288 sats \ 7 replies \ @om 28 Dec 2023 \ parent \ on: The Evil of the Residential Property Tax libertarian
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.
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.
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the heart of our disagreement is over what rights are and what they're for
Exactly!
You seem to believe that there is an L0 (societal consensus) notion of real estate ownership that is independent from L1 (either a blockchain or a government registry) database. So you assume that when you go register your house with the government (L1 level) you thereby lay your claim on the house at L0 level. I'd say that L0 ownership doesn't really exist.
We both agree that the government's consensus mechanism - which is: if you're not in consensus with the government, it beats you up - is barbaric. Much better solutions exist now, for example, Prospera planned (or even had?) a blockchain-based property registry. So we both want to move from government's L1 (registry and violence) to the new L1 (blockchain and emerging consensus).
The difference is how we imagine the move to occur. You seem to think that government's L1 registry will be replaced with a new blockchain or whatever violence-free L1 and your purchase, manifesting an L0 ownership claim, will be transferred to the new L1.
I however believe that such transition is not possible. Instead an organisation such as Prospera will buy a fief, thus registering it at L1, and than enfeoff it further through a blockchain. Therefore the blockchain-registered owner will be a vassal of that new Prospera which will itself be a vassal of the state. If this will prove successful, then this new Prospera will in the end own everything and then the government registry could be wound down because it contains only one owner anyway. If this will be unsuccessful, well, tough luck, back to the barbarism it is.
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If you haven't made a post about this already, I think you should. It's interesting to think about what a transition to property title blockchains would look like and, more importantly, what it actually means for title claims.
I'm going to restate how you put my position, because I like the way you framed it and I think we're close to seeing where each other are coming from.
L0 is something like the conceptually ideal just property assignment. I'm not sure I'd say it "exists" either, but rather that we have criteria for evaluating which competing claims are closer to L0. L1 is the ledger of property titles that we want to reflect L0. I think changes to L1 should only occur through homesteading new property, voluntarily trading titles, and court (or some other dispute resolution process) decisions that decide an L1 entry was incorrectly assigned.
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I'm not going to make that post because simply migrating the database to a blockchain is only a small part of a solution, the true question is how to peacefully resolve disagreements between competing jurisdictions, and I don't have a post-worthy answer to that. The actual Prospera simply relied on the state of Honduras, and the state now decided to destroy the experiment.
L0 is something like the conceptually ideal just property assignment.
To see where I'm coming from, check out this response by Lysander Spooner to Earl of Dunraven (cited from here):
"The whole force of your letter, as a defence of Irish landlords, rests upon the
assumption that they are the real and true owners of the lands they now hold. But this
assumption is a false one. These lands, largely or mostly, were originally taken by the
sword, and have ever since been held by the sword. Neither the original robbers, nor
any subsequent holders, have ever had any other than a robber’s title to them. And
robbery gives no better title to lands than it does to any other property.
No lapse of time can cure this defect in the original title. Every successive holder not
only indorses all the robberies of all his predecessors, but he commits a new one
himself by withholding the lands, either from the original and true owners, or from
those who, but for those robberies, would have been their legitimate heirs and assigns.
And what is true of the lands in Ireland is equally true of the lands in England. The
lands in England, largely or mostly, were originally taken by the sword, and have ever
since been held by the sword; and the present holders have no better titles to them
than simple, naked robbery has given them.
If the present holders, or any of their predecessors, in either Ireland or England, have
ever purchased any of these lands, they have either purchased only a robber’s title to
them, or they have purchased them only with the profits or proceeds of previous
robberies. They have, therefore, never had, and have not now, any real titles to them.
For these reasons, the present holders of lands generally, in either England or
Ireland—whether they hold them by inheritance or purchase—have no whit better
title to them, than the highwayman has to the purse he has taken from the traveller, or
than the pirate has to the ships and cargoes he has captured on the ocean."
Spooner continues this to advocate no less than undoing Anglo-Saxon and Norman conquests through a revolution. He does so in a time of acute crisis in Ireland, so it looks less insane than it does now. I'm not saying that going that far today is anywhere near a good idea. But he has a point, which is: a spherical "conceptually ideal just property assignment" in a vacuum doesn't really exist, given the history.
To that, you've already replied: "these things get complicated if you trace them sufficiently far back". Indeed. But they also get complicated if you ask how far back is sufficiently far. For example, Erdogan said that Israel is an unbidden newcomer on originally Turkish territory. Of course, Greeks have a lot to say about whose territory Istanbul originally was, and Israel itself lays a claim much older than all of Turkey's existence even when it was at its original location somewhere around China. Speaking of which, Mao's China wasn't originally allowed in UN because Mao's conquest was seen as totally illegitimate; but now Taiwan isn't allowed in UN because China doesn't like it. Is anything simply going to be legitimate if you wait long enough, and if so, how long?
Looks like the US Supreme Court would clear a land fraud after almost 300 years, but do we really want that?
So my position is that violence-free real estate, like guilt-free spaghetti from the excellent Rick&Morty spaghetti episode (S7E4), only exists if you refuse to think of how it's cooked.
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I actually don't think it's as hopeless to get property rights correct (in many cases) as you do, because most of those historical issues will end up being irrelevant. The current owner is the person with the longest unbroken chain of title transfers and those generally don't go back very far.
I don't believe in a statute of limitations in these matters, If you can demonstrate that something was rightfully owned by someone who passed it down to you, then you ought to be recognized as the rightful owner.
I also don't think the right approach is to try to figure out exactly who owns what. Rather, we should just be trying to resolve disputes about who owns what. I'm sure I live on stolen land, but no one else is claiming to own it (apart from the government sort of), so for now it's mine.
I'd still encourage you to make a post about the future of property titles, even if you don't have all the answers. If you lay out how you're thinking about it and what you aren't sure about, I bet it would generate an interesting conversation.
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