> This is how we lose natural land to sprawl. A large chunk is bought by a developer, clear cut, split into many small chunks, and sold to private individuals.

> This is how we lose natural land to sprawl. A large chunk is bought by a developer, clear cut, split into many small chunks, and sold to private individuals. This is Land front-running - somebody has information you want or will want something and buys it for himself and later reselling to you more expensively (eg. concert ticket scalpers, high frequency trading or simply knowong that there will be generations of youngsters moving to cities so why not to buy real estate there and sell it to them later). While this market-making can be a useful service for smoothing out price of goods with price fluctuating up and down, it however becomes immoral for badly auctioned goods - such as desirable concert tickets which are often sold to scalpers in large quantities who front-run every other buyer. Also in real estate and land markets - where all the QE printed money creates asset price inflation, so by buying in those markets you can front run people who don't yet have money for it or are not even born yet. This ceases to be a problem under LVT because you auction land usage fairly to a large degree. No front-running -> no sitting idle on land by developers and deforestation -> optimal allocation to users.