Which is Worse?

Guest Post by Eric Peters

Few people like taxes – excepting, of course, those who collect them (and get paid, via them). But which tax – i.e., which form of legalized theft – is the worst: The tax on income – or the tax on property?

Examination of the thing result in just one answer. The most abominable of all taxes is the one applied to property; that is, to the home you will never own on account of these taxes.

This fact encompasses the fact that you will never stop paying taxes on income, which you’ll need in order to pay the taxes on what is not your home and never truly will be. If it were your home, you wouldn’t be paying money to keep from being evicted, which is exactly what happens to renters who don’t pay and that is what you are in the sense that matters most. Which is that you can be kicked out of what you think of as your place by the landlord for failure to pay.

The consequences of this fact are considerable.

First, there is the knowledge of the fact that you can and will be kicked out of “your” place – no matter how many years ago you thought you paid for it – if you ever find yourself unable to pay the rent. This fact vitiates the security of knowing you own your place; or rather, it engenders a feeling of insecurity, because you know it will never be your place.

That you will always “owe.”

Then there is the fact that the landlord can raise the rent at any time and irrespective of the “homeowner’s” ability to pay it.

There are countless cases of “homeowners” who have been forced to sell what they thought was theirs because they could no longer afford to pay the rent. This happens most usually to older people who’ve stopped earning income or who are earning less, being retired and living on savings and the federal dole (i.e. Socialist Insecurity). But it can also happen top people who thought they had purchased a place in an affordable area. Not just the home – but also the taxes levied upon it. But such areas tend to be attractive to other people, who also move there for the same reason and – before you know it – the taxes go up to pay for the “services” you neither asked for nor use, such as the government schools for the children who aren’t yours.

“The children” – and the “schools” – are the oft-used guilt-trips used to justify forcing people to pay taxes to pay for them (and specifically, to pay the generous salaries and benefits of the people who run them and who have acquired the power to force you to pay them, thereby eliminating any incentive for them to do other than demand more while doing less).

Including the people who do not use “the schools” and do not approve of what is taught there.

Jefferson had something to say about the evil of compelling a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he finds abhorrent, such as those propagated in government schools.

It’s also evil, arguably, to say any man is his brother’s or his brother’s kids’ keeper – at gunpoint. Which is exactly what will happen when the landlord comes to evict you from what you allowed yourself to regard as your home, if you fail to pay the rent that goes to pay for such things as “the schools” and “the children” you didn’t bring into this world.

Objecting marks you as a mean-minded person, of course. Just the same as it marked you as mean-minded to not wear a “mask.”

These things may seem unrelated but they are in fact the same things, in principle. It is not enough that you take care of yourself – and thereby impose no burden on anyone else. You must be forced to take care of others – however they define it and to whatever extent. It is why there is generally no limit on how high the rent can go. Nor a cap on how much rent you must pay.

If you live in what you thought was your home long enough, you may end up paying more in rent than you did for the home, itself. Even if not, you will still pay a lot. (This writer has already been forced to pay about $40,000 in rent on a home purchased 20 years ago; if the rent does not got up, it will be about $80,000 in another 20. That is a lot of money; almost enough to buy a new EV, even.)

The point of all of the above is that the property tax obliges you to pay income taxes in perpetuity – because it is almost impossible for most people to be able to pay the property tax/rent without earning income, in perpetuity.

Or at least, until they die.

At which point, their heirs will pay the taxes.

If, on the other hand, it were possible for people to actually own their homes free and clear, it would be possible to avoid income taxes by dint of not needing to earn much of even any income to be taxed. A homeowner’s expenses are (or can be) extremely modest. They encompass the unavoidable necessaries such as food (which can be raised and grown) and utilities (and the latter expense can be greatly minimized by using them less or even not at all). None of that requires generating an income sufficiently high to incur much, if any, income taxation.

That is why there are taxes on property.

It is not just about the money. It is about making sure you and I never have enough of it. That we are rendered perpetually insecure so that we are more easily controlled. The last thing controlling people want is for other people to be independent of them. For them to be able to accumulate the capital that makes people independent.

And that is why the tax on property is the most pernicious and evil form of taxation ever devised.

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