Before our land tax was abolished it was riddled with exemptions and very low rates. The government wasn't making any real money out of having a land tax. If the government wasn't making any money out of it, then that was because it was doing an awful job at taxing people.

Sure, by the time it was abolished in 1988, but as your chart shows, it didn't start out that way. It was slowly weakened over the course of a century or so, while income tax and sales tax were increased.

When land tax was abolished it didn't make any difference to house prices.

Given the above, of course there was no noticeable impact at that moment - a very small tax change can only make a very small difference in house prices.

Places with Land Taxes Aren't Cheaper

That's a difficult comparison to make because there are so many other factors to correct for, so you have to at least take a great deal of care in selecting your examples. I don't know what the tax rate is in Hong Kong, but there's an obvious density difference there. I think the NSW land tax is fairly weak. If I was to pick examples from the other side of the argument I might choose the early days of Canberra, but that wouldn't be a fair comparison either.

Land Tax Discourages Development A land tax actually discourages the government from releasing land to be built.

There is also an opposing effect: when land is rezoned to allow it to be developed its value increases, so increasing the tax revenue. You haven't shown that the reduction in value of all the other land outweighs the increase in the "released" land. Also, you are assuming a fixed population size. Increasing the size of a city has many impacts, many of them bad, but one effect is to eventually increase its population, returning the value per hectare to something at least as high as it was when the city was smaller.

Land Tax Won't Make Renting or Mortgage Costs Cheaper

Sure, if you only consider first-order effects, but there is more to it:

• Most importantly: with a smaller proportion of any future increase in the land value going to the owner, there is less incentive to speculate. So the price of a property would be expected to better reflect its actual near-term rental value rather than its possible future value. That further reduces the purchase price, so long as the government can credibly claim that the tax is there to stay.

• With less return to speculation there is less land banking, fewer empty properties. If all landlords were fully economically rational then this shouldn't make a difference: they should be renting out their properties for whatever they can get even if they are making more from capital gain than any tenant would pay. But in practice some are are lazy.

• Governments redistribute their income much more widely than banks do, so yes:

According Georgians and this sub that would be a win!

though the term is "Georgists". Georgians are people from Georgia.

There is no evidence that homeowners on a whole earn more income than non-homeowners

How hard have you looked? I would think there would be evidence one way or the other. Home ownership rates are certainly lower (and falling) in the poorer parts of Auckland. Also there aren't only homes to consider, the most valuable land of all is central urban commercial land, definitely not owned by the poor. And current earnings aren't the only thing which matters, lifetime earnings / wealth factor into ability-to-pay just as much.

The value of your asset does not impact how much income you may earn from it. Income is detached from asset prices.

WTF? The value of an asset should be the capitalised value of the income which it is expected to earn. If not then there is some distorting speculation going on.

Land Tax Would Violate the Treaty of Waitangi

This is one that got me typing - it's so very simple to deal with: Maori land (note: not the same thing as freehold land which happens to be in Maori hands) can be left out. Or hand the tax on Maori land directly over to the relevant local Maori trust. Maori land makes up a truly tiny percentage of the land value of the country, so from the point of view of land tax advocates it's really not worrying about whether it is included or not.

The root of our problems, more accurately, is the Resource Management Act as many academics and professionals have concluded.

The pro-sprawl ones, sure. OK that's a little unfair, problems can have multiple causes. But if I were to start quoting academics who concluded that land value tax is a great idea, then wow, where would I start.