OK, wait a minute. The tax is on the value of the land, right? It's not supposed to change just because I build a house on it, right? (Though having power and sewer to the lot may improve the value.)
So if I don't value it highly enough myself, someone else can come in and take the land. But the house is on the land. So I'm going to have to adjust the price to the actual price of the house + land, or someone else will outbid me and take it, thereby getting both the land and the house.
Or else, when they outbid me, they only get the land but I keep the house. But how's that actually going to work in practice?
The net effect is that this scheme stops being Georgism. It becomes a tax on the total value of the land plus improvements.
Yes; that’s true, it’s not a land tax. But many have pointed out that land fails to capture the scarce raw material that makes up an economy, such as human attention. These are very hard to assess. Land is too, and frankly the productivity of land alone is probably not enough to pay for the government, so all profits get collected as tax and the value of the land drops to zero.
So if I don't value it highly enough myself, someone else can come in and take the land. But the house is on the land. So I'm going to have to adjust the price to the actual price of the house + land, or someone else will outbid me and take it, thereby getting both the land and the house.
Or else, when they outbid me, they only get the land but I keep the house. But how's that actually going to work in practice?
The net effect is that this scheme stops being Georgism. It becomes a tax on the total value of the land plus improvements.