Keene Free Press - Property Taxes are Communism
Keene Free Press - Property Taxes are Communism
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Some “authority”, in this case the “Department of Assessment”, assigns a value to your property. The “Revenue Collector” then applies a tax rate of X mils to your property and sends you a bill. Providing you do not want a band of armed thugs (the police) coming to throw you off the property that YOU paid for, you pay the outrageously expensive bill. So does everyone else. All these payments are sent to the Revenue Collector (the central controller) who then sends portions of your money off to other centrally controlled bureaucracies like the School Board and Police Department.
Most people would agree that schools and police are important things to have around. However, has anyone ever asked themselves why these bureaucracies cannot be funded on a voluntary basis? If they are truly providing a valuable service, surely people will step up to the plate and buy their services just like we buy services from Panera Bread or Walmart on a voluntary basis.
“How will voluntary funding make police and schools better?”
Simple, because if they aren’t doing their jobs, they won’t get the funding. With today’s property tax scam, it doesn’t matter how bad or inefficient the police, schools, and other government services are, they keep getting bigger budgets year after year. There’s no accountability and not much that we can do about it. If we were to set a date, say Jan 1st 2007 and tell these bureaucracies that they will no longer get tax funding after that date, they’d either figure out how to voluntarily fund themselves, or they would die from uselessness. Inefficent bureaucracies would have to turn into efficient businesses to survive. None of the rest of us in business get a guaranteed fat funding check every 6 months, neither should the government.
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Doesn’t that first paragraph sound just a bit like paying some Mob for “protection”? How did we get to the point that government is a legal incarnation of organized crime?