Killer Arguments Against LVT. Not (362)

Posted by some complacent Faux Lib over at Reddit:

I definitely understand that taxes are needed for the things we enjoy the use of, such as roads, hospitals, police and fire (EMS in some cases), utilities etc. but, is there not a better way of collecting the money for these causes? I would rather pay higher sales taxes than fear losing my property.

The property tax just seems to go against everything America was founded for. I cannot own property, you essentially lease it from the government. Yeah, I will "own" the title to the property but if I do not pay taxes on that property my basic right of shelter is taken away.

This doesn't seem right, it does not seem like freedom. We are essentially modern day serfs. You never truly own anything, ever.

Deftly fielded by Cashto:

"The property tax just seems to go against everything America was founded for…"?

I take it you've never read Thomas Paine's Agrarian Justice?

"It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural, cultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race."

Or as Thomas Jefferson put it in a letter to James Madison:

"Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on.

"On the contrary, the common belief of the times was that whereas one's labor belonged to no one else but himself, the earth was the common property of all mankind, that there is no office in heaven where God has issue titles to land, but that to "possess" land was an act of seizing some portion of the earth for oneself, and therefore subject to the approval of society and government, and allowed insofar as the land could be put to productive use."
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Or, to be a bit more philosophical about this, you can only 'own' things as long as you are alive.

Land ownership is something bestowed by society, it is man-made law, just like the right to vote. Everybody benefits by having the right to vote, the burden is that everybody else has the right to vote differently to you. And when you die, your right to vote simply ceases to exist. So if you want benefits from society (land ownership) then pay for it; if you are prepared to accept the burden of being excluded from land ownership, don't pay (but get the Citizen's Dividend).

And being practical, that is why you'd have to have a roll up option for Poor Widows In Mansions - to all intents and purposes they own the house tax-free until they die, but when they die, their right to vote lapses and some or all of the value of the home goes back into the pot for everybody else. It might happen that on the day the PWIM dies, somebody else turns eighteen and becomes entitled to vote, you can't seriously say that the right to vote was transferred or redistributed from the PWIM to the eighteen year old.