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Property taxes can be viewed as a form of feudalism. You never outright own your property, and if you're not productive enough (can't pay your property tax) you

by avar 8y ago

Property taxes can be viewed as a form of feudalism. You never outright own your property, and if you're not productive enough (can't pay your property tax) your feudal lord (the government) will throw you out and find someone else who is more productive. You can sensibly critique Proposition 13, but calling it "feudalism" is nonsense. It's the opposite, it's basically carving out a limited exemption in a partially feudal system for some citizens over others. Is it dumb? Sure, unequal? Definitely. But it's not "feudal", it's making the system less so.

village-idiot 8y ago
It’s feudal because there are a number of people who own land and can extract an unusually high level of revenue from it purely because of who their parents were. That someone can own inherited land, collect rent, and pay a mere pittance in property tax purely because of who their parents were is as close to an aristocracy as we get in America. It was never a requirement of feudalism that a land owner had 100% control over their land. Most feudal lords had a greater lord that expected tribute and support during war. In this metaphor land owners would be the lesser lords, not the king.
- nitrogen 8y ago
  Do inheritance loopholes apply to rental properties? I've seen the counterpoint sentiment in this thread described as "right to place". Some have a deep instinct to want to stay where they grew up and continue to build it. Maybe we should find a way to support that dream as well as the needs of people moving from outside to take advantage of the growth produced by their predecessors, instead of vilifying anybody who has something we want. Otherwise you end up with an entirely transient population with little sense of ownership, responsibility, or community.
  - Kalium 8y ago
    > Do inheritance loopholes apply to rental properties? In California, it's all properties. Regardless of purpose. You can inherit dear old dad's office building and its tax assessment.
  - TulliusCicero 8y ago
    As someone from the bay area, if you think the setup there leads to 'natives' being able to stick around for the long term, I have some bad news: it's literally the exact opposite of that. Out of my high school class, people who stuck around are actually somewhat uncommon. I mean, there's obviously still more there than any single other metro, but surprise surprise, most have moved somewhere much cheaper. With saner density/zoning regulations, rents would be low enough to where more would have been able to stick around. Instead, very few have. The current setup benefits homeowners who get in early. Their kids may well eventually benefit by inheriting that house, but in the meantime they've probably lived at least a few decades as adults elsewhere.
TulliusCicero 8y ago
You do outright own it, though. It's just that outright ownership doesn't free you from all possible obligations or regulations. You can own a dog, but that doesn't mean you're allowed to beat your dog. And if you beat your dog, the state may well come in and take it away (and also jail you).
seanmcdirmid 8y ago
Property taxes explicitly work against speculation (you can’t just buy property and sit on it, since property tax acts to depreciate its value), but not rent seeking (indeed, it even pushes people to use their property productively so they can lay their property taxes).
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  The truth is property is worth basically nothing without public infrastructure and services. So taxes pay for the maintenance of the public infrastructure and services that give the land it's value.
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    There is that, but property taxes are also designed to discourage unproductive speculation. Many taxes have dual purposes like that (e.g. sin taxes).
    - Gibbon1 8y ago
      Before property taxes you had things like the lord demanding a certain amount of labor per year. Plus some amount of goods. For a minor noble inability to supply that without reason would result in being replaced. Taxes are less intrusive than say being press ganged to spread asphalt on I80 at 2am for a couple of weeks. At least for me.
thaumasiotes 8y ago
My understanding of European feudalism (which is sparse, and comes from https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00XTAXZAU/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00XTAXZAU/ ) is that it is characterized by the following features: - The owner of land owns it outright. If you own land, you don't pay taxes on it to anyone. It's yours. - Ownership of land is inalienable. Your land is yours, and you can't sell it or otherwise transfer ownership (except through inheritance). - Land generates revenue through the collection of dues from peasants who would like to work it. - The feudal dues associated with a stretch of land are fixed by tradition and, like the ownership of the land, can't be changed. This is why European peasant reform movements emphasized stable measurement units so heavily -- since lords couldn't change the nominal amount of feudal dues, changes were actually implemented by messing with the size of the units those dues were measured in. - The king has no tax authority. He gets his revenue from the land he owns, just like every other noble does. It is a radically decentralized system, even for the rest of the world at the time, and it reflects the very low level of societal development in feudal Europe. The US property tax system is nothing like this. The government owns ALL the land, and no one else can ever own any. The government has tax authority over the land and many other things. The proposition 13 system does look like it's trying to move things in the direction of feudalism, as far as I can see. It's even trying to make sure land can't be sold, in that when you sell your land, all the tax benefits are lost.
- User23 8y ago
  > The US property tax system is nothing like this. The government owns ALL the land, and no one else can ever own any. The government has tax authority over the land and many other things. Just a quibble, but, with the exception of federal lands, it's the individual states that levy property tax in their territory. Allodial title is what it's called when you have no obligations on the property. Nevada allowed limited allodial title, but it only lasts for the life of the owner. The way the implemented it was they computed an estimated total property tax and the owner would buy out the state's interest for his lifetime[1]. It actually provides additional privileges besides property tax exemption. Liens can't be enforced on an allodium, among other privileges. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allodial_title#Nevada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allodial_title#Nevada
solidsnack9000 8y ago
There's nothing feudal about the absence of "allodial title" -- the absence of the possibility to "outright own your property". Empires, after all, never allowed that either; they were not feudal, though, they were empires. Under feudalism is actually when legal systems began to recognise allodial title as such. To the old fashioned kings, "land to which you have an absolute title" was just "land I haven't conquered yet". When people talk about feudalism here, what they probably are referencing is the defacto inalienability of property under feudalism, and the consequent emergence of a small landed class who enjoyed revenues from a large labouring class. The inalienability and concentration was not due to one law or institution, but typically several together. Some wills outright forbade the inheritor to sell any of the property, if they accepted the inheritance. In some parts of Europe, all of the property was inherited by one son -- primogeniture -- tending to concentration. It was never the case under feudalism that there was no way to move into the landowning class -- some families moved in and some out -- but in practice families with land could very easily retain it. This changed only with the emergence of widespread trade and then industrialism, because these introduced much better ways to generate revenue from labor and led to a situation that might seem bizarre to us: poor gentry with vast landholdings and no money, and no way to generate revenue from the land since they couldn't invest in it, and no way to get outside investors because it was always "heads I win, tails you lose" when it came to collecting on the only asset of value the gentry had, the land. What California is doing really is feudal, in the sense of encouraging the concentration of landholdings in a semi-permanent group of families.
- avar 8y ago
  > What California is doing really is feudal, in the sense of encouraging the concentration of landholdings in a semi-permanent group of families[...] This history lesson really falls apart when you consider what preceded feudalism for the average person in medieval Europe, or what happened in parallel in other societies outside of Europe that never experienced feudalism. In both cases it was the norm in agrarian societies that farmsteads would be owned by the same family for generations. Re-establishing that is the main effect of Proposition 13.
  - solidsnack9000 8y ago
ataturk 8y ago
I have made this same argument before but it falls on deaf ears of so-called progressives. The idea behind property tax was to "keep things moving" and avoid having inter-generational landed gentry as was common in Europe. It has been converted into tax farming by the very liberals who designed it for another purpose. "School taxes" were the major funding target, and still are where I live. What I am sick to death of is all the little fees, surcharges, surtaxes (WTF is a surtax, that's total bs) sales taxes, on top of income tax both state and federal, Social Security tax, and property. Some US states also tax personal property such as cars, ATVs, and boats (basically anything they can find to tax). My state taxes new cars punitively for a few years, which to me is a disincentive to ever buy a new vehicle even though I sometimes do. It is sick, sick, sick what we have become as a nation, all in the name of bleeding heart policies for this or that. Here's the facts: I don't want to pay taxes so other able-bodied people can sit at home and not work. I don't want to pay tax to educate the world's children, e.g. anyone who can get here illegally is not automatically entitled to the fruits of my labor. It is disgusting what progressives and many so-called conservatives do in the name of bleeding heart non-solutions which only actually accomplish one thing and that is to destroy the middle class so that they can centralize their power structure. We don't want feudalism, we aren't part of some kind of tax plantation for the ultra wealthy. End this. End it all. ETA: One more tidbit to this rant: These taxes keep going up and up because retirement pension plans at the city, county, state, and federal levels promised too much. My school taxes are paying out to an army of retired teachers, in ridiculous disproportion to current budgets and current students. We're paying into a Ponzi!

by avar 8y ago

village-idiot 8y ago

It’s feudal because there are a number of people who own land and can extract an unusually high level of revenue from it purely because of who their parents were. That someone can own inherited land, collect rent, and pay a mere pittance in property tax purely because of who their parents were is as close to an aristocracy as we get in America. It was never a requirement of feudalism that a land owner had 100% control over their land. Most feudal lords had a greater lord that expected tribute and support during war. In this metaphor land owners would be the lesser lords, not the king.

nitrogen 8y ago
Do inheritance loopholes apply to rental properties? I've seen the counterpoint sentiment in this thread described as "right to place". Some have a deep instinct to want to stay where they grew up and continue to build it. Maybe we should find a way to support that dream as well as the needs of people moving from outside to take advantage of the growth produced by their predecessors, instead of vilifying anybody who has something we want. Otherwise you end up with an entirely transient population with little sense of ownership, responsibility, or community.
- Kalium 8y ago
  > Do inheritance loopholes apply to rental properties? In California, it's all properties. Regardless of purpose. You can inherit dear old dad's office building and its tax assessment.
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  As someone from the bay area, if you think the setup there leads to 'natives' being able to stick around for the long term, I have some bad news: it's literally the exact opposite of that. Out of my high school class, people who stuck around are actually somewhat uncommon. I mean, there's obviously still more there than any single other metro, but surprise surprise, most have moved somewhere much cheaper. With saner density/zoning regulations, rents would be low enough to where more would have been able to stick around. Instead, very few have. The current setup benefits homeowners who get in early. Their kids may well eventually benefit by inheriting that house, but in the meantime they've probably lived at least a few decades as adults elsewhere.

TulliusCicero 8y ago

You do outright own it, though. It's just that outright ownership doesn't free you from all possible obligations or regulations. You can own a dog, but that doesn't mean you're allowed to beat your dog. And if you beat your dog, the state may well come in and take it away (and also jail you).

seanmcdirmid 8y ago

Property taxes explicitly work against speculation (you can’t just buy property and sit on it, since property tax acts to depreciate its value), but not rent seeking (indeed, it even pushes people to use their property productively so they can lay their property taxes).

Gibbon1 8y ago
The truth is property is worth basically nothing without public infrastructure and services. So taxes pay for the maintenance of the public infrastructure and services that give the land it's value.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  There is that, but property taxes are also designed to discourage unproductive speculation. Many taxes have dual purposes like that (e.g. sin taxes).
  - Gibbon1 8y ago
    Before property taxes you had things like the lord demanding a certain amount of labor per year. Plus some amount of goods. For a minor noble inability to supply that without reason would result in being replaced. Taxes are less intrusive than say being press ganged to spread asphalt on I80 at 2am for a couple of weeks. At least for me.

thaumasiotes 8y ago

My understanding of European feudalism (which is sparse, and comes from https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00XTAXZAU/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00XTAXZAU/ ) is that it is characterized by the following features: - The owner of land owns it outright. If you own land, you don't pay taxes on it to anyone. It's yours. - Ownership of land is inalienable. Your land is yours, and you can't sell it or otherwise transfer ownership (except through inheritance). - Land generates revenue through the collection of dues from peasants who would like to work it. - The feudal dues associated with a stretch of land are fixed by tradition and, like the ownership of the land, can't be changed. This is why European peasant reform movements emphasized stable measurement units so heavily -- since lords couldn't change the nominal amount of feudal dues, changes were actually implemented by messing with the size of the units those dues were measured in. - The king has no tax authority. He gets his revenue from the land he owns, just like every other noble does. It is a radically decentralized system, even for the rest of the world at the time, and it reflects the very low level of societal development in feudal Europe. The US property tax system is nothing like this. The government owns ALL the land, and no one else can ever own any. The government has tax authority over the land and many other things. The proposition 13 system does look like it's trying to move things in the direction of feudalism, as far as I can see. It's even trying to make sure land can't be sold, in that when you sell your land, all the tax benefits are lost.

User23 8y ago
> The US property tax system is nothing like this. The government owns ALL the land, and no one else can ever own any. The government has tax authority over the land and many other things. Just a quibble, but, with the exception of federal lands, it's the individual states that levy property tax in their territory. Allodial title is what it's called when you have no obligations on the property. Nevada allowed limited allodial title, but it only lasts for the life of the owner. The way the implemented it was they computed an estimated total property tax and the owner would buy out the state's interest for his lifetime[1]. It actually provides additional privileges besides property tax exemption. Liens can't be enforced on an allodium, among other privileges. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allodial_title#Nevada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allodial_title#Nevada

solidsnack9000 8y ago

There's nothing feudal about the absence of "allodial title" -- the absence of the possibility to "outright own your property". Empires, after all, never allowed that either; they were not feudal, though, they were empires. Under feudalism is actually when legal systems began to recognise allodial title as such. To the old fashioned kings, "land to which you have an absolute title" was just "land I haven't conquered yet". When people talk about feudalism here, what they probably are referencing is the defacto inalienability of property under feudalism, and the consequent emergence of a small landed class who enjoyed revenues from a large labouring class. The inalienability and concentration was not due to one law or institution, but typically several together. Some wills outright forbade the inheritor to sell any of the property, if they accepted the inheritance. In some parts of Europe, all of the property was inherited by one son -- primogeniture -- tending to concentration. It was never the case under feudalism that there was no way to move into the landowning class -- some families moved in and some out -- but in practice families with land could very easily retain it. This changed only with the emergence of widespread trade and then industrialism, because these introduced much better ways to generate revenue from labor and led to a situation that might seem bizarre to us: poor gentry with vast landholdings and no money, and no way to generate revenue from the land since they couldn't invest in it, and no way to get outside investors because it was always "heads I win, tails you lose" when it came to collecting on the only asset of value the gentry had, the land. What California is doing really is feudal, in the sense of encouraging the concentration of landholdings in a semi-permanent group of families.

avar 8y ago
> What California is doing really is feudal, in the sense of encouraging the concentration of landholdings in a semi-permanent group of families[...] This history lesson really falls apart when you consider what preceded feudalism for the average person in medieval Europe, or what happened in parallel in other societies outside of Europe that never experienced feudalism. In both cases it was the norm in agrarian societies that farmsteads would be owned by the same family for generations. Re-establishing that is the main effect of Proposition 13.
- solidsnack9000 8y ago

ataturk 8y ago

I have made this same argument before but it falls on deaf ears of so-called progressives. The idea behind property tax was to "keep things moving" and avoid having inter-generational landed gentry as was common in Europe. It has been converted into tax farming by the very liberals who designed it for another purpose. "School taxes" were the major funding target, and still are where I live. What I am sick to death of is all the little fees, surcharges, surtaxes (WTF is a surtax, that's total bs) sales taxes, on top of income tax both state and federal, Social Security tax, and property. Some US states also tax personal property such as cars, ATVs, and boats (basically anything they can find to tax). My state taxes new cars punitively for a few years, which to me is a disincentive to ever buy a new vehicle even though I sometimes do. It is sick, sick, sick what we have become as a nation, all in the name of bleeding heart policies for this or that. Here's the facts: I don't want to pay taxes so other able-bodied people can sit at home and not work. I don't want to pay tax to educate the world's children, e.g. anyone who can get here illegally is not automatically entitled to the fruits of my labor. It is disgusting what progressives and many so-called conservatives do in the name of bleeding heart non-solutions which only actually accomplish one thing and that is to destroy the middle class so that they can centralize their power structure. We don't want feudalism, we aren't part of some kind of tax plantation for the ultra wealthy. End this. End it all. ETA: One more tidbit to this rant: These taxes keep going up and up because retirement pension plans at the city, county, state, and federal levels promised too much. My school taxes are paying out to an army of retired teachers, in ridiculous disproportion to current budgets and current students. We're paying into a Ponzi!