If there’s one government program that proves that “land of the free” is not an accurate description of America, it’s property tax. It proves that nobody actually, trully own the land that they think they own… they’re just renting. Even if the land was purchased by an ancestor centuries ago and handed down from generation to generation, the local government still thinks that *they* own it.
As one example of a great many, read through this story.
Short form: a 71-year-old woman has a tax dispute with the town of Redding, Connecticut. Reddings response? Foreclose on 2 of her 8.5 acres, and sell them to someone else. It just so happens that those two acres contained her driveway, and it just so happens that that the someone who bought it put a chian across it and dug a trench. So now, the fuel oil truck can’t get to her house to bring her heating oil, she can’t get deliveries of hay for her horses, she has to walk through the woods to get to her car to drive to chemotherapy.
Now, it could be that the woman is massively at fault here, and has spent her life being a pain in the ass to everyone around her and racking up enemies left and right. Who knows. But the thing to note is… the town of Redding essentially stole her land and sold it to someone else.
If an American cannot be secure in their own home… where can an American be secure? If you’ve bought something, it’s *yours,* damnit.
9 Responses to “The Injustice Of Property Taxes”
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Ahh, Redding, about 10 miles as the DF-31 flies from the ancestral Allegrezza homestead. I’ll have to ask around about this and see if anybody knows the back story.
I will say that small Connecticut towns have a surplus of earnest old-timers who serve on the various boards (conservation, zoning, etc.) and have NOTHING ELSE TO DO but drive around and check to see if your mailbox is the correct number of inches from your driveway. So it could be that someone in the Redding town government was working this strictly by the book and made it very difficult for her to reach an understanding and avoid the land sale.
Having said that, the guy who bought the two acres sounds like a Class A tool.
She utilised services that Government provided, therefore she should have paid her tax. Simple really. The outcome was unfortunate and I don’t doubt the case could have been handled better and I agree, the purchaser of the land wasn’t exactly nice but I’d suggest that as she consumed those government services she should have considered that she needed to pay for them. If she couldn’t, then perhaps she should have realised she needed to trim her sails to suit her cloth and sold up.
> She utilised services that Government provided, therefore she should have paid her tax.
If only it were that simple. What services did she consume? Is there no better way to pay for these services than to make every single person into a renter, not an owner, a subject, not a citizen?
How about this: you get the services you pay for. If you can’t afford them, you don’t pay for them, and you don’t get them. This is how it works in everything else… but if I decide that I can’t pay for cable TV anymore and stop paying my bill, the cable TV company will cut off my cable TV service… but they won’t confiscate my house.
There was a news story a few weeks back about some guy who lost his house to a fire, while the fire fighters jsut stood there and watched. Why? Because he had not paid his bill for fire fighting services. Had he done so, the fire fighters woudl have tried to put out the fire, at no extra cost to him. No, I though the fire departments response of just standing there and watching his home burn was a Dick Move… what they should ahve done was put out the fire, and then written the home owner a big fat bill for services rendered.
That’s a superior system to property taxes. Pay for the services, or don’t get them. Not “pay for services, or we steal your stuff.” Property taxes are a protection racket a homeowner can’t escape from.
Modern society is not that simple. Who builds the roads you drive on? Who builds the roads that your cable-tv man drives on when comes to cut off your cable-tv cable? Where does the power come from? Cables. Who pays for the cables? Where does the water you use come from? Who pays for the pipes?
Infrastructure like that is what modern society possible and pleasant (and in the case of sewers, healthy). Infrastructure is the glue that keeps society together and it is the oil which reduces friction within society. I’d have assumed as a good capitalist you’d have appreciated that. Without modern infrastructure, commerce becomes so much more difficult and appreciably more expensive. Just one of those benefits of collectivisation.
Individuals can’t often afford to pay for pipes/cables/roads on an individual basis but collectively as a society they can. So is society unfair for levying taxes to recoup some of those costs? I do not believe so.
The fact that there’s a road somewhere does not make me or anyone else the perpetual servant of the State.
> So is society unfair for levying taxes to recoup some of those costs?
Nope. What’s unfair is the *type* of taxation. Taxing somethign for merely existing, and taxing it over and over and over and over is just plain *wrong.* A tax at purchase? Fine. I’d be thrilled with a one-time sales tax on end-user items as a replacement for the income tax. But property taxes never freakin’ end. It’s like an annual income tax on all income you’ve ever paid. if you made $50K this year, you have to pay $20K in tax on it. Of course, you also have to pay $20K in tax on the $50K you earned *last* year, and $20K in tax on the $50K you earned the year before that, and the year before that, and the year before that…
Once you’ve bought something, it’s *yours.* Or do you believe that the government shoudl ahve the right to just swoop in and take your stuff whenever it wants?
The fairest way to recoup costs for specific projects is to tax those who benefit most directly from them. For roads, set up toll booths. For water, tax the water users. For electricity, tax those who use electricity.
If someone wants to be a hermit, and buy a plot of land somewhere to farm it themselves using nothing but the sweat of their brow and the rain from the sky, asking and taking nothing from the rest of society… *you* would have them kicked off their land in less than a year. Whether that landowner was one lone hermit, a commune of hippies or a group of aborigines… you’d send in the cops to kick them off the land they own and send them all to jail because they didn’t pay the government rent.
Your hermit in reality more than likely not and cannot be completely self-sufficient. Your romantic view of modern life is touching but of course completely unrealistic. As long as people utilise government provided services and infrastructure, they will be expected to pay tax. You might want to live in some 18th century agrarian utopian ideal but me, I want to live in the 21st century and I have to acknowledge that costs money.
> As long as people utilise government provided services and infrastructure, they will be expected to pay tax.
And that’s agreed upon. What we don’t agree upon is *how* those taxes are to be collected. It seems that you have no problem with the government taking whatever it wants. Well, the Chinese have shown that that can get some good money using “donated” organs, so perhaps hospital-support taxes could be taken in the form of random body parts? If you disagree with that idea, then clearly you are opposed to paying your fair share of the burden, yes?
So suddenly its gone from “taxation is theft” to an acknowledgement that some taxation is beneficial to society? Did you enjoy your cake while you were eating it too? Hospitals do not need to be paid for by organ donations. Now you’re getting desperate.
I agree very early on that the methods by which the county collected the money was wrong, even if understandable. As long as you have people who refuse to pay their fair and justified taxes, the state will enforce the laws it has passed to enable that collection. You don’t like those laws, then vote someone in who will repeal them. Of course, when the county goes broke and is unable to repair the infrastructure that services its inhabitants or provide the services they need, then someone else will be voted in to reinstitute those taxes. People want all the stuff I’ve mentioned, they can’t appear for free. If you throw people back on their individual ability to pay for them, then they won’t get provided to those who can’t afford but need them. I know you’re anti any form of social welfare but its obvious you’ve never needed such things. When you do, your attitude will change.
> So suddenly its gone from “taxation is theft” to an acknowledgement that some taxation is beneficial to society?
Are you incapable of understanding that both concepts are true at the same time? Similarly, “murder is wrong” can be true at the same time that “the only way to stop the outbreak of a genetically engineered SuperSmallpox is to blow the airliner out of the sky” might be true.
> Did you enjoy your cake while you were eating it too?
Generally, yes. I’m not sure what the relevance here is, but in general, cake is enjoyable to eat.
> As long as you have people who refuse to pay their fair and justified taxes
Define both. In the US, more than 40% of the populace pays no federal income tax at all. And something like 5% of the populace pays something like 30% of the federal income tax. So the poor seem to be skating by on the backs of the productive. The proper response here would be for the most productive to decide to take a year or two off. Go on extended staycations.
> I know you’re anti any form of social welfare but its obvious you’ve never needed such things.
Define “need.” I’ve gone some rather long stretches without a paycheck. And I’ve not drawna dime in the form of welfare; instead I’ve found my own ways to make money, lean though it may be. Of course, perhaps the better approach would have been to dive headlong into the welfare state and try to suck it as dry as I can. Why bother working if I can extort the money from someone else?