Man Loses Home After Failing to Pay $8.41 in Property Taxes
forbes.com
forbes.com
The case in question is an absolute disgrace and an excellent example of the failings of the American system of government in its present state of (dys)function. I would argue that it should be much, much harder to evict people for any reason, and that seizing private property for trivial reasons should be near impossible. Many here would agree, but in this specific case it is purely a local matter.
Sub/exurban Detroit cannot be compared to Singapore. And the problem has little to do with global population or overpopulation, but it is curiously linked to population density. Jürgen Habermas and others have written extensively about the phenomenon of 'Verrechtlichung' or 'juridification', i.e. the process by which an ever increasing amount of human interaction and social and economic life is subjected to legal regulation and codification, corresponding roughly to increases in population density that came with urbanisation, industrialisation, and the advent of urban modernity from the late 19th century on. But that is really not directly related to the given issue exept in a rather abstract way.
1. Coalesce power to the top assuming that those people are more intelligent and deserving of control?
No. That's how authoritarianism starts.
2. Remove the power to seize private property?
No. Because that's seen as an effective deterrent against crime. You can't have drug dealers putting their cash into untouchable multi million dollar homes.
3. More checks and balances on local governments to not abuse their power?
Yes. This is how it's always been done, and will continue to be done in the future. There's the state and federal court systems which can provide relief. There's also state and federal legislators. There's also the free press which can illuminate these issues. Lastly there's elections. If you don't like the way someone has run government, you can vote them out.
2. I generally disagree with regards to the seizure of property. You say that the seizure of criminal assets is seen as an effective crime deterrent. Who sees it as such? Is there any evidence that it works? Are you familiar with the debates surrounding 'civil forfeiture'? If not, it is worth looking into. There are jurisdictions in the US(primarily at the municipal and county level) that derive a large part of their total operating budgets from the seizure of 'criminal' assets without any sort of due process. The example of drug kingpins parking their money in real estate is a particularly lurid and unrepresentative example--there might indeed be a place for criminal asset forfeiture in the fight against organized crime--but at the very least the threshold should be rather high and not include petty infractions or minor unpaid debts.
3. I see your point here, and you are correct on checks and balances, but I think you are naive with regards to the role of the press and the efficacy of simply voting out incumbent officials. Having said that, I will concede that the strategy actually works best at the lowest possible tier of government, but of course that requires adequate civic engagement in local politics.
More on the free press issue. Here's a story for you. In the early 1970s, my dad worked for a couple of local newspapers in the southern US. They would send him to cover city council meetings. He commented that the reporters from the big papers would show up for about 10 minutes and leave, and then write reports as if they had been present the entire time. And that was yearly 50 years ago, when the American newspaper landscape looked very different from today. Today most of those local papers are gone altogether and the press in general has undergone a total transformation. Beyond the occasional outrage story, I wouldn't automatically assume that the press is going to do its job.
Please don't take offense at my comments and fire back an angry rebuttal. This is not meant as criticism of you or your positions. Just thoughts and debate, nothing more.
Once there is no more legislative or judicial oversight, and the president can choose to make every action classified, then it might as well be an authoritarian system.
2. > Who sees it as such?
The US's political establishment and law enforcement agencies.
Let's be clear about what I am for and what I am not.
There's two types of property seizure in the US:
A: Property seized directly as the result of a crime (cars used to transport drugs, houses used to store or manufacture drugs, bank accounts used to store proceed from drug transactions, etc.)
B: Property seized merely as being suspect to being involved in a crime. So called civil forfeiture. These are the weird cases like "US vs. $5000".
I'm all for A, but against B. And if you say you can no longer seize bank accounts or houses of convicted drug dealers, then that's a non-starter in the US.
3. The framers of the constitution never put an article describing the role of the free press. Nor was the free press an original guarantee of the constitution. That came later with the first amendment. It was the final check on government corruption and overreach.
There's lots of national coverage on the Russia-Gate stories, but the local news doesn't have the resources to cover city-council coverup for a 1500 person town anymore. It's a shame, I agree because the people in the 1500 person town deserve just as strong a protection as those that live in NYC. But if you have a political party that attacks the media as being "partisan", people are going to stop subscribing to the local newspapers, because they're "partisan-by-default".
Different rules for the rich as always.
It marks the second time the association has defaulted, but it won back the street in 1985 after paying up.
I have an unfounded fear that overpopulation is humanity's greatest threat, and I think we're way past capacity.
Globally, we have more than enough to eat. And apart from the US exporting it's legal system everywhere (see https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...), there's not too many spillover effects in terms of laws from one place to another.
When looking at different locales, generally denser places are more desirable. Hence their land rents and prices are higher. After taking higher rents into account, it's a mostly a wash and down to personal preferences---but that just tells you that the prices are mostly in line with reality.
Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration
About laws: that's one of the reasons we have human judges. As for perfection: for most purposes laws first and foremost have to be predictable in their effect. (Which this one here apparently was not in practice in this case.)
One of the densest countries on earth, Singapore, has one of the most efficient legal systems, especially in that regard.
This means that as an area becomes more desirable, more people move there, land rent goes up, and the state earns more and more capital to build/maintain infrastructure and bureaucracy that is proportional to its population.
Contrast with the Bay Area (only used as an exemplar of basically all of America/the western world), which is full of extraordinarily wealthy people paying enormous rents to live under a dysfunctional government with a budgetary shortfall of $6.3B.
It appears that high Singaporean rents go back into paying for a society worth living in, while high San Franciscan rents go into the pockets of a handful of landlords (who of course contributed nothing to San Francisco's explosion of productivity over the last few decades).
I'd buy the logic more, if the leases were for eg 10 years at a time. (Or if there were charging a land value tax.) But do see https://www.iras.gov.sg/irashome/Property/Property-owners/Wo...
Singapore is an outlier in so many ways, it's hard to say what essential and what's accidental when comparing to eg California.
For example, NIMBYs seem to have almost no power here. In return for putting up with construction sites everywhere all the time, we get fancy modern infrastructure.
And between 2012 and now, residential rents seem to have come down by about a quarter. Mostly because much more housing supply came online.
If we have to have any government, then we need to finance that government. Given the government the role of landowner and renting out the land to the highest bidder is the least bad way we know to do that financing. (That's what Georgism is all about.)
If you buy land (and there's not a huge property tax or land value tax), than you are sharecropper and landowner in personal union. But the price you paid for the land was just the capitalised present value of those future land rents. So you don't even get much out of owning the land. In equilibrium, you could have invested in other assets just as well.
In any case, I like living in Singapore. And I especially like that I don't have to buy an owner-occupied home to avoid capital gains taxes, like in most other countries.
Living here, I think we could levy a land value tax, and decrease eg person income taxes or VAT. But I can't complain too much in practice.
I'm not sure there is a way to perfectly set up incentives in the first place. The more important aspect seems to be culture: public officials actually wanting to serve the citizens & do good.
Income taxes provide more than taxes connected to land.
Singapore is however probably the closest thing you can find to an implementation of orthodox economics' prescriptions. (Especially since Hong Kong introduced minimum wage laws.)
The state has a large surplus and the City and County of San Francisco has a projected deficit of an order of magnitude less than that amount, and the US budget deficit is on the rough scale of two orders of magnitude larger. What dysfunctional government are you referring to?
From the voter information pamphlet (link: https://voterguide.sfelections.org/en/overview-san-francisco...) it appears that official figures for the city's debt is in the $2.29B range, not including "the San Francisco Community College District, San Francisco Unified School District, and Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART)."
I revise my above statement to "[San Francisco] is full of extraordinarily wealthy people paying enormous rents to live under a dysfunctional government with a city debt of at least $2.29B."
In any case, even if San Francisco had zero debt, it would still be a dysfunctional government. One need only walk through the Mission to see that.
Productivity is a technical term in economics. It connects to people's subjective judgement in the aggregate (ie San Francisco is only considered productive if people want what they produce) but doesn't care that one person in particular doesn't like what they do.
For comparison, I don't like 'Light Beer', but a big brewery figuring out how to make more Light Beer from less malts still counts as a productivity improvement.
I'm all in favour of subsidarity, too. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity)
The number of laws and regulations seem to have increased quite a lot. I can dig up some statistics, if necessary. But just remember the reams of pages from the Patriot Act etc.
The number of civil servants (and other people employed by the government) seems to have increased a lot, too. (GDP increased a lot, and the size of government increased even faster.)
The number of people in your House of Representatives was basically flat. That's true. Though they only vote on the legislation, the actual law writing is outsourced. (Similar to how you still have only one president, but the executive has grown nonetheless.)
Not sure about the number of judges. Would be interesting to dig up some statistics about the number of judges per capita over time.
We are paying for it though. The primary cause of wildlife-loss/species-endangerment is from habitat loss for farming/ranching. Even so much as burning rain-forests to grow soy (to feed cattle) and palm-oil. People don't want just any old calories, they want expensive/inefficient/tasty meats!
A much better model is to view the legal system as a tool used by the rich and powerful to exert their domination over the oppressed classes. This has historically always been what the law was for, going back all the way to ancient Rome. This is also what makes the concept of a "rule of law, not of man" such a revolutionary concept.
I think that's a perfect analogy. EULAs and other corporate policies are likely just as full of loopholes as government regulations and source code (they're all written by people.)
And, if necessary, break up political units (like counties and states, or even countries) into smaller pieces?
In terms of numbers of people, many US states are bigger than entire European countries. And American counties and cities aren't really smaller in terms of people than they used to be throughout history (or are they) or what we have in other countries in general.
Next you have school districts, which are approximately 90% designed in order to segregate black kids from white kids, and the other 10% of justification is a race-blind desire to not pay for other kids to go to school, just your own. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/27/16004084/s...
It seems this is how the legal system sorta fundamentally works (in America).
Laws are challenged in court and struck down all the time no?
All that being said, I'm pretty sure if this was 1890 they would have just given back the guys house.
I think this is due to women having to enter the work force and repay student loans vs. educated women choosing to not reproduce because of education.
When you overpay your property taxes, they send you a check for the balance. I accidentally overpaid mine this year by $10, the county mailed back a check in that amount with no further information or interaction required. I hadn't even realized the error until receiving it unannounced.
Usually yeah the government forces you to sell your property and pay the debt, but any extra from the sale is the property owner's... Which makes way more sense.
How can you even call this ownership if your house is sold and you get nothing if you don't pay your property tax...
The mortgaging bank OTOH is the actual owner of the property up until you pay the full contractual price and they sign over the deed.
No, they are the owner of the mortgage which is recorded on the deed until the terms of the mortgage are fulfilled. While a mortgage is a real property interest, it is not ownership of the underlying property.
The individual is the "owner" at all times. Others can have debts secured by the property, but that does not make them the owner. When you pay off your loan, the bank's interest in the land is released.
And yes, in the US, an HOA has an interest in the land not too dissimilar from the lending bank. And like a lending bank, most of them can "foreclose" by forcing the auction of the property to pay the debt, for very small sums.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair
‘Dear God, help us all’: Utah taxpayers stung after home valued at [$987 Megabucks] in ‘horrific’ typo
https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/world-economy/dear-g...
But it does highlights the asymmetry of power. The state holds the people to a much higher standard than what the state itself is willing or able to offer back. The state will never be held to this kind of standard when owing you money. Either by adjusting the law or by simply never applying the same strict outcome to themselves (imagine that no Government building would ever be subjected to this should their tax not be payed for any reason).
And in places where the people care little about righting some wrongs or are tricked into thinking this is what they actually want you end up with absurd situations like this. Losing a house for an $8 debt.
But if the aim is to pay little tax then come to Alabama! The natural lowtax experiment has been run in Alabama. The 1901 constitution was written by the wealthy industrialists and landowners with the express goal to disenfranchise black freedmen and white sharecroppers. The wealthy don't need local services paid through taxes, they can fund their own schools and other facilities and disregard the life of everyone else, so they made it very much impossible to raise local funds without going through the legislature in Montgomery, which they controlled. Now look at the shape of the state today. There is no decent infrastructure, education and roads are awful, no opportunity to profit from investment. Everyone who could leave left long ago.
Or at least that's what my country's founders might have believed and tried to establish. We might argue they're still correct in some sense even in spite of a government or society that insists otherwise.
Although, you could still choose a different government by moving so not all choice is removed. However, you have odd things like the US taxing based off citizenship instead of location. Although the US is one of the few countries that will let you relinquish your citizenship and even become stateless (bad idea don't become stateless).
Also if you purchase land in the US your not getting allodial title. Also I doubt any state or country today would let you get a complete allodial title, it would probably be limited in some form.
The bigger problem here though is it really just to seize all value of property for failing their obligations by 8 dollars. I would argue that is clearly unjust considering the scale of things.
That said, I really like the benefits from taxes - a good government and social cohesion: there are plenty of places in the world with less taxes and less government that appear extremely unappealing to live in.