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Notes -
Trying to phrase my objection correctly:
A user making the highest and best use would always pay zero because the amount that this user would pay affects the amount of taxes that the landowner would pay, and the combination of these would lead to the user paying zero, the landowner making zero, and the taxes being zero.
In order for this to work, you need it to be something like "the amount that the user would be willing to pay if there was someone who would care about raising their price that high, even if there's nobody who'd care". That would be consistent, but I can't see how such a thing could possibly be computed.
Forget about the landowner for a moment. Suppose the government has some parcel of land, and wants to get some money for it. So they decide to auction off a lease to it to the highest bidder. The price they can auction that lease for is a good approximation of the land rent for the highest and best use. Now consider that they only auction off short-term leases, so every year (or whatever period) all the land they leased out gets re-auctioned to the highest bidder, with some option to the current leaseholder to match the high bid to extend the lease. Now the government is collecting all the land rent, which has been determined without any annoying zeroes, and someone's making use of the land. There's no "landowner" and no "tax" in this system. But if we call the leaseholder a "landowner" and the rent they are paying the "land value tax", it's the same thing.
That scenario works because the government has found someone willing to pay the amount listed in the lease, so it has a place to get the number from. In the Georgist scheme, the government is going to have to come up with "land rent" values that the owner could have rented the land for even if he isn't actually doing it. There's no lease to pick the number off of.
Figuring out the land value tax without something like that auction would be very difficult, yes.
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