I think the appeal is that it sounds simple -- you say "I bought my house for $1M, and I don't want to move, so I set the value at $2M, so I have to spend $20,000/yr to keep it, or someone can give me $2M and take the house."
That's the sort of thing that sounds very unappealing to the average voter. "I have to pay property tax on substantially more than it's worth and keep raising it on a regular basis, otherwise some property speculator might make me homeless" is much easier to understand than notional efficiency benefits.
Same goes for the Harberger tax on copyright, which is basically "only people and corporations who are already rich deserve to extract market value from their creations"
It really reads like a fun thought experiment which in practice is really impractical for real-world use cases.
"I can make your life miserable and I have enough money to do so" is something that can happen in the real world and that the average person doesn't want to happen. Tthe Statute of Anne was created b/c previously printers could essentially publish any work that wasn't already in publication by another house... which is in some ways closer to a Harberger tax situation, but was widely hated by everyone who wasn't one of the publishers who monopolized access to the printing presses.
I think that drastically underestimates the (american, at least) knee jerk opposition to taxes, discomfort with novelty, and fear of having to move. Why would anyone go from a place where they pay a flat percentage of the assessed value to this new framework?
Scenario: Your local town assessor hates $ethnic_minority and starts assessing everything in $minority_neighborhood at 5x its former value so that they get taxed to death.
Scenario: Your local town assessor hates rich people and starts assessing everything in $wealthy_neighborhood at 5x its former value so that they get taxed to death.
Scenario: Libertarian demagogue mayor decides to eliminate income and sale taxes, and this is his proposal to fund what few public services will remain (at a very low rate). It works, but having virtually no public services remaining has predictable effects and gets him thrown out of office. Rather than rebuild the old system (and start an interminable fight over the specifics in the legislature) the decision is made by the next administration to simply adjust the rate on the new one upwards by a thousand percent.
I'm not saying these are credible scenarios, but treat this like a novel where you've written the last chapter; What is the most plausible way that a polity got from here to there? It's a more circumstantial way of thinking - "How might this occur?" than planning hypotheticals, which work more like "How will I achieve this next year in our current universe using my own actions".
realistically there should just be some kind of homestead exemption for one primary residence. several states already have such a system, where you get reduced or frozen property taxes, and protection during bankruptcy.
