One Thing at a Time

Guest Post by Eric Peters

If you’ve ever restored an old car or a motorcycle – a basket case that needs everything – you know the importance of focusing on one thing at a time. Because it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the totality of the mess.

The last bike I restored (a ’75 Kawasaki S1 triple) I started with just the frame. I had the entire bike completely disassembled, the parts laid out like the famous skeleton of Lucy, the oldest semi-complete fossil of a distant ancestor of humanity yet found.

Looking at all those rusty, worn out grease-caked parts, the peeling chrome and  pitted metal, made it hard to imagine the “like new” bike I hoped to have at the end of the odyssey.

Which is what makes it hard to even begin.

Which makes it easy to give up.

Our situation, politically, is a lot like this. So much needs fixing, so much is broken, it’s easy to just give up and resign ourselves to the hopelessness of it all.

But so long as we are not in FEMA camps or waiting for the bullet at the edge of a ditch, there is hope. There is still the chance something might be done.

Even if it’s just one thing.

Like eliminating taxes on people’s homes (and the land that they are built on).

People kvetch about the IRS and the income tax and – agreed – both are at odds with a free society. Not primarily because of the money taken from our hides but because of power over our lives acquired by the government, which it must have in order to enforce compliance with this particular tax.

Consider the difference between a sales tax and the income tax.

A sales tax is basically anonymous. You buy something and you pay a percentage of the purchase price in tax. You – the buyer – are not required to divulge personal details about the source of your income, your employment, your private affairs. Heck, you don’t even have to give them your nickname.

And you can pay the tax in cash.

The income tax, in contrast, endows the government with police state powers. It cannot exist without such powers. The power to monitor our affairs; the requirement that we disclose our affairs – even to the extent that incriminate ourselves (on pain of perjury, no less) as regards what we allegedly “owe.” Filing a 1040 is on the face of it as egregious a violation of the Fifth Amendment as randomly stopping (and questioning ) motorists without even the pretext of individualized suspicion they’ve committed a crime is an affront to the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches, executed without a warrant or probable cause.

But as noxious as the income tax is, it’s not as noxious as the taxes applied to our homes and land.

The property tax (as it is usually called) is an outright assault on the concept of property, of ownership itself.

The income tax can be avoided – legally. When one no longer earns income, one no longer “owes” the tax. It is therefore possible to be free of this tax – and everything that comes along with it.

But the tax on property is inescapable – unless one chooses to live a property-less life. This effectively means living as a vagrant. Or in a van down by the river.

Even if you rent, you still pay. The cost of the tax being folded into what you pay in rent.

But imagine if – once you’d paid for your home/land in full – it was really yours. Owned, free and clear. No payments in perpetuity to the government as the price of being allowed to continue to live in “your” home and on “your” land.

Italics added to emphasize the obvious. That being, if you must forever pay money in order to remain in your home and on your land then you do not own your home or land. Whether you are paying a lender (your mortgage) or the government (the tax on property) you are a tenant. The home/land is the property of someone – or something – else.

This is a much greater affront to our liberties, our status as free men and women, than the income tax.

Because you can never be free. 

Contrariwise, imagine how free you’d feel – and would be – if, after having paid off your home and land, you really did own it. No longer owed anyone a cent.

Could live free – beholden to none – on your land.

Without the need to continue to earn money in order to pay endless (and always rising) taxes. Without having to live in constant dread of not being able to afford those taxes.

But if you owned your home and land once you paid it off, these worries would evaporate.

Even if you lost your job or your income went way down due to hard times, you’d still have a place to live, guaranteed. A literal physical refuge against what were once referred to as the vicissitudes of life.

Which is exactly why there is a tax on property.

To keep us all in a state of perpetual anxiety. To apply constant financial pressure to generate income – not for our own maintenance but for the maintenance of the state. To provide the very means used to tyrannize and enslave us.

And yes, slavery is precisely the right word.

A slave is forced to work for the benefit of his master; the degree to which he is forced to work for the benefit of his master does not change his status or the nature of the relationship.

Free men only “owe” debts they have freely assumed.

 A slave  is not allowed to own property. He is property. Property being defined as that which is legally under your control.

Are we not legally under the control of the government? Legally denied our right to own property ourselves, including even ourselves?

Remember, ownership is defined as an item being under your control, not under the control of someone else.

When it comes to “our” homes and land, we are permitted a sort of at-will occupancy sufferance. So long as we continue to pay our taxes, we’ll be allowed to live in “our” homes and on “our” land. But stop paying the endless taxes and see who really owns your home and land… .

So, let’s begin with this: The abolition of all taxes on personal homes/land. The restoration of the concept of ownership.

If we can achieve that, we’ll have achieved much. The tax on income – and the affront to our liberties that flow from it – can be next on the list.