I strongly disagree.
My post on the most evil tax of our time: Property Tax.
https://steemit.com/taxes/@builderofcastles/property-tax-is-the-most-evil-tax-of-our-time
I know these writers you have read try to make the point about land being the basis for all income, and its sorta true, it sound great and easy, but it is not. It is downright evil.
Lets say you own a tiny piece of land with a tiny house on it. Its use value is that you could rent it out to someone. And thus make $400 a month. So, you should be paying tax on that land value. But wait! You are living in it. It is not bringing you any money, it actually costs you money to maintain. It is the place you sleep. So, you pay tax on the land value for a place to sleep? That's not land value taxing, that is taxing you to live.
The most profitable pieces of land are factories where lots of stuff is made in a tiny space. Tax the land or tax the profit. Both are the same outcome. Both affect where an entrepreneur will build a company (or affect if he will build the company).
The next most profitable pieces of land are arable farm land. This is where all of our food comes from. So any taxes paid on these lands are immediately put into the prices of food.
After that, the land becomes next to worthless. Dirt cheap, as they would say. Without a whole lot of work, it is useless. So, no taxes there.
So, we get back to the actual statement that you keep trying to avoid.
Where does the UBI come from? It comes from the people working.
It doesn't come from the land, it comes from people working the land.
And in EVERY SINGLE CASE you are going to tax the more productive people to pay for the living arrangements of the less productive people.
There is no magic way to come up with money. Every single way taxes the productive people.
So, as a very broke productive person, I would rather build a tiny home for every american than to pay them all $400 every month so they can rent a tiny home.
It is far more economic and provides for the need.
Yes, it does feel nicer for the individual person to have money that they can use to rent a place. But this is fallacious. Because we are not talking about a single person, we are talking about all the persons.
Have you ever worked with the cluster-fuck called section 8 housing?
For the amount we spend on that, greasing the hands of the people that grease the hands of our politicians, I could build a tiny house for every single man, woman and child in america. And then we would never have to pay again.
But yeah to again spell this out: Property tax is not Land Value Tax.
Property tax is something to put on someone's property. Property can include: the value of the hard work that went into that something. It correlates to the potential sales price of the commodity good in its entirety.
While the Land Value Tax explicitly excludes any additions made by one's Labor to the thing. So an empty plot in NY would cost the owner the same Land Tax as it'd cost someone to own a plot of land in NY with a skyscraper on it.
Very different concept. Notice that you can easily split the tax burden if you fancy vertical living.
And if ALL the money from the LVT is paid to the people who usually live in the city, then you're going to win out if you own somewhat above average amounts or less. At the cost of people who don't usually live in the city yet hold an average or greater amount of Land in it. You also get even more out of the deal if you chose vertical living.
If you care about high quality living quarters for permanent residents, it's a useful approach.
It keeps investors from freeloading off of your community becoming a nicer place.
Of course it's a question of how we get a real LVT+dividend in place, still. So I don't really suggest the LVT as a central demand, personally.
if we get a nationwide UBI in place, then some city will figure out that they just need to attract people to build a real cool community, and to keep out (or at least make em pay) predatory investors/rich kids in need of a third or fourth living quarter, they'd pass an LVT+additional dividend for permanent residents. Eventually, other places might follow that example, if it turns out as expected.
But yeah if we introduce a more social kind of money system in the first place, none of that might be needed (or it might be integrated with that money system!). This is just a useful strategy to reduce negative impact of the exponentially growing incomes that some but not many experience today thanks to the debt money system.
Either way, we gotta look at more re-instating democracy somewhere somehow in there. It's not so easy but gotta start somewhere you know! Might as well demand things that people might care to fight for together.