Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (294)

Ben Jamin' in the comments to an earlier post:

LVT is supposed to be unavoidable, what about Gypsies? I'd like to see you give them an LVT bill. Good luck with that one.

Easiest thing in the world. LVT is just ground rent. We know that:

a) The general public has certain sort of prejudices against gypsies, be they justified or otherwise, and they want gypsy camps (settlements?) to be as far away from them as possible.

b) Gypsies on the other hand would probably prefer, all things being equal, to be closer to rather than further away from urban centres, because they have to go shopping etc just like anybody else.

c) Mainly, gypsies want to be left in peace and quiet, and they are prepared to pay for this.

So it's up to each town to identify a suitable site and offer to rent it to gypsies (who have their own clans and family structures, impenetrable to me). The closer that site is to the town, the higher the rent will be (the town's residents will want 'compensation' and the gypsies will be happy to pay more), and the further away it is, the lower the rent will be (for equal and opposite reasons).

So the rent the town's residents would demand for a field right next to the town would be £100,000s a year, and the rent they would demand for a field which is three miles out of town might be only £10,000 a year. By applying usual market forces and a kind of bidding-auction process, we will find some sort of optimum, maybe it's a field one mile out of town and the rent is £30,000 a year.

So our thirty (or whatever) gypsy families agree to pay £30,000 a year rent for that field, chipping in £1,000 a year each. If they don't pay, they get moved on, but seeing as they agreed to pay this, why would they not pay?

There, that's your LVT (aka ground rent) collected. We can also assume that at least some of those gypsies will be legally resident UK citizens entitled to their Citizen's Dividend. The adult-rate CD would be about £3,500 - £4,000 per year, so as long as ten or more of them are entitled, their LVT bill and CD entitlement can be netted off, no money actually changes hands.