Tim endorses business rates as a "close approximation to a Land Value Tax, the least distorting of all taxes."

He omits to add that they are also very unpopular - which is one reason why they raise only 1.6% of GDP*. Their domestic equivalent, rates, were, remember, abolished in 1988 and (eventually) replaced with the less onerous council tax. This tells us that there is very little support for Land Value Tax.

This reflects a widespread problem in economic policy-making, which I express through the medium of a Venn diagram thusly:

This doesn't just apply to land taxes, but to numerous other things: immigration; Keynesianism (Osborne's policy is more popular than Labour's); a citizens' basic income; worker democracy; drug liberalization; fiscal union in the euro area. And so on; feel free to add others.

In saying this, I'm not taking a left-right stance. Marxists have long thought public opinion warped by false consciousness; the libertarian Bryan Caplan has challenged what he calls the "myth of the rational voter", and the Democrat-supporting Alan Blinder has said (pdf):

Ideology seems to play a stronger role in shaping opinion on economic policy issues than either self-interest or knowledge...The contrast with homo economicus'who is well informed, nonideological, and extremely self-interested'could hardly be more stark.

However, I fear that blaming public stupidity is only part of the problem. It's also the case that economists' association with the charlatanic practice of forecasting has helped to discredit the profession even where it has useful things to say.

Whatever the cause, the fact is that there is a sharp trade-off between democracy and good economic policy-making.