Paraphrasing this thread: seibelj: Corporate taxes are regressive. Roboprog: Stop taxing income. Tax property and imports. RUG3Y: Flat tax, because prop

Paraphrasing this thread: seibelj: Corporate taxes are regressive. Roboprog: Stop taxing income. Tax property and imports. RUG3Y: Flat tax, because property tax is evil. twblalock: Property deserves to be taxed, because gov't services. logfromblammo: Gov't services are not sufficient justification for any tax. See also: every libertarian ever. twblalock: I have already rejected libertarian arguments. Then why bother responding at all? I, like RUG3Y, think that levying taxes based on the value of owned property is worse than other methods of taxation, particularly when failure to pay the tax may lead to seizure of the property. The fact is that property does not enjoy the benefit of government-provided services. People do. So you tax the people, in proportion to the cost of providing them with those services, not in proportion to how much their house is worth, as it is a poor proxy for the former. Just as the Window Tax led people to wall themselves off from natural sunlight, property tax discourages people from purchasing and improving property for the long term. Also, property tax just feels like a protection racket shakedown to me. "Nice lawn. It'd be a shame if someone took it from you and sold it just because you didn't pay me to not do exactly that." It's one of the reasons why I can't stand Georgists/geoists: property taxation is one of their foundation stones. Edit (rate-limited): If the cost of a road does not scale to the number of users, please explain why a single-lane gravel road costs the same as a 6-lane elevated highway. Sparsely populated areas get reduced services. One guy living in the middle of a 16 sq.mi. ranch does not get city water and a sewer connection. He digs his own well and uses a septic field. He doesn't get fiber to the home; he uses a satellite dish. On the other side, city dwellers get city services because they live at high density, and it is therefore cost effective to do so.