The Scottish Land Commission has on its website a report produced by the University of Reading on the prospects for introducing a land value tax in Scotland. The report sets off in the wrong direction by defining land value tax as a tax based on selling prices. The Scottish report, which uses the word ‘challenging’ thirty times in 119 pages, provides an excellent set of arguments against...

I regularly get into arguments with people who think that property taxes are paid by tenants. Now it is true that tenants in the UK are nominally responsible for paying the property tax, be it Council Tax or business rate. But the tax cuts into the amount a landlord can charge in rent. In other words, the incidence of the tax is on the landlord. Yet so many people refuse to believe this and do not...

All the really silly arguments against LVT are debunked here. No doubt they will be trotted out at tomorrow’s second reading of Caroline Lucas’s Land Value Tax Bill.

From a discussion group on the Guardian’s Comment is Free“A design office in the UK designs a widget. They have a three room office in Hull. It sells all over the world for £500 a go. It is made in China, where the vast factory is paid £10 per unit over costs. The UK company makes £300 profit per unit. Explain to me how land value tax works on this, given you want to get rid of corporation...

One of the arguments being put against LVT is that is a tax on imputed incomes, not real ones. The point was wittily made in a letter in the FT a few days ago – “if LVT is a tax on imputed incomes”, it was asked, “could it be paid with an imputed cheque?” Accepting this line of argument, all you could expect for your imputed payment would be imputed police and fire...

One of our supporters sent a copy of our comments on the report of the Treasury Committee Tax Review Inquiry back to the Treasury Committee. It was answered by the House of Commons Committee Assistant as follows: “The Committee did not give an opinion either way on whether land value tax was worth further consideration. Instead it noted that radical tax changes had been mooted, and drew attention...

The past few months have seen a flurry of activity which has probably helped to bring LVT more public attention more than for several decades. Notably, it was espoused by one of the candidates for the Labour leadership and there were three articles in the Guardian. The first two articles were vague to the point that it was unclear what was being proposed. The third of the articles, by Mark Braund,...

These by email from someone called Richard Davis, of a company called Praetorian Properties, so not exactly a disinterested party. One would have thought that a property professional would have a better grasp of the implication of LVT, but seemingly not in this case. I tried to reply but the email was returned.

Rothbard put the case against LVT in Critique of Georgism and Reply to Georgists They are demolished in A Critique of Murray Rothbard’s Critique of the Georgist Argument

“If they (the wealthy) don’t want to pay land taxes, they shift all their income-generating assets somewhere else (that won’t subject them to land value tax.) Offshore. They have escaped the land value tax. None of this is to say that land value taxes aren’t good. Quite the contrary. It’s just that they can only ever be part of a solution.” Can someone please...