paper.pdf
"Land Value Taxation in Vancouver: Rent-Seeking and the Tax Revolt," England (2018).
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ajes.12218
Other Academic Literature
Dye & England, "Land Value Taxation: Theory, Evidence, and Practice."
https://www.amazon.com/Land-Value-Taxation-Evidence-Practice/dp/1558441859
Dye & England, "Assessing the Theory and Practice of Land Value Taxation."
https://www.lincolninst.edu/sites/default/files/pubfiles/assessing-theory-practice-land-value-taxation-full_0.pdf
Haughwout, "Land taxation in New York City: a general equilibrium analysis."
https://www.elgaronline.com/display/1843763818.00011.xml
Hirsch, "Land Values Taxation In Practice."
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89097112049&view=1up&seq=10
Lent, "The Taxation of Land Value."
https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/024/1967/001/article-A004-en.xml?ArticleTabs=abstract
Your arguments are sound to be careful not over-valuing land, but to me you did not provide an argument against under-valuation. Sure, we'll have to resort to distortionary taxes, but we already do, and we won't have to resort to them as much as now.
Also, I don't see the goal of LVT as solving the housing crisis. For me their goal is just to fund public goods (in a non-distortionary wat).
I am not at all a specialist but I'd tend to estimate land value by subtracting the property values at different locations with similar improvements. To be precise, this would estimate the difference in land values between locations. Then you arbitrarily set to 0 the land value of the cheapest location. This convention helps to not overvalue land.
Finally, I don't think the parallel with the carbon tax is a good argument against yours. Because the uncertainty on the optimal carbon tax does not call not to tax, but to prudently choose the tax level. You claim to argue that both under- and overtaxing land would be bad, so it's not a question of imprecise level for you, but of taxing at all. (If it were a question of imprecise level, you could implement a LVT at the lower bound of plausible land value; and we're back to my second point: I don't get why you oppose this.)
I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Theoretically, land value equals the net profits of an entrepreneur who uses this land for some purpose, right? Revenues-Cost-Land Value = 0 —> Land value = Revenues-Costs. This means that in a competitive market (of goods, not land) one would be willing to pay as much as one can profit from using this land. I have three questions:
1) what’s the meaning of “Land has no market, government coming up with price of its own”? Obviously, land has a market. Government may set a price too high, and then there will be zero buyers, and it may set it too low, such that everyone will want to buy it. The willingness to pay for the land is directly related to the net profits one can extract from this land.
2) What’s the meaning of “Wealth today is not a function of how much land you own as economic production is not as tied to land like it was when we were an agrarian society.” What’s agrarian has to do with it? In what way economic production is not as tied to land as it was? This is observably not true. I can’t make sense of any of it.
3) what do you mean by “housing prices are monopoly rents”? Land is fixed, but housing services are not. Housing do react to prices, but land doesn’t. I don’t understand your explanation as to why are those monopoly rents.
I’m sure I misunderstood or missed something, so I would much appreciate your answers.
Thank you!
> what’s the meaning of “Land has no market, government coming up with price of its own”?
There are essentially no pure land sales in developed areas. Take, for instance, Center City Philadelphia. Most of it is developed - like 99% of it. There is a market for developed land, where people bundle together both the land and the property on top of it. When you buy developed land, you're buying a combination of land value and property value.
Land value (which I use synonymously with land price) can't be inferred because there's only a market for developed land, not a market of undeveloped/unimproved land, which is what Georgists mean when they say "unimproved value of land".
>What’s the meaning of “Wealth today is not a function of how much land you own
When Smith and George were writing about land value taxes, how much land you owned was vastly more important to how wealthy you are than today. Economic production back then was largely agrarian, so the landed elites were incredibly wealthy. Indeed, one of the reasons why it is unconstitutional to pass a property or land tax at the Federal level in the United States is because the Southern states were run by massively wealthy land owners who didn't want their wealth taxed away.
Today, the wealthy aren't rich merely because they own land. Sure, *some* are, but not like it was back in the 1700s and 1800s. Take for instance Jeff Bezos. He is rich because of his consumer goods company. Bill Gates is rich because of Microsoft products.
Even the well-to-do middle class is largely wealthy because of 401k investments. Much wealth is tied up in *housing* (which is why people oppose liberalized zoning laws, as it would eat into their wealth) but that has to do with housing scarcity, not land scarcity.
>what do you mean by “housing prices are monopoly rents”?
Housing today is expensive not because there's too little land, but because there are too few houses. In economics, when something is in short supply with lots of demand, the good seller is said to have "monopoly rents". Not that there's a *fixed amount* or *one seller* of the good, but rather that there is *pricing power* relative to a fair, competitive market price.
Take the current egg shortage as an example. Avian flu has caused a decrease in egg supply. For those with chickens unaffected by the avian flu, the cost of their chickens have not increased but their good is in short supply so they can charge higher prices. Ergo, we'd say they have monopoly rents due to the short supply of eggs - they can charge prices that greatly exceed their cost to produce the good.
I appreciate your questions!
Thank you very much for you answers!
1) That’s not a satisfying answer. An entrepreneur will be willing to pay for the land the net profits he can get from the property that’s on top of that land. I understand that it might be hard to asses, but that’s a really long way from saying that “land has no market” and that “government coming up with price of its own”. And of course, there are entrepreneurs that don’t want the property that’s currently on top of the land, so they destroy it and use the land for something else. How much do you think they will be willing to pay for the land?
And how will they react if the government that’s “coming up with price of its own” setting a price that higher/lower than their willingness to pay?
2) Ok. But that means that economic productivity isn’t as tied to land in the 17th century as it was a thousand years before, right? If i understand your point correctly, than any improvement in agriculture, for example, would mean that economic productivity isn’t as tied to land as it used to be.
This point doesn’t really matters honestly, but in my opinion, it’s nothing but unhelpful semantics, and it teaches nothing.
3) I’m really not following here.
No, in economics, high demand and low supply are not “monopoly rents”. Since high demand and low supply are not well defined, those are obviously not the criterions. “Pricing power” doesn’t come directly from from “high demand” and “low supply”. without free entrance or with a heavy regulatory burden, sure, you can claim there are monopoly rents, but it surely isn’t the conclusion from your explanation.
About the eggs - I think you are very wrong. At max, you can claim that in the very short run, egg suppliers have some monopoly rent, since supply hasn’t yet adjusted. But even then, what makes you think the market isn’t competitive? What would happen to the supplier that raises his prices well above the new market price? And by the way, what happened to the price of chickens themselves after many of them got affected?
By the way, out of curiosity, are you an economist or a pure data scientist?
Again, thank you very much for answering!
this is trivially obviously incorrect. for one thing, you're talking about a tax with literally zero deadweight loss. If your ballpark estimate is even 10% or 20% off, that's still a phenomenally efficient tax. hell, even if it's 80% off, that's more efficient than productivity taxes.
but it actually turns out you don't Even need to be very accurate with the land value assessment to avoid deadweight loss. literally the only thing you need is to make sure that the assessment isn't based on anything the owner has control over. that is, it can't be based on any of the built structures on the land. so you could just assign a tax based on the number of acres, regardless of where they are located, and that alone would be sufficient to avoid deadweight loss.
and to the extent you want to solve it accurately, you can use a pretty straightforward system of linear equations solving to take a bunch of nearby properties and compare their price to the amount of land and the amount of square footage in the homes, and solve for x and y quite trivially.
I don't think your critiques are wrong, but it seems like we do the same thing with property taxes, no? We assign a value to properties even if they have been off the market for decades. As you mention in the footnote, you can compare values when it's sold: but that doesn't tell you if prior assessments were correct. So far, this doesn't seem to be an argument against shifting from property taxes to land taxes, at least.
Also, it seems that land rents are a big issue. There are places where they build a lot of housing: is the value of housing not mostly land in those places? I think it is. Your note about Japan is misleading btw: look at their CPI and growth, of course housing prices haven't increased!
I'll be reading the rest of this series with interest, though!
Yeah, we do something similar with property taxes for properties that haven't sold for awhile! My criticism of land value estimation would extend to valuation of properties off market.
Indeed, one of the issues I've thought about when doing some property valuation data science work is that the kinds of properties on the market - even controlling for things like number of bedrooms, bathrooms, etc - are different than the ones off the market. With some exceptions, homes on the market are likely *nicer* than the ones off market (i.e., you repaint the walls before selling, fix up the leaky faucet, etc) and that's unobserved. So we likely overestimate the values of off-market properties (especially ones off the market for a long time). And its hard to put bounds on how off we are.
Anyway, no, I don't advocate against shifting from property taxes to land taxes. I think that, despite all the issues I've raised, that we should shift to a split rate system. I am just less enthusiastic for land value taxes than most other Liberals and don't think they're a magic bullet for our social ills like many make them out to be.
Lots of housing is indeed built in areas of high land value! But the value of that housing isn't the land itself. A lot goes into housing that's valuable such as the quality of the build, amenities in the building or unit, etc. For renters, part of your rent is transferring risk of property ownership to a landlord (of course, there are far too many bad landlords that do not do their socially useful purpose and maintain properties).
As for Japan, if CPI is flat and housing prices are flat this would still imply zero real growth in prices. If Japan had 2% inflation and 2% increase in housing prices each year, that'd imply no real growth in prices as well. When I talk about "housing prices" I implicitly mean real (inflation adjusted) prices, though admittedly I use nominal prices when talking about observed prices.
Hello, Cory. I have a few thoughts on your article, hopefully worth engaging with.
I'm glad to see you understand the basic theoretical underpinning for LVT, and have only practical counterarguments (sort of). That's usually the heaviest lift.
How do I know LVT will perform in the real world as well as in theory? Notwithstanding others' comments on the academic literature, I don't agree with this standard because LVT hasn't been tried transparently at scale. There are plenty of localized attempts, and they all seem to work to the extent they've been tried. There's not to my mind any evidence that unintended or contrary effects occurred. For example, Altoona repealed its LVT a decade ago allegedly because the effects were too limited and people and businesses didn't understand it, thinking Altoona just had high property taxes. The challenge for LVT isn't putting theory to practice, it's producing demonstrable effects quickly to convince people that it works. It's unfair, but that's life.
I am not concerned about estimation problems because LVT doesn't need to beat the bear, it just needs to beat the deadweight costs of other taxes. For example, if a parcel is taxed at 105% of land value (analogous to your overtaxing carbon example), it would do some economic harm to marginal locations, but I don't believe it would be worse than an income tax that in theory motivates people to move away or a sales tax that causes people to make their purchases elsewhere.
"Economic production is not as tied to land like it was when we were an agrarian society." This misunderstands the theory. LVT isn't just a good policy idea in the urbanist toolbox because it looks good on supply/demand/excess-burden-of-taxation charts that the proles don't get because they didn't go to college (Henry George didn't). Rather, "land" here appears to be misleading you into thinking that land rents exist when people do land-y things, like farming, logging, or mining, so its persistence in urban areas is an artifact.
No. "Land value" here really means "location value," the benefit of controlling a space relative to others without strict reference to any properties of that space itself. Location rents are the fundamental surplus of an economy and are necessary for increasingly sophisticated activity. For example, looking at BEA data, the New York-Newark-Jersey City MSA produced in $1.6 trillion in GDP in 2021. Your Philadelphia MSA created $400 billion. This is somewhere around 20 percent of GDP in urban areas that are a fraction of the country's size. It happens because of the value of the locations it occurs in.
Moreover, I recommend familiarizing yourself with the principle that all taxes come out of rent ("ATCOR" in the literature). That is, all taxes suppress location rents to the extent of the tax. The reasoning is that the government takes the first cut of people's incomes, so the location monopolist can only charge on what remains. To put it differently, the issue isn't which tax is the best; rather, it's how much damage does a tax do to an economy before it taps location rents. (One book is The Losses of Nations.)
As for global warming, I think there's more of a connection between carbon emissions and land rents than you might think. Wealthy people take up more space than poor people. They own real estate, stocks in companies that own land, and participate in land-guzzling nonprofits, like golf courses. Consequently, they emit more carbon based on their lower-level land uses and lifestyles than the poor.
Finally, it's not substantial, but I thought neoliberals were in favor of cutting taxes and deregulating and privatizing natural monopolies. Seems like LVT would not be up their alley.
I'm too dumb to have an opinion on this, but good read