The Supreme Court should take up the idea of property taxes. If you have to pay taxes on property do you really own that property?
You don’t pay property taxes to own the land. You pay taxes for all those services modern civilised society wants.
EDIT: Maybe in practice oligopsonize, but either way on a long timescale you can say goodbye to widespread freeholding.
The founding fathers oversaw a tradition of property taxes in the USA.
> Property taxes in the United States originated during colonial times.[64] By 1796, state and local governments in fourteen of the fifteen states taxed land
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax_in_the_United_S...
From a simple arithmetic perspective, a land "owner" that doesn't pay at least the guard labor necessary to protect the land, will eventually lose that land. If we assume that military expenditures are paid by working income tax payers, then the guard labor would no longer be paid by its beneficiary and over the long run this disequilibrium will be eliminated through a revolution or war. In the latter case, the attacker values the land more than the "owner" and therefore it is "profitable" to acquire it by expensing the full amount of guard labor to "defend" it from the weaker army of the original owner.
I don't see how this doesn't extend to all property. If it does, perhaps ownership is "logically" impossible, so we're going to need a new word to mean what everyone's using "ownership" to mean now, because it's a useful word.
[EDIT] For those who've not read him (the Second Treatise is, if not great philosophy, at least a clear, engaging, relatively-quick read, and is the work of his that comes up the most) Locke notices, as many have, that land ownership is kind of screwy under many otherwise-liberal frameworks of political and economic thinking, and justifies it by proposing that adding labor to land is what renders it fit for private ownership, by improving it (in terms of productivity or utility-to-people) beyond its "natural" state. Like most of the rest of the work, this comes off rather as Locke deciding which things he likes first, then going back and constructing the reasoning to justify them under his "natural law" framework, while studiously ignoring any branches of that reasoning that may head any direction he doesn't like—but, regardless, that's his take: input increasing productivity/utility is what justifies private land ownership.
Property taxes, and hopefully all forms of wealth taxes, are unconstitutional and local towns / state must find an alternative method of funding themselves such as higher income tax, sales, VAT, etc.
Other people seem to have a different definition, and I can't easily put it to words. Something like "you have some control of this thing and you can keep that control as long as you meet some list of conditions".
I find it hard to argue against calling that something closer to renting than owning.
I don't know. How would you define ownership?
This definition sucks because it's not the case practically anywhere, and I don't think making up some new word for what everyone means by "own" just so the "more rational than thou" set can take the word "own" to mean this nearly-useless-because-practically-nonexistent phenomenon, is helpful.
At some point, you become exposed to the real world and realize that it's really difficult to own anything like that, especially in a world where so many things are financed or come with subscriptions and cloud connections.
But that first understanding of the concept still sticks.
How about things that nobody knows you have? These would probably tend to be smaller things just because its easier for them to go unnoticed, and if nobody knows about them, they wouldn't have any reason or ability to take them from you.
I'm curious how you would define ownership?
As for land, if you could actually hide the physical body of land from people, then sure, it could sort of apply there. I don't think I meant "hiding" by legal means though. I mean if nobody can physically see it or look it up in a database to know it exists.
Realistically, we mostly don't own anything by my definition. Does that mean my definition is wrong?
In any case, I'm not claiming that my understanding is correct, just that people have different understandings and mine happens to be what I mentioned above.
I'm still curious about yours.
Incidentally this is not inherent. If tax were assessed in some way like min(5%_of_disposable_income, assessed_property_tax) then I think there'd be a much stronger argument of ownership, in spite of the fact that in the vast majority of scenarios there would be exactly 0 difference. But take our little scenario above. Just want to check out of society for a bit? You'd be absolutely free to do so, and when you came back your land would would still be your land. In fact it would never be taken from you except in some scenario where you broke the law, such as by tax evasion.
Would you say that you did not "own" this land, you were just renting it?
In fact, at least one type of property tax is specifically enumerated in the constitution (Section 9)! So the notion that the founding fathers believed property taxes were unconstitutional -- while also enumerating a specific type of property tax in the constitution -- is ridiculous.
IMO, if an extreme SCOTUS attempted to kill all forms of property taxes, a collective decision by legislatures and the executive to selectively ignore Marbury v Madison would be a more likely outcome than the end of property taxes.
In general: the idea that the judiciary can "strike down" unconstitutional laws is much more tenuous than most of the things that fringe constitutional theories consider to be unconstitutional. I think this is where fantasies like ending property taxes or sovereign citizen stuff fall apart: if we're going to stretch the meaning of the constitution that far, then why continue putting so much unenumerated power into the judiciary?
Also: taxing income without taxing property is ridiculously stupid public policy. We should be doing exactly the opposite: rewarding hard work and severely punishing lazy lay-abouts who sit around on generational properties instead of contributing to society by working and earning an income.
State property taxes existed in the US for 100 years before and also during the constitutional convention. It strains credulity to claim that the framers intended for state property taxes to be unconstitutional while also not enumerating this fact and even specifically enumerating limits on taxation of certain types of property.
Furthermore, the legislative and executive actions of constitutional convention members, within their respective commonwealths and states, clearly demonstrate that the framers did not intend to prohibit taxation of property particularly by non-federal governments (or even by the federal government, for that matter, as long as funds were equally distributed). Again, it strains credulity to claim that a framer would write a constitution intended to prevent states from taxing property, and then go serve in a state legislative assembly or executive that approved taxation based on the value of estates or properties.
And we haven't even made it to the 9th amendment.
Again: I'm much more willing to accept that Marbury v Madison was a mistaken interpretation of the constitution than I am to accept the US constitution can be somehow interpreted to disallow state property taxes. To be blunt, if SCOTUS tried to do something this blatantly ridiculous and made-up, most state governments and courts would simply ignore the ruling.
Taxes need to be focused on passive sources of income like investments. Income that is generated by work that produced goods or services should be minimally taxed to encourage more of those activities.
Taxes paid when purchased, taxes paid on maintenance, taxes paid on fuel, yearly personal property tax, yearly registration (tax), insurance (tax)
Keeping X requires constant resources to defend X that scale with the value of X due to competition for X. Governments (among other things) are for collective security and efficient defence of your X.
Thus by ongoing support of your ownership of X a government grants you an ongoing service which you pay for via taxes.
Without a state you must directly pay costs / use resources to prevent someone else who wants your X from taking it.
In nature ownership does not exist. Any being that is able to can consume what they are able from another. In nature energy is constantly spent on this for yourself and trying to prevent this happening to yourself.
Governments evolve for mutual benefit of their constituents much like multicellular organisms evolve for mutual benefit of their constituent cells .
> No wonder our society is dividing into people who own nothing and pay nothing and people who own everything and do everything they can to pay nothing.
Notice in your body certain cells seem to get a better deal than others? Why is that? Could it be objective proof that collectives that treat members equally are by evolutionary competition not as viable and those that do not? Yes! The evolutionary stable strategy seems to be to grant benefits to constituents just better than their next best viable option. This of course is only necessary but not sufficient.
A different way of looking at this is that I'm letting you own a piece of land within my borders and in exchange I'm asking you pay a tax on it and if that isn't agreeable find a different settlement.