Property Taxes are Communism

[FTL_Ian]

Frank Chodorov is not allowed to post on this thread.


Property Taxes are Communism

What better way to welcome someone to the area than with a huge property tax bill?  I just bought some property in Keene, and what's the first thing I get in the mail?  A nearly $3,000 bill for property taxes!  This amount will only cover six months!  Keene's property taxes are so high, it's like paying rent again.  One of the main reasons I became a homeowner was to get away from throwing money down the rent rathole, now I'm just throwing it down the property tax rathole to the tune of $500 per month.

"What?!" you say, "You have to have property taxes!  What about our government services?  What about the schools?".  To that I say, wait.  Back up.  Reset.

Did you realize that property taxes are communism in America?  A hallmark of communism is central control and distribution of resources.  Anyone who has paid even a little attention to history knows that communism is always a failure, because centralization is inefficient, slow, stupid, and dangerous.  Why do we put up with this in the USA let alone the great state of New Hampshire?  Just in case you're confused, here's how property taxes work:

Some "authority", in this case the "Department of Assessment", assigns a value to your property.  The "Revenue Collector" then applies a tax rate of X mils to your property and sends you a bill.  Providing you do not want a band of armed thugs (the police) coming to throw you off the property that YOU paid for, you pay the outrageously expensive bill.  So does everyone else.  All these payments are sent to the Revenue Collector (the central controller) who then sends portions of your money off to other centrally controlled bureaucracies like the School Board and Police Department.

"Are you saying you don't want school and police?!"

No, not at all.  I'm saying I don't like communist forced wealth redistribution schemes.  It's totally possible to have both schools and police without property taxes.  And no, I'm not proposing another tax to replace it.  My proposal will give us better schools and police, here's how:

Most people would agree that schools and police are important things to have around.  However, has anyone ever asked themselves why these bureaucracies cannot be funded on a voluntary basis?  If they are truly providing a valuable service, surely people will step up to the plate and buy their services just like we buy services from Panera Bread or Walmart on a voluntary basis.

"How will voluntary funding make police and schools better?"

Simple, because if they aren't doing their jobs, they won't get the funding.  With today's property tax scam, it doesn't matter how bad or inefficient the police, schools, and other government services are, they keep getting bigger budgets year after year.  There's no accountability and not much that we can do about it.  If we were to set a date, say Jan 1st 2007 and tell these bureaucracies that they will no longer get tax funding after that date, they'd either figure out how to voluntarily fund themselves, or they would die from uselessness.  Inefficent bureaucracies would have to turn into efficient businesses to survive.  None of the rest of us in business get a guaranteed fat funding check every 6 months, neither should the government.

"Great idea!  How do we get there from here?"

That's the tricky part.  I see two paths:

1.  Electing principled, pro-Liberty candidates to local office.  These individuals could make the changes necessary to set a date for conversion to voluntary funding, and everything would be "official".  We'd all get one last property tax bill, and the bureaucrats would get a deadline to become 100% voluntarily funded.

2.  Civil disobedience.  Did you ever ask yourself, what would they do if 10% of residents refused to pay?  What about 25%?  Would they build a big jail and throw us all in and take all our property?  This shows how absurd property taxes are.  If you were to put those people in jail, you'd be destroying the economy of the area from two directions.  The economy would take a hit because all those productive individuals would be in jail sitting around.  It would take another hit, because they'd have to raise the remaining population's taxes to pay for the 10 or 25% sitting in jail!

If we can shift our bureaucracies to voluntary funding models and eliminate the oppressive property tax, New Hampshire will become the wealthiest place in the world.  Imagine what you could do if you didn't have to pay those thousands of dollars a year to the government.  Imagine being able to control every dollar you earn, and spend it, save it, and give it away in the ways that YOU think are best!  This change is possible, and it's being discussed at http://forum.nhfree.com .  I hope you give it the utmost serious consideration.

[PowerPenguin]

I was actually thinking about this same topic a few days ago. If you have to "rent" it through taxes than you don't actually own it but rather the collector, ie. the local and/or state government does. Also, whoever brought up the allodial title topic on last night's show doesn't know much of anything...

[Recumbent ReCycler]

$500/month!?!?  That's outrageous!  That's more than I ever paid for rent before moving to NH.  Now I'm paying $800/month for rent on half of an old uninsulated duplex with walls that are crumbling.  Now I understand why the last banker I talked to about a loan told me that I could afford a mortgage, but not the taxes. 

[Ron Helwig]

Aren't property taxes more like feudalism? You pay rent to your feudal lord...

[Russell Kanning]

I say "no" to paying taxes to the bully organization in my area.

[Recumbent ReCycler]

I say "no" to paying taxes to the bully organization in my area.

How has that been working out for you?  Have you been threatened for not paying them?  You have to admit that you do pay some taxes, like the fuel tax that pays for maintaining the roads, rooms and meals tax, probably others.

[Lex]

I say "no" to paying taxes to the bully organization in my area.

How has that been working out for you?  Have you been threatened for not paying them?  You have to admit that you do pay some taxes, like the fuel tax that pays for maintaining the roads, rooms and meals tax, probably others.

You could argue that the place of business pays the tax but passes on the expense to the buyer. Also, it's partially a choice you make, you don't HAVE TO eat at a restaurant or drive a car. With property taxes you have no choice cus you need property to live

[Kat Kanning]

Frank Chodorov is not allowed to post on this thread.

Ian, this was a nice way to not have to deal with your thread being hijacked...start a new thread on the same topic and ban the problem member from this thread.   

[FTL_Ian]

Thanks, I figured he'd had enough fun with the first one.  I thought about splitting off his conversation from the other one, but that would have been too much work.

[tracysaboe]

I didn't know the origininator of a thread could ban a person from a thread.

I'll keep that in Mind.

Tracy

[Lex]

I didn't know the origininator of a thread could ban a person from a thread.

I'll keep that in Mind.

Tracy

I think it's cus Ian has Admin privs.

[FTL_Ian]

Originators of threads can remove their entire thread, but I didn't want to do that to the old one, so I made a new one.  And yes, it is because of my admin priviliges.   

[tracysaboe]

What makes Ian so special that he gets Admin privlidges.



Tracy

[FTL_Ian]

What makes Ian so special that he gets Admin privlidges.



Tracy

I asked nicely, plus I own the nhfree.com domain name, and that helps.

[Caleb]

The thing you don't realize about property ownership is that it is actually a bundle of rights:  use, possession, exclusion, transferability, and finally economic rent.

When you experience gains in the unimproved land value, economic rent attaches, per Locke's proviso.  If you attempt to avoid the economic rent, you are depriving your neighbors of their collection of the economic rent that naturally attaches to the land, which is held in common.

Land must be held in common by all man, because it is not produced by men, and hence is not a natural right of man.  I am for the absolute private ownership of labor and capital.  But you cannot have both absolute ownership of labor and absolute ownership of land.  You have to choose, and by choosing absolute ownership of property (by denying the right to tax the economic rent), you are of necessity choosing to deny the absolute ownership of labor.  You can't have it both ways!