Talk:Land value tax

the price of rent is determined by supply and demand not "what tenants are prepared to pay" whatever that means 112.209.203.48 (talk) 16:11, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

"What tenants are prepared to pay" refers to the bid rent function, which are essentially the inverse demand functions for land, so the determination of prices through supply and demand involves the maximum rent per unit of land tenants are prepared to pay or "bid rent". Viespe1 (talk) 00:07, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

The graph incorrectly labels the height of tax revenues as the tax rate. I’ll provide two explanations: first geometric, and the other unit analytic.

Firstly, if tax revenues—a rectangle—is base × height, and the base is the market quantity as shown in the graph, then the height of the rectangle is the ratio of the area of the rectangle and the base, that is:

${\displaystyle {\text{tax revenue}}\div {\text{quantity}}={\text{tax paid per unit}}\,.}$

The per unit tax is a bit different from the tax rate. The latter is a dimensionless ratio with values between 0 and 1, while the former is measured in nominal or money-terms (e.g., one might pay $10 in taxes per unit sold).

Elementary unit analysis says the tax rate is a dimensionless quantity because it is defined as the ratio of two nominal variables—taxes and the value of the tax base— while the per-unit tax is nominal because it is the ratio of a nominal quantity (tax revenues) and a real quantity (the amount of goods being taxed).

Thus, the tax rate is defined as:

${\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}{\text{tax rate}}&{}={\text{tax revenue}}\div ({\text{price}}\times {\text{quantity}})\\&{}={\text{per unit tax}}\div {\text{price}}\,.\end{aligned}}}$

If you took the price as numéraire (= 1), which actually isn’t an uncommon modeling trick, then you’ve effectively choose units so that the per unit tax becomes equivalent to the tax rate, but I doubt that’s even helpful here, so I suggest replacing the label tax rate with per unit tax to describe the height of tax revenues since, in the graph at least, tax revenues are plotted against quantity, not price × quantity.

Viespe0 (talk) 16:25, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

The article reads like a campaign piece - it is overwhelmingly in support of the Land Value Tax, and the economic, philosophical, and even theological, theories behind it - with very little criticism. Wikipedia is supposed to be a neutral reference source - not a political campaigning organization. ~2026-56337-4 (talk) 07:08, 19 April 2026 (UTC)