Many people revolt at the very thought of property taxes; their gut instincts telling them that there’s something fundamentally wrong about taxing homeownership, imposing an artificial condition for keeping a roof over a family’s heads — especially when that family owns the property and enjoys it peacefully, respecting the rights of their neighbors. Truth be told, their instincts are more than valid. They are right to revolt, and they are more than entitled to do so. After all, this is just as we as humans have evolved to do: to protect our families and to defend our homes. And the property tax is not just a direct assault upon the home; it is thereby an attack upon the whole family unit, an attack upon the very institution and sanctity of family, and upon the idea that they are each secure in their persons, property, and effects.
While the politicians point to programs and services that get their funding through property taxes — a form of ‘consequentialist justification’ or excuse-making for ends that can theoretically get their funding elsewhere and by other means (i.e. use fees and sales taxes) — and while academics of different kinds can shower the public with sophisticated models and spectacular theories, homeowners are more than justified in their misgivings, their displeasure, and their visceral resentment toward such a cruel institution and such absurd excuses. Likewise, as free persons endowed by their Creator with the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and property, the same people are more than justified to reject the legitimacy of such a thing and to refuse to pay.
One of the great misdeeds of the academic world has been this: the fact that people have been made to feel ashamed of their instincts — instincts developed over millennia as our ancestors fought for their very survival, and instincts which are, in these cases, shouting to be heard amid the noise of so many lies, scams, and betrayals of nature and morality. What’s more, the academic world has enjoyed the advantage of the myriad technologies streamlining and polishing its work, as well as the technical jargon and the layers of bureaucracy which essentially do the gatekeeping for their topics and defend the pretexts by which they maintain control. In addition to the frustrations that come from this and the obvious financial burdens suffered as a direct consequence of property taxes, there is another important reason: in nearly all cases, the issue of property taxes is treated as an academic problem rather than one pertaining to human rights.
Indeed, property taxes have not merely served as a source of funding for ‘public services’ — the services said to educate the youth and keep us safe, and others which maintain the roads and parks; property taxes have also ensured our financial enslavement to a massive bureaucracy with a payroll full of both academics armed with arcane and esoteric abstractions and employees who translate taxes as job security. As for the employees, they’re the ‘useful idiots’ who take up space and stand between the bureaucrats and accountability; the academics are just as useful, but by arming the bureaucrats with the language to maintain their con and convince enough people of its plausibility.
As a result, some of the people buy into the explanations, some overcome their instincts and fancy themselves more sophisticated for having done so, and yet some still manage to see through the con or otherwise honor the instincts they’ve inherited through a long line of hard-won lessons. Whether they understand or not, their instincts are striving to protect the most vital aspects to their survival, and in this case they spot a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
In this case, the wolves have managed to turn humble homes into perpetual liabilities and mere variables in a mathematical problem; a mathematical problem which assumes that the formula and the methodologies reflect the relevant details of the real world, and that any solution will translate without any major problems. In many cases, the academics overestimate themselves; in others, they are simply lying.
As for some of the mechanics of the property tax, we can look to two fields, economics and philosophy, in order to reveal the conflicts and contradictions in approachable terms. Upon contrasting these two perspectives, it becomes clear why there is so much anxiety and confusion on this matter, and why it is high time that we as a people reassess it.
As for the economists, they generally argue that property taxes are ‘regressive’ — to the extent that lower-income homeowners tend to pay a higher fraction of their incomes in property taxes. However, the tax is also ‘progressive’, for it is assessed based on the appraised value of the property. For these reasons, economists generally regard property taxes as relatively benign: they assert that (compared to alternative taxes) they produce relatively few externalities, they incentivize sensitivity to opportunity costs, and they otherwise have little effect on economic activity (i.e. incentives pertaining to home-buying decisions); and where they do affect incentives, it is by freeing up vacant, unused, or economically unproductive property for economic development.
However, while the sheer economic aspects of property taxes may appear benign, the real effect is in the way that it changes the relationship of people to the government, as slaves held perpetually responsible for an unending tax that they cannot escape; a tax which threatens to make them homeless upon their failure to pay. This is hardly benign, but rather an assault on the individual’s right to the property he owns, his peace of mind in the security of his own home, and his cultivation and preservation of his legacy. Far from that which is commanded in Micah 4:4, the property tax ensures that no man — especially the one of modest means — will ever have the joy of “sit[ting] in safety under his own vine and fig tree [without being] afraid.”
One of the great blessings bestowed upon any child, beyond the skills and the wisdom necessary to survive and thrive in life, is the family home: the place where he can return at any point in life should he need it; the place where he can develop and cultivate the land to meet his needs; the place which covers his basic need for shelter, which grants his opportunity to provide for his family, and which (per Micah 4:4) represents his chance at true freedom and happiness, to “sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree [where] there shall be none to make him afraid”; and the place which he stands to inherit to continue the family legacy and the traditions which make raising a family more than a biological or evolutionary affair, but one centered on equipping each subsequent generation with ever more skills, wisdom, and resources to leave each generation better off, the legacy enhanced, and the family better insulated from market conditions and better protected from predators and governments (often one and the same) who are always ready to exploit cases of economic desperation, and who always have the upper hand where the populace is struggling even just to afford homes.
This brief synopsis captures the contrast between a sheer economics-based perspective and a true philosophical approach to the issue of property taxes — the first being much akin to a mathematician building a house with no construction knowledge, no concept of that which makes a house safe, livable, or meaningful — in the modern parlance, that which makes a ‘house’ a ‘home’. Or consider this: the man entering into marriage with no concept of family and the thought that it’s just two people living together. In each of these analogies, the point is just this: mathematical models and sheer economic analysis often fail to appreciate the ‘building’ blocks of the free and ethical society — one in which the individual, individual rights, and the sanctity of family, are elemental.
Just as there is more to any problem or concept than the principles or the math, there is much more to life than observable activity or measurable output. At the heart of the matter is ultimately this: whether, in the ‘land of the free’, man should be in chains for the roof he keeps over his head — to be sure, man can literally end up in chains if he fails to pay his property taxes then refuses to leave his home when the property is seized — or whether a free man who has met his basic needs ought to be free to enjoy them without condition or interference, particularly by the government entrusted to protect his right to just that.
At the most basic level, we must reconcile in our minds, to the best of our logical abilities, whether a man is truly ‘free’ in the event that he is subject to endless persecution and harassment (by his government) merely for peacefully living on his own property without bothering anyone else. To any reasonable person, and by any reasonable standard, the answer is obvious and unequivocal: no, he is not.
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