Not quite. There is information that's not part of the price system.
National defense isn't going to be priced in by markets. And food security is national security, even if it's "more efficient" to ship food in from your geopolitical rivals.
Things having a price isn't same as profit maximizing on everything. People don't purely profit maximize.
Are you maximizing profit in your primary residence? You might derive pleasure from having a large garden instead of building an industrial plant of same sort there, for example, or not rent out rooms, or have more shirts than you need instead of investing those monies into a business.
When you said generally desirable, I assumed you meant to the general public and society at large. Absent some other very convincing information, the price of a plot of land is going to be the best analogue for how much society values that land.
Obviously the private land owner (in general) would prefer that the cost of owning land was as near zero as possible so that they could use it how they saw fit, regardless of the opportunity cost to society. And that's how it spirals into the mess we have today.
Why would it be most desirable for society if the only thing done with land was to maximize profit? Society also values museums, parks, etc. - but those are not a profit maximization things.
You keep bringing up price, but price and use of the land are not the same. A price (if transacted on) also only really speaks towards the parties involved, not society as a whole.
The mess we have today is not because we don't maximize profits from landownership enough.
The mess we have is because landowners can squeeze the users of the land for all of their profit. Really what should be maximized is the productivity (in a broad sense) of the land.
Profit is a pretty good stand in for productivity, especially if you can't trivially extract rent.
If landowners already maximize profit, why would you expect any change if you tax landowners in a way that encourages profit maximization from land?
Or do you mean things like more industry and less housing? Smaller, high density and expensive housing instead of larger housing?
Landowners can now maximize profits by renting it out and speculating on land value increase. They are getting value for free, at the expense of the renters and people who can't find land. They are nothing but a drag on society if they take this approach.
Note that a landlord who builds and maintains a nice house isn't freeloading and not part of the problem.
The problem to solve here is vacant lots, land speculation, and, slumlords. Anyone who makes their money off their land from it just being there, rather than by working on improving or using the land. Put differently, anyone who makes their money purely by virtue of people who have no other way to access land.
Being a slumlord could be the most profitable in the current world, but stop being profitable when an LVT were in force.
In the current world, slumlords make profit because their costs are negligible, and it's mostly profit. They could build nicer houses, but they don't deem it worth the effort. They make money either way.
Once an LVT is introduced, if they don't invest, they lose money. All of a sudden, investing in the place becomes worth it.
Sorry, but I don't understand how that follows from an LTV. If the payout from being a slumlord is positive, making no investments might lead to higher IRR than investing, for example. Even if investments where the way to go for higher profit, it might not mean that investments go towards nicer houses.
I think the idea that an LTV can so finely steer investment seems unlikely to me (also, would need to take varying interest rates into account). Trying to steer investments by increasing certain costs has in the past led to a lot of unexpected behavior - I'd assume the same would happen here.
In a world without LVT the slum option is quite attractive, especially if you don't have much capital, don't want to do effort, or expect to sell soon.
If you introduce an LVT, that might turn out at about 90$.
All of a sudden, investment becomes much more profitable.
And it isn't inconceivable the LVT comes out at 105$ . At that point the slumlord is forced ti either improve, or divest.
The issue with LVT here, is that it will wreck the financials of anyone with significant landownership. It will be a massive transfer of wealth and incine. It will be a totally fair transfer of income. No one is working to earn the money LVT taxes. The transfer of wealth is more hairy, people have worked hard to buy their land. It was at worst a slightly immoral decision if they invested most of their wealth in land, but it is harsh to destroy that wealth.
Regardless of fairness tho, it will face a loooooot of opposition from self interested parties, with a lot of power and influence.
The slumlord could just increase rent a bit, for example (where would other options for housing come from for the current renters?).
At a 90, the slumlord option is still much better than the decent option (100% return on investment in the former, less than 20% in the latter). An LVT would just further highly extractive land use - that might not be by existing landowners but not sure why that would matter much.
It will be bad for the landowners who don't actually use the land. Landowners who make their money either renting out the land to others who actually use it well, or who just leave it vacant for 10 years until the value spiked.
Those landowners are nothing but a drag. All the other landowners will have some more tax, but the more they invested in improving the land, the lower the taxes will proportionately be.
So the sale value drops, but the assesed value doesn't, and the raised taxes also remain fixed.