RE: What Can Make Social Democracy "Libertarian"?
I'm beginning to understand how you are balancing the extremes and nuances between libertarianism, socialism, communism, and anarchy. Indeed freedom is a very complex thing when dealing with large societies. The ecosystem of man is a very complex interconnected mechanism. One entity's freedom can easily become another's enslavement.
Liquid democracy seems to me the best possible solution, in our current political climate, to resolve, very rapidly, many of the injustices and pro corporate policies that are eroding our societies. It's effectively decentralizing politics by doing away with the zero sum results of representative democracy. I can participate in policy making representing only myself or "campaign" for direct delegations from individuals at all levels. Our modern technology, specifically blockchain, makes this very possible and promising.
Land value tax makes great sense. But I would modify the rules a bit to incentivize occupancy and self sufficiency by setting a base level of land that an individual can occupy without taxation. Perhaps 1/2 acre per occupant would be sensible. The land value tax percentage could then increase with the total land held by an individual. This would put strong pressures for decentralization and give small businesses, small farms, and communal/eco villages a large advantage.
You should look into Estonia's system of digital democracy. It's quite interesting.
As for "setting a base level of land that an individual can occupy without taxation", my proposed system already does that, just in a different way. My proposal is based on the proposal of the American founding father, Thomas Paine. In Agrarian Justice, he proposed linking ground-rent/land value tax to a citizen's dividend. I do the same thing. The revenue generated from the land value tax is divided up and goes back to the citizens as dividends. If you just have a humble house and a small plot of land, you would effectively have no taxes, because your land value tax would be more than covered by your dividend/basic income. The people that would end up paying taxes would be folks who monopolize large plots of land. The beauty of the citizen's dividend (or universal basic income) approach is that it also subsidizes people who have no land (so they basically have a negative tax rate), and it serves as a from of welfare for the poorest people in society, thereby eliminating poverty. You can then simplify the welfare state by eliminating most of the "means-tested" welfare programs. So, this approach is a much simpler way of doing taxation and a much simpler way of doing welfare, which is far more libertarian and requires much less government bureaucracy.
My only worry would be that the land tax could be passed down from the landlords onto the tenants. Rents would rise and there would be no net difference for those who don’t own land. Theoretically this would put a higher demand for home ownership, but that would, in turn, increase the value of homes. My thought was that having a sliding scale of taxation based on total land owned by a single entity would essentially subsidize smaller and decentralized land ownership.
If the owner tried to push the costs of the taxes on to the tenants, then he'd do it by raising the price of his land. The rent would go up, higher price. The consequence would be higher taxes, so the increase would just be re-confiscated via land value tax. You wouldn't be able to push the costs on to tenants very easily. If prices and rent rise, the taxes increase too.
Ah, I see. Then the only way rents would naturally rise would be through the demand. With less people working full time jobs and incentive to own some land with net 0 taxation, the demand for rentals would be leveled out. Especially if populations begin to disperse more through the freedom provided by basic income.