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Does the de jure owner of the land have de facto ownership? Do actual states interfere with the owner’s decisions?

There’s fire regs, which are about not endangering the neighbours. There’s creeping totalitarianism. “But no, his little honeymoon cottage — or our retirement shack — had to be a 900-square-foot Taj Mahal.” There’s utility infrastructure, such as water and methane.

But setting thing like the above aside, can the owner do what they like with the land?

If so, then they own it by law and custom, which means a formalist restructuring would grant them ownership.

(Edward, of course, had so many wars going on that by the end of his reign the Parliament was pretty near an annual institution.)

Yes, that is correct. There is a non-economic difference, in that the government does not get to choose whether to rent to you or not. That would be truly totalitarian, in Nick Szabo’s sense — a single landlord, no pluralism. Mark Wadsworth, a land-tax advocate, says “I never said people shouldn’t be able to own land. I am very much in favour of people owning land. What I said was that the economy works best when land owners have to pay for the location rent.”

For me the big questions about LVT are about political formulas.

We know that it is sustainable if it already exists. All land in Hongkong is leasehold (except the Cathedral). And England had a local welfare system (the Poor Laws) financed by the “rates” from Elizabeth I until it was replaced with a central welfare state after WW1.

The question is about how to get there. Almost all landowners will be opposed. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that our landowning class is part of our current political formula. And before Elizabeth I, the central state did not own all the land — it relied on large landowners (nobles). But the central state is much more powerful now.

True. But they also loathe income tax if it’s not deducted from their wages automatically. Before PAYE, I believe, plenty of people used to fail to save enough money to pay their income tax bill at the end of the year, and some high-earning entertainers still do. Collecting it monthly is much more sensible.

People who currently pay rent don’t seem to have much trouble making sure they save enough to pay rent each month. One can just arrange that the rent is due a day or two after you get paid, so you don’t have much chance to spend it all. LVT is no different from rent, and would be collected monthly. In the UK we already have council tax, which you can pay monthly by direct debit, so the govt would just have to increase that.

* Mindless doesn’t mean that individual conservatives are stupid – just that there are no continuous institutions that teach anti-progressive thought. As a result conservatism just evolves into a list of things that sound kind of good to the portion of voting public that isn’t bought by the left in some way.

Your last paragraph is the answer.

The left is just in favor of whatever gives the professional left more jobs and power.

Putting it in economic terms the left is a giant program to create dead weight loss. Anything that reduces dead weight loss will be opposed no matter if it fits the stated justifications for their policies or not.