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111 sats \ 10 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 28 Dec 2023 \ parent \ on: The Evil of the Residential Property Tax libertarian
If you produced food, clothing, shelter, etc for yourself, instead of earning wages and buying it, then the income tax wouldn't play any role. However, property taxes would essentially force you to get a wage paying job in order to not have the house you built for yourself taken away by the state.
My Christmas wish is that you lot could just take the extra step and realize that all taxes are unjust and unnecessary, rather than devoting so much energy to arguing about what the right kind of taxes are.
But that scenario is grotesquely unrealistic. You're writing on SN, so you have at least bought either a computer or a phone (somehow I don't believe you've produced it in your backyard). You're obviously paying for Internet access as well. Even if you produce all the energy on site from solar panels, I strongly doubt that you've produced the panels themselves, and so on. So yes, you have to get a wage paying job (the horror, the horror!).
And my Christmas wish is that you lot could realize that whatever defense arrangement will replace the government isn't going to be free and probably will require annual subscription just the same. Case in point: the biggest private domain name service, the Ethereum Name Service, wants annual payments, which are essentially property taxes. Yes, there are name services that don't do that, such as Unstoppable Domains, but also there are countries without property taxes.
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We do realize that private defense costs money. In fact that's exactly the alternative we advocate for.
Our objection isn't to paying for stuff. Our objection is to theft. It's a pretty straightforward distinction.
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Is it though?
You've bought the house, meaning that you went to a criminal gang ("government") and explicitly asked them to list yourself in their ledger. You knew full well that "owning" the house specifically means being listed in that criminal gang's registry. You were well aware that the rules of that criminal gang involve you regularly paying them a fee. You knew the whole deal pretty well, except for the part where the fee scales with inflation. But the criminals weren't even trying to hide that condition from you, you simply missed it on your own. And now as the criminals come to collect their fee you claim that you're a victim of theft. But in this case I don't think you are.
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I do like "coming to the nuisance" type arguments, generally. In the case of governments, I'm not very persuaded by them though. I don't think there's an obligation to honor agreements with organizations that regularly engage in non-voluntary interactions (see estoppel).
I would say that at some point they began extorting the owner of that property in a clearly non-consensual manner, but the owner never lost the right to transfer ownership of the property sans a government claim on it. So, there never was any right to tax the property which renders current taxes illegitimate.
Your line of thinking is why I don't get super worked up about existing taxes though. I chose to live where I live, partly because of its lower tax incidence. That doesn't change my view that an ideal system wouldn't condone coercive relationships.
This does touch on something I've often wondered about. If a seller voluntarily requires that I pay my property taxes as a condition of the sale, and that I must require the same of anyone I sell to, is there a libertarian way out of that agreement or is that property forever subject to property taxes?
Feel free to disregard that last part, if it doesn't interest you.
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I don't think there's an obligation to honor agreements with organizations that regularly engage in non-voluntary interactions (see estoppel).
OK, but when mafia comes to collect a fee that you've agreed to that act itself isn't theft, although mafia may be involved with some other thefts.
I would say that at some point they began extorting the owner of that property in a clearly non-consensual manner, but the owner never lost the right to transfer ownership of the property sans a government claim on it.
Here's a European perspective (US is a whole different can of worms): that's not at all how things developed. Originally when a bandit conquers a territory, he exercises sovereignty over it, meaning that he's now the king and owns all the land. But he can't manage the whole country all by himself so he enfeoffs most of his lands to his homies (earls, dukes, beys, whatever). These lands are now called fiefs and his homies are called his vassals. Fiefs are kinda unlimited term rental properties; the rent is paid with horsemen ready for combat at the king's call.
Now the earls/dukes/etc can't manage their fief all by themselves either so they sublet it to the next level (thanes/counts/whatever). In the end there is a complicated multi-level tree of vassal-liege relationships. The ultimate owner ("lord paramount") is usually the king, but sometimes the Pope (mostly symbolically). There were all sorts of weird cases: The Duke of Cornwall is still somehow the lord paramount of his duchy instead of the British king but whatever. There were also allodial lands which seem to be the closest to your notion of land ownership but today they don't exist anymore.
Contrary to what you've said, originally the vassal-liege relationship was a personal bond. Your renters were literally going to protect your back on the battlefield! The idea that fiefs could be bought and sold came later, and was offensive to the old chivalric mindset. The Crown did not insert taxation into a pre-existing fief market.
So, there never was any right to tax the property which renders current taxes illegitimate.
The modern term "property" applied to real estate describes a fief with the State being the liege. And that isn't exactly a secret. The original military meaning of the vassal-liege relationship is lost not because the government is now meek and doesn't lord it over people, but on the contrary, because the modern government asserts its right to conscript everybody regardless of whether they have fiefs or not.
is there a libertarian way out of that agreement or is that property forever subject to property taxes?
The key question is who enforces the agreement. If it's the government, then it will require the taxes anyway. If it's a blockchain, then yes, forever: just like Opensea's NFTs are forever encumbered with royalty payments to the artist upon every trade.
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when mafia comes to collect a fee that you've agreed to that act itself isn't theft
If you only agree because of a threat of violence, then it is still theft.
There's way too much to get into with all of the historical stuff and I freely grant that these things get complicated if you trace them sufficiently far back. To me, the relevant question is whether the agreement is based on a threat of violence or not. Your historical exposition is full of violence and threats of violence, which carries little weight with me as a basis for thinking about ownership rights.
I think if we continued this conversation long enough, we'd discover the heart of our disagreement is over what rights are and what they're for. I favor the system of property rights that I do because I believe it is sufficient to resolve conflicts over scarce resources without resorting to violence. We may simply have different preferences on this point.