One objection against LVT I recently stumbled over was that as a single tax it violated the principle that everyone should contribute to state spending.
Saint of Bacon who recorded a video on Youtube critiquing the LVT said "My argument is the idea of a single tax isn't going to fly in the US because we've adopted the view that everyone should pay into the government. Meaning having some segment of the population be tax exempt by choice isn't how America likes to function. Efficiency only gets so far and that is my point, quoting philosophy that I don't subscribe to isn't going to convince me. You're literally in the position of a Christian quoting Bible courses to an atheist."
Let's assume for arguments sake the LVT could indeed cover all of state spending is Bacon correct?
Say a country spends £250bn on services and £250bn on benefits. As the rental value of land is £500bn pa, for reasons of efficiency and justice it decides to shift to a LVT and Citizens Income , negating the need to tax incomes, capital or transactions.
The principle behind the LVT is that it is a compensatory payment to those excluded from valuable natural resources. That it is collected and redistributed/spent by the state is a separate issue. As we are all equally excluded we are therefore all entitled to an equal share of the rents, so this hypothetical country does this by paying out the £500bn pa as a Citizens Income.
This country still has to finance £250bn of spending on defence, schools, hospitals etc, which it does by imposing a Poll Tax on each citizen.
For accounting purposes this makes no sense. So instead of collecting the Poll Tax, it's less bureaucratic just to deduct £250bn of the LVT at source, and pay the other £250bn out as a Citizens Income.
This is viewed by Bacon that only those that pay the LVT pay into state coffers, but that's not correct because that's not what is happening in principle.
The correct view is that the LVT doesn't belong to the state as tax. The state is merely its collector and redistributor. Therefore any citizen that does not receive their full amount of compensation with no deduction is paying a defacto Poll Tax.
And as all taxes on income, capital and transactions are to some degree incident upon land, that's also true of all current tax systems around the world. That is, we pay into state coffers simply by not receiving our full share of land rent.
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