Lars Doucet, the writer who won the first ACX book review contest with a treatment of Henry George's Progress and Poverty, reports from the other side of a five-year arc that took land value tax from blog-debate curiosity to active legislation. Virginia and Kentucky passed LVT enablement laws in April 2026, permitting municipalities to opt into split-rate property taxes that lower rates on buildings and raise them on land. Bills are moving in multiple other states, with Washington State next in line. The international momentum is harder to dismiss than any single U.S. state bill. The UK elected Andy Burnham as prime minister — a long-time open LVT advocate. South Korea's Lee Jae Myung, elected president, has the same inclination. In January 2025, the German state of Baden-Württemberg implemented an LVT that survived a court challenge, though its effective rate remains low. These are not academic endorsements; they are elected leaders with governing authority. Doucet's most useful reflection is tactical, not theoretical. He now believes overly online debate is the least productive avenue for policy change. The real leverage is boring scut work: building models, creating visualization tools, finding sympathetic legislators, and pursuing a 'succeed anywhere' strategy rather than fighting hard cases at home. His organization, the Center for Land Economics, maintains open-source tools — CivicMapper for 3D land value visualization and LVTShift for modeling revenue-neutral tax shifts — that let any city council see who wins and who loses. The data work addresses the most common objection head-on: that LVT would punish single-family homeowners. CivicMapper shows land value concentration in downtown cores — Houston alone has $3.5 billion in land value locked under surface parking lots. Revenue-neutral LVT models consistently show the biggest losers are vacant land and surface parking, while the median single-family homeowner comes out ahead. A newer argument connects LVT to AI-era economics. As AI-generated wealth concentrates among a small cohort who then bid up land prices in cities like San Francisco and Seoul, the Georgist case strengthens: land captures productivity gains its owners didn't create. Adam Ozimek argues land will be a winner in the age of AI; Norwegian EA thinker Aksel Sterri calls for an explicitly Georgist framework for the AI era. Doucet is candid about limits. The German LVT rate is low. It remains to be seen whether Burnham or Lee will push ambitious implementation. The 'single tax' — LVT as the only tax — remains controversial among economists, even as LVT itself enjoys broad professional support. The gap between enablement laws and meaningful rate-setting is real, and political headwinds will intensify once landowners with concentrated downtown holdings understand the math. The structural question is whether this movement can survive the transition from 'interesting idea that helps homeowners' to 'actual rate that redistributes billions from commercial landholders.' Every tax reform looks popular until the losers organize. The Georgist advantage is that the losers are surface parking lots and vacant land speculators, not sympathetic constituencies — but those owners have lobbyists, and homeowner coalitions have been weaponized before against reforms that nominally benefit them.
