Context for all the frustrated tenants:

Here’s Ron DeSantis’ original tweet surrounding the topic. The man on the right is Henry George, and this quote is from Chapter 33 of his masterwork Progress and Poverty.

Simply put, people are already paying the price of land to private owners. It’s necessary for life but finite (i.e. we can’t produce more of it, filling out water though land reclamation is just taking pre-existing underwater land and making it usable above water).

As it relates to land, Ron DeSantis is wrong on both fronts (taxing buildings is certainly problematic but even worse are the sales taxes he loves so much). It’s generally agreed in economics that a land value tax can’t be passed on because of what I mentioned before that land is finite. The price of land depends on what tenants to the land are ready to pay to whoever already owns it, and that’s often as high as people are willing to pay.

In other words, the oppression that he speaks of is already being levied against the landless through incredibly high land prices and rents. Landless folks are constantly forced to compete with each other for whatever finite parcels of land remain while landowners. Even worse, speculators and land hoarders are incentivized to come and hoard land, waiting for its price to rise without doing anything with it, only worsening the whole situation. High land prices form an integral source of the housing crisis and a massive barrier to building and buying for anyone.

It’s for that reason that Ron is wrong on the second front of LVT being ineffective. Because land cannot be produced, taxing its value won’t discourage production and cause landowners to produce less of it to try make land more expensive and offset costs. In fact it’s actually beneficial for the economy because it kicks out those same speculators I pointed out, making land cheaper and more available and decreasing costs of production and living for workers and capitalists alike. LVT is perfectly efficient, and that means solving any inefficiencies that exist in our current land market.

As George rightly pointed out, taxing the value of land (and really taxing [or otherwise reforming] all assets that are finite since we can’t produce more of them, like non-land natural resources included mineral deposits or limited legal privileges like a patent right for an invention) would simply give to the public what would already have been paid to private owners; even better by kicking out the hoarders who smell the unearned scarcity income (like the infamous patent troll). Ron DeSantis is willing to throw the reality of the situation out and harm those looking to work, invest, or just have a nice place to live if it means benefiting incumbent landowners. We saw what that did to California starting 50 years ago, repeating it would bring about socio-economic suffering.