Georgism

Individual voters don't have to be rational as long as their errors cancel out. This is the "wisdom of crowds" / "central limit theorem" argument: statistically, you can get a very good approximation of the true value out of very unreliable individual measurements as long as you have a large number of independent such measurements.

Whether this theorem is robust against systematic cognitive biases is another matter. I don't know the answer to that, but it seems like voters are more likely to eg. vote for a tax that falls on someone else but gets passed along to them as higher prices, which would be an argument against an LVT ever being enacted.

Also, elsewhere in these comments are good arguments why an LVT is very difficult to "bolt onto" and enact a government once it's already been formed, which may be why we don't have one. That's simple path-dependence: Georgism didn't exist when most modern industrial nations were first formed, therefore it can't exist now.

To your first problem: In the simple agricultural example, clearing the land has a reasonably predictable cost, whether it is taking down centuries-old trees and removing stumps and roots, or removing the boulders, or removing the spring harvest of rocks that surface due to winter freezes and placing them onto walls. Often the soil must be drained, and fenced, and possibly irrigated. But not all the land will be improved at once; uncleared land will be close to cleared, fenced, drained land, and obviously a tenant or buyer will pay more for partially improved farmland than for unimproved.

To your second problem: Where in the US is there unowned land? The settlers went west across thousands of miles of unoccupied land. Why didn't they stop and settle? It was owned. Early and ultimate sprawl. Others had pre-empted it for the benefit of their heirs. Think how the development of the US would have been had development proceeded west in some orderly way.

To your third problem: the land is forever. If well taken care of, it will remain fertile. But its fertility may not be important for all that long, depending on its location; its highest and best use will stop being agriculture. Buildings built for one purpose gradually deteriorate, and as the community changes, are no longer suitable to the current highest and best use of that land. At one time in NYC - say, 1880 - 21 year leases were common, and huge department stores and other edifices were built on them. It was understood that another building would likely follow. And it did. And the landlord got his "share." How did he earn that share? And look at the teardowns in your part of the country. Homes that seem perfectly serviceable to some of us are bought to be torn down to build something else on that well-located land. It doesn't happen on the edge of town; it happens in the center of things. The price one is willing to pay to get that land is pretty clear: the transaction plus the cost of removing the old improvement.

To your fourth problem: the land owner who doesn't improve his land can still sell it for a higher price due to the activity of the community around him. The value of the improvements never exceeds their replacement value, but could be quite a bit less. A huge spa resort built 15 or 20 miles from Disney World is likely an over-development of the land it is built on, while closer to DW, it might be quite appropriate and profitable. One who is building with consideration to others' preferences -- as customers or as tenants -- will build differently from one who simply wants what they want, without regard to resale value. We don't increase the unimproved value of our own sites, but we can contribute to the value of the surrounding sites -- or we might decrease the value. Increasing it doesn't exempt us from any portion of the value of our own site. Our neighbors' actions can increase or decrease the value of our own site. Regular reassessments take that into account.

When HG was writing, there were taxes on land, on buildings, on personal property such as watches, horses, carriages, umbrellas ... the poor paid the personal property taxes -- and widows and orphans paid them, because their trustee wouldn't swear off on less than the real amount. But on his own holdings, well, they were quite meager. Some interesting news articles compared the personal property of rich decedents to the personal property on which they paid annual taxes.

There were also significant tariffs on imported goods. Sugar and tea, which the poor liked as well as the rich. One of HG's books was "Protection or Free Trade" which Milton Friedman called his favorite book on the topic. (Then again, Friedman repeatedly called land value taxation the "least bad" tax, but never found the motivation to promote its application.) I had occasion to dip into POFT last week, and found it pleasurable and interesting reading. Its at Schalkenbach's website, among other places.

Yes, a shift could be quite gradual, though I suspect that once it was begun, and people began to see the beauty of untaxing buildings, wages, sales, it would likely be sped up.

just curious, what sort of distortions would you expect to see with a very high LVT?

Many people who were first influenced by Henry George's ideas became impatient with the "organicness" of them, and moved to promoting socialism because they thought it would achieve their objectives more quickly. But George was convinced that it had to grow organically.

George's simple reform would provide the level playing field, and not involve "command and control." George was very much the small-d democrat and very much the capitalist -- but a purer capitalism, not land monopoly capitalism. And he could accurately be called a mensch!

George Bernard Shaw was perhaps the most famous of them.

Henry George had public debates with several socialists (Serge Shevitch was one - 1887; Henry Hyndman another). They're great reading.