Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s regime is remembered for its sweeping declarations of reform — none more ambitious than his promise of genuine land reform. Yet, despite bold rhetoric and a series of presidential decrees, his administration failed to address the root of the land problem in the Philippines: the unearned wealth generated by land ownership itself. Had Marcos Sr. adopted a Land Value Tax (LVT) instead of focusing solely on land redistribution, his land reform could have been truly transformative.

Marcos’s land reform aimed to break up large estates and redistribute land to tenant farmers, particularly through Presidential Decree No. 27. While some land was redistributed, the program was riddled with loopholes, underfunded, and largely bypassed the wealthiest landowning families — including political allies. Worse, it failed to dismantle the economic foundation of landlordism: the ability to extract rising land values without producing anything.

This is where Land Value Tax would have made a difference. By taxing the unimproved value of land — not the crops, not the buildings, but the raw location value — LVT strikes at the heart of feudal wealth. It makes it costly to hoard land and rewards its productive use. More importantly, it reclaims for the public the value created by community growth, infrastructure, and economic development — not private privilege.

Had Marcos implemented LVT, he could have:

* Discouraged speculative landholding by elites; * Provided government revenue to fund rural development and services; * Empowered small farmers without requiring massive state buyouts; * Undermined the wealth and power of entrenched landed dynasties — including his own.

Instead, land reform under Marcos became a symbolic gesture — one that preserved landlord power under a new guise. His failure to adopt a structural reform like LVT allowed land inequality to persist and dynastic wealth to flourish into the present day.

In hindsight, Land Value Tax wasn’t just an economic alternative — it was a moral one. It offered a way to fulfill the promise of justice and productivity in the countryside without violence or expropriation. For a leader who claimed to champion a “New Society,” Marcos Sr. missed the opportunity to build one on truly just and sustainable ground.