Land value tax: the least-bad tax

Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, MoneyWeek and the Labour Party are all fans of a land value tax. But what exactly is it and how would it work? Simon Wilson reports.

House and money
(Image credit: malerapaso)

What is a land value tax?

It's a levy paid on the value of the land upon which a property (or no property) sits, rather than a tax on a property itself. The basic idea behind the tax is that pieces of land get their value from their location, rather than the calibre of the development on them. And what gives a location value is what is going on around it. Is it close to the centre of a city? Is it in an area with great transport infrastructure, good schools, hospitals, and so on?

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.