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Comment by noahtallen | Hacker News Reader

It really does seem like an extremely capitalist concept! The idea is to force the market to compete much more thoroughly. Not sure why folks are saying it’s a “leftist redistribution ploy,” when the main benefit is to force owners to make a profit on their land or sell.

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Exactly. All it's saying is that you can do whatever you want with your land, as long as you can afford to.

It forces landowners to account for the opportunity costs they impose on society by not utilizing the land optimally, even if (and especially if) those costs change over time.

What if they don’t want to do that with their land?

... sucks to be them? No tax scheme is truly neutral, and any tax scheme is going to favor certain behaviors and disfavor others. If the behavior you wanted to undertake isn't the one a given tax system incentivizes, that's probably unpleasant, but somebody had to get the short straw, and as a society we may as well pick a short-straw-holder in such a way that broadly pro-social outcomes are maximized, like increasing the likelihood that more people have places to live.

Why not just raise existing taxes across the board to pay for this? Seems a lot more fair since pro-social benefits are distributed among the whole society.

The tax on income disincentivizes meaningful productive work. If you have to pay out $50 for every $100 you make, you would probably just not bother putting in the effort.

As grandparent said, every tax causes this kind of incentive. So people thought long about what was the least worst of all the options and came up with LVT and similar ideas. They cause the minimum harm to the economy and have the least side effects and "unintended consequences"

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