True reform means cutting them now and eliminating them over time.
A property deed should mean ownership, not a renewable lease from the government.
Yet that is what property taxes amount to in practice. A family can earn the income, buy the home, pay off the mortgage, maintain and improve the property, and still owe the government every year merely to retain possession of it. Miss enough payments, and the state can seize the property. That may be common. It is not normal in any morally serious sense.
That is why the standard economist’s line that property taxes are the “least bad tax” has always missed the deeper problem. The issue is not only economic efficiency in the abstract. It is whether a free society should tolerate a tax that permanently weakens ownership, punishes stewardship, ignores ability to pay, funds excessive spending, and treats citizens as perpetual tenants of the state. From a taxpayer’s perspective, and from a classical liberal, constitutional view of limited government, the answer should be no.
Our core humanity consists of responsibility, work, and the right to enjoy the fruits of honest labor. Property ownership flows from that principle. What people build, buy, improve, and care for should be theirs to keep. Property taxes invert that moral order. They place governments above the owner and convert secure ownership into conditional possession.
...read more at thedailyeconomy.org
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The conventional view from economists is actually that a head tax is the "least bad tax" because it's non-distortionary under a decent array of utility functions.
The bigger issue with property taxes is the practical one: the state knows where your property is, so it's an easy target. As long as people accept the principle that the state may loot them, there will be property taxes.
The counter argument is that property taxes fund the multiple services which central and local government provide that enhance the value and productivity of a property.
Without roads, law and order and security and a wider context of enforceable contracts and infrastructure provided by government the land one owns if of lower value.
Improvements to the physical infrastructure and security surrounding a property increase its potential productivity and market value.
Taxes that are directly related to funding increased potential productivity are argued to be ideal as they can create a virtuous circle of wealth creation.
Most people don't know the legal term for what this article is describing. In Anglo-American property law, almost nobody holds "allodial title" anymore. What you actually get when you buy a house is "fee simple" ownership, which traces back to feudal England where the king technically owned all land and lords held it in exchange for service. Property taxes are the modern version of that feudal obligation. The last true allodial holdings in the US were eliminated when Nevada repealed their allodial title statute in 2005, partly because it was letting wealthy landowners dodge school funding.
Bitcoin might be the first genuinely allodial property most people will ever hold. No jurisdiction can attach a recurring obligation to your UTXOs just because you possess them. That is a bigger deal than most Bitcoiners realize when they talk about "self-custody."