Wyatt (1994): A Critical View of Land Value Taxation as a Progressive Strategy

Overview

"A Critical View of Land Value Taxation as a Progressive Strategy for Urban Revitalization, Rational Land Use, and Tax Relief" is a 1994 paper by Michael D. Wyatt, published in the Review of Radical Political Economics, volume 26, issue 1, pp. 1–25.[1] Writing from a left/radical-political-economy perspective, Wyatt reviews the standard arguments for land value tax — that it stops urban sprawl, eliminates land speculation, reduces housing costs, and provides tax relief — and argues against most of them: he concludes LVT would increase, not lower, land prices, provide only a small incentive to building construction, would not favorably affect the distribution of wealth, and would not reduce housing costs, and that a progressive property tax could deliver residential tax relief more effectively.[1][2]

The paper is one of a small number of substantive scholarly critiques of LVT from outside the free-market/Austrian tradition, which makes it useful to this wiki's honesty mandate — most of the literature (see LVT dampens land speculation and landlords cannot pass LVT to tenants) points the other way. Lars Doucet's Land is a Big Deal (2022, Ch. 21) surveys 13-plus studies on whether LVT is capitalized into land prices (and therefore cannot be passed on to tenants as higher rents) and identifies Wyatt (1994) as the only paper found that emphatically rejects full capitalization — but Doucet also reports that Wyatt's strongest supporting argument, that publicly funded improvements paid for by LVT revenue can themselves raise land values, actually affirms rather than undermines the Henry George Theorem, and that some of Wyatt's cited sources are unreliable, including (per Doucet) a piece of science-fiction short fiction published in a law review as a hypothetical illustration.[2]

See Also

• Land is a Big Deal (Lars Doucet, book) — the discovery source that surveys Wyatt (1994) against 12+ pro-capitalization studies
• Landlords cannot pass LVT to tenants — the outcome claim Wyatt's paper is a documented dissent from
• Henry George Theorem — the theorem Doucet argues Wyatt's own argument ends up supporting
• LVT Austrian Critique — a separate line of LVT criticism, from the opposite political direction

Sources

1. Michael D. Wyatt (1994), "A Critical View of Land Value Taxation as a Progressive Strategy for Urban Revitalization, Rational Land Use, and Tax Relief," Review of Radical Political Economics, 26(1), pp. 1–25. DOI: 10.1177/048661349402600101. Free full text: gwern.net PDF — used for the paper's authorship, venue, page range, and headline findings (this session read the abstract and the paper's own reference list from the scanned PDF, but could not extract the full scanned body text; a future editor with OCR access should verify Wyatt's specific arguments and page-level detail). The page range (26(1): 1–25) is confirmed from the journal's own RePEc/SAGE metadata record and the article's running header on its closing reference page.
2. Lars A. Doucet, Land is a Big Deal: Why rent is too high, wages too low, and what we can do about it (Shack Simple Press, 2022), Ch. 21 — used for Doucet's characterization of Wyatt as the sole dissenting capitalization study, the critique of Wyatt's sourcing, and the argument that Wyatt's own strongest point affirms the Henry George Theorem. Wiki summary