Quote Originally Posted by HoreTore View Post
DING DING DING! Spot on.

It's obvious that property needs to be less profitable, while production needs to be more profitable. I do not claim to have a miracle recipe on how to accomplish that, of course. I do know I'm very skeptical of solutions which smells of ideological blindness though, like solutions that focus entirely on tax raises or entirely on tax cuts.
Actually, business just needs to be more profitable for the same effort. The second is an important point.

Property taxes in the UK are basically out of date, they don't scale up so that for your really huge mansions you're still just paying the same as a Georgian townhouse - that's not a question "increasing" taxes, just removing the cliff drop at the extreme end.

Beyond that, you could tax people for leaving arable land fallow for more than two years, punatively, that would at least encourage either use or development rather than fields being bought up and then sold when they become valuable as real estate for a housing estate.

Proper town planning is a part of this too, by which I mean not just tacking bits on willy nilly and hollowing out the centre of a town while all the wealthy people move to the suburbs.