Is there anything anyone can do about all this? Or is this how Western civilization finally ends?
It varies but many state and local governments collect personal property taxes on based on the vehicle’s value. What’s notable is US property taxes are generally regressive. 3.6% for the bottom 20% down to 0.7% for the top 1%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax_in_the_United_Sta...
Ah, so no growth, no taxes. I see what your did there.
Then everyone would be able to own 25,000,000 worth of stuff free and clear.
Given the speeding up of inflation, reaching $25m will happen in no time...
Putting aside the issue of the current trajectory of increasing inequality and its destabilizing effects on national security, the obsession Americans have with owning things "free and clear" is a reflection of a kind of privilege. The US is blessed with an expansionary economy, stable financial system, strong rule of law, military power, and respect for individual rights. These all form the basis of this belief that private property rights are absolute. They are never absolute, always subject to the goodwill of the social contract and the laws of physics. What good is owning things free and clear when there is a marauding militia outside your Capitol, or your land lost all value because of the environmental damage externalities of the economy?
Sure, let's go back to feudalism !! Yeah!!
Moreover, because some people choose not to own doesn't mean it shall be imposed by force to a whole population.
Some pray for a price crash, after they saved for a mortgage deposit but prices went up so it's not enough any more. Meanwhile rent is a substantial part of their income, and often costs more than a mortgage for the same property would, so they would choose a mortgage if they could, but can't get one.
Many of them live in poor quality conditions too, unable to improve or repair the property they are in, and at constant threat of eviction on the landlord's whim, and face difficulties finding a similar place to rent when it happens.
For most of them, the work they are skilled in either cannot be done remotely, or is low paid work (eg remote call centre worker).
There is also the not entirely trivial problem that moving to a completely different location with low prices and higher supply typically means low wages and fewer jobs, along with losing all your friends and family network, which is crucial if you are already struggling, and doubly so if you have a young family.
This increasingly affects more older people approaching retirement age, who worry about how they are supposed to pay rent when they are too old to work. The pension won't cover it. They are not choosing to not own.
I also don't see how more and more regulations ensure this won't happen, as it most likely had the exact opposite effect: prevent new wealth from establishing itself (high regulation preventing blooming wealth from building enough momentum to escape taxes) and enshrines "old" money. Regulations gives a clear advantage to people already established.
I'm not arguing that feudalism is part of the solution.
Would you tax wealth held as cash also? A 1-2 % negative interest rate on cash would decimate banks.
Money is just a way to reresent a bar tab. You don't own the money because money is a claim to the labor of someone else. It is essentially a debt.
People want that debt to last forever even though that is impossible as people age and die or their productivity is lost through unemploynent.
The truth is that your money is rotting all the time. By cutting spending they run into the illusion that their money can buy more things.
But money only starts rotting when it is actively used. So there is a delay between the current purchasing power and the decline in purchasing power after you have spent it.
Negative interest rates merely eliminate the delay. They aren't taking anything away from you that existed in the first place. They are taking the part that wasn't real to begin with. They are shattering an illusion that many people believe in so they want to shoot the messenger.
There is no store of value. Just 7 billion hard working humans. If they don't work your dollars buy you nothing. Currencies are worthless, it's the people that give them value.
Though it's certainly a privilege to own land.
Taxing real property to fund improvements and services adjacent to that property makes the most logical sense. I don't buy the argument that people on fixed income are somehow hurt by this. If someone on a fixed income owns a giant house and can't pay property tax on it, that implies they need to liquidate that property or rent it out to pay for the improvements around that property that support its value. Thanks to federalism, Americans actually have a choice of different places to live that tax property at different rates with correspondingly different levels of local services, so people are free to own in states with very low property tax in places that don't have much in the way of improvements.
Can you justify that at all?
Then the "rich" will no longer own anything, officially, their company will. There is no difference between having $1 billion in cash and being the director and fully controlling a $1 billion "company".
There are many sub-cultures within the anglo-saxon-sphere, some of them cooperative, egalitarian, pluralistic, strongly democratic.
Call it for what it is, using whatever terminology you want ... capitalist, neo-liberal, oligarchic ... just use something more specific and more accurate than "anglo-saxon" if you want terms to actually have some meaning.
Or maybe if the trend of folks no longer working continues for long enough with enough force ...
The labor class has gotten screwed so severely for so long opting out of the labor economy is probably the most rationale option available for the majority of earth's human population ...
I have read that in the past paying taxes was a sort of pride, a kind of score-keeping among the rich. Just recently I saw an anime (JoJo's) where the influential senator was trying to reassure himself how powerful and successful he was and one of the lines was something like "I pay more taxes than anyone!". I don't know if this was meant to be a reflection of modern Japanese culture (it was set in 1989) but it felt archaic.
Using a system (or the law) in ways it was not intended to be used can be considered hacking.
Claiming "whatever tax credit" is not a "loophole" but merely claiming what the law allows you to claim.
Note - it’s still legal.
So your idea is to punish people for doing legal things?
This is part of the reason the best tax system is one that is super simple. Once you add in exceptions and complexity, you necessarily create loopholes. Government needs to be humble about the reality that the adversary will always be smarter and willing to work harder.
But often the lawmakers themselves exploit these loopholes. A big part of the problem is that the "adversary" includes the people making the law, which does not create well-aligned incentives.
There is a huge variety of solutions. War isn't inevitable it is merely the easiest way.