Who Owns What? – Alma Boykin
I had never given much thought to the question of “who owns what for how long?” Growing up in the US, I learned that if you pay for it, and keep up with any taxes, it is yours, be it a car, house, farm, or work of art. You can sell it to whomever, bequeath it to your children, or dog, or favorite charity or museum. You can set up a trust and have your money doled out to worthy causes long after your death. After all, you earned it and it was yours to give away. People might challenge you and question your judgment (Dickens’s Bleak House, anyone?), but no one questions your right to dispose of property even after your death.
The first time I came across something different was in the book Holding the Stirrup by Elizabeth von und zu Gutenberg, the daughter of a Bavarian nobleman. After her father died, the men of his extended family gathered to redistribute his property, giving his castle and country house to other relatives that needed the space more than Elizabeth’s mother did (Elizabeth had just married). The real goods of the family belonged to the family as a whole, not to Elizabeth’s father. The clan provided her mother with an apartment in Munich and an income, so she wasn’t homeless or destitute by any means, but the needs of the clan overrode whatever her father’s wishes and mother’s desires might have been. That was how it had always been in the great families of Bavaria and Austro-Hungary. The practice made survival sense in many ways, and Elizabeth von und zu Gutenberg didn’t question the division.
The next thing to catch my attention came while I was in the Czech Republic, when learned about the Lex Schwarzenberg and the difference between legal and illegal property confiscation. Let’s just say that you really don’t want to have a law named for your family. To greatly oversimplify a complicated (and still litigated) story, after WWI and the creation of Czechoslovakia, the duly elected government decided that foreign property holders and some noble families (the two categories overlapped because of the new borders) owned too much land and their holdings potentially endangered the security of the new republic. So the government confiscated all agricultural holdings over 150 hectares (370 acres) and all non-agricultural land over 250 ha (617 a) from foreign owners, and did similar to the magnates’ estates. No one family could own more than 500 ha. The government paid some recompense, but in a new currency at old prices. One unspoken but understood justification for the new government’s actions was that the state i.e. the Habsburg monarchy, had given the land and so the current state had the right to redistribute it, just like the Habsburgs had. Another was the warning posed by the total expropriation of all Habsburg family property. After WWII, another law, the Lex Schwarzenberg, specifically stripped one branch of one old family of its holdings. Then came 1948 and everyone lost everything.
After the Velvet Revolution, the Czech government decided to allow people whose property had been illegally confiscated (by the Nazis or Communists) to redeem it from the state. If you had the proper paperwork, had maintained Czech citizenship, and could show proof of the seizure, you were entitled to your property back, in as-is condition. BUT, and this is what raised my eyebrows, if it had been legally expropriated by a democratic government between 1919-1938 and 1945-1948, too bad. Your family name might get put back on the castle, country house, or what have you, but you had no claim on the property. You could buy it back, however, at fair market value, if you met certain conditions and the government decided it didn’t need the property.
Hungary followed a similar pattern, but did not allow families to reclaim land taken by the Communists. The government paid people in land bonds, a good number of which quickly ended up on the market and were sold to speculators and investors for half their value.
OK, you are reading this and thinking, “Well, that’s Central Europe. The Habsburg Empire was an anomaly and yeah, the government shouldn’t have just taken all that property if without fair compensation but the Schwarzenbergs and Eszterhazys and everyone were feudal lords and should have seen what was coming, and they got their property by conquest and marriage, didn’t really earn it,” and so on.
But in almost every country in Europe, the state can cap how much of your private property, especially real estate, you are allowed to dispose of and in what manner, because at bottom all real property belongs to the state. You might not be allowed to disinherit your slacker, sleezeball brother. Your estranged husband still gets a chunk of your estate. You cannot leave the farm to the one child who really wants it. In fact, the total value of your estate may be capped so that only 30 percent is assigned by you in your will. The State parcels out the rest, what it doesn’t claim in the form of taxes. And this is as it has been for centuries, because the good of the clan, or tribe, or nation, is more important than the desires of a dead individual. The good of the group, now the state, is the primary consideration. Everything is on long-term loan to you from the state. You don’t own that.
Only in Britain, and Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand do the ideas of truly private property hold sway, and even here the Progressives and their Euro-fan siblings are eroding it, giving the state more and more power over private property and how it is dispersed and used. The English were the first to develop the idea of truly private property, something that went back to the 13th century and perhaps farther. The sources get mighty scarce before the 1300s, but even then the English had a brisk land market. You didn’t have European-style peasants tied to the land, endlessly shrinking plots of farmland, or people unable to acquire real property because it all belonged to independent nobles. Instead you had yeomen farmers, freeholders, and small businessmen as well as nobles, and the government had to respect their property rights (at least in theory).
We in North America are so used to the idea of truly owning land and goods that we don’t recognize how Odd our system is in the grand scheme of things. I’d never really thought about it until this summer, and it was reinforced by reading Daniel Hannan’s book How We Invented Freedom and Why it Matters, a history of the underpinnings of the Anglophone world’s ideas about the individual and individual rights.
If the purpose of government is to protect life, liberty, and property, as Locke originally wrote, then why is the state permitted to determine who gets to own what, and if someone has too much? Europeans, Chinese, Indians, and others would say that the needs of the state (which is the first and final owner of the land) or the clan or village come before the individual, especially after death. We Anglophones are strange, even heartless and selfish, to believe that property is ours to dispose of.
Now, the question of ownership can add a whole messy plot or subplot if you are writing about a feudal society or historical fiction set outside the Anglosphere. Katherine Kurtz has used it well in several of the Dyreni books, and I mentioned Holding the Stirrup, which is a fascinating autobiography. I’m going to have to deal with it in A Carpathian Campaign and the sequel, and I suspect it will come up in a later Cat book, although only as a minor point, since Rada Ni Drako and Joschka von Hohen-Drachenburg are so steeped in the culture of the Houses that they wouldn’t blink at property divisions and redistributions. Who owns your property: the living, the dead, or the state? It’s an idea with implications for our imagined worlds as well as for real world society.
According To Hoyt 
Between Eminent Domain and property taxes, I’ve heard ownership referred to as “renting from the government” rather often in the last few years.
In our imagined worlds, I think we tend to carry in both our assumptions and our fears. Adding actual _knowledge_ of the various forms and customs involving ownership? Interesting concept. ;)
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Over in Tacoma a couple got “reassessed” so that their yearly taxes are more than they paid for it in the 50s.
And they backdated it.
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Nonsense like this is why California voters passed Proposition 13 back in the ’70s.
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And I still hear people bitching about Prop 13 in terms of revenue. “Is it fair?” Taxes are not a moral instrument; fairness has nothing to do with it. Being able to plan, however, is a valuable commodity, and having reassessed values in the midst of a housing bubble forces people out of homes. As DID HAPPEN in the last national bubble, but people ignore that.
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Taxes certain are, or at least can be, a moral instrument and fairness, at least in the US most certainly SHOULD have something to do with it.
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Kindly give me an operational definition of fairness – a test with a fairly obvious result – at least as applied to a specified domain and range.
Global application is better but I’d be interested a test for any domain and range you care to specify.
For my money Deciding is it fair is the equivalent of cardinal utility – sort of like saying Rotary’s 4 Way Test beats Arrow’s impossibility theorem.
I’ve long wondered what is fair and what is just but I’ve never had a way to know. By Heinlein’s pragmatic test of what works North Korea currently and Iraq under Saddam Hussein might be fair and just I think.
My own rules have been more inclined to favor liberte over equalite and ignore fraternite. That is maximize potential and interfere minimally. For taxes this implies a VAT is better as less of a burden on economic activity and so distorting the market minimally. Others think say it’s fair for the government to give a senior discount – anybody who lives long enough will qualify and so it’s a benefit distributed equally though it conflicts with a rule increasing marginal tax rates proportionally to wealth (should be stock or flow?) A general tax on unearned increment (John Start Mill and Henry George sell the family farm to a developer to pay the tax?) has a lot of appeal as fair and minimally distorting if so it be.
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A minor quibble:
Given what passes for logic in some quarters — you didn’t build that!!! — I would urge a cautious and careful definition of anything termed “unearned.”
Beloved Spouse & I bought our first house in part because it was near (as cheek is to jowl) a local university, making likely its use as rental property once we were able to move on. Would any increase in its sale price resulting from such conversion or by the university’s expansion have constituted an “unearned” increment?
The neighborhood my parents lived in for forty years existed because a family bought and held farmland to the West of town, held it thirty – forty years then sold it to a developer — who just happened to be a corporation established by that family. Would that constitute an “unearned” increment? How about if the developer was not owned by the family but by business (or political, say by the name of Reid) associates?
Frankly, it strikes me as a boon for the courts, this attempt to define what is “unearned” increment and what is “earned” increment. It would undermine predictability, which is otherwise an aspect of your argument I heartily applaud.
A simpler method might be to establish a base tax on all real property, with a surcharge based on income generated by that property and a possible additional tax on concentrations of property (if you’re gonna buy up so much land you oughtta be able to afford the taxes.)
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Not everything in life can be boiled down to a simple formula or test, and some things are highly contextual.
What is fair in a sporting competition (rules defined prior to the competition, and intended to apply 100 percent equally to all teams) might not be fair in a work place (we expect someone with 10 years experience to out perform someone who was hired yesterday).
However the best definition of “fair” that would be global would be “a system where no matter where a reasonable person wound up he would think the system equitable”.
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In the realm of games there is perhaps a tension between games like tennis or golf where rules are to be followed by all parties and games like football where rules are followed unless the penalty be less than the cost of following the rules – e.g. pass interference may be preferred to a touchdown and a deliberate foul is the way people play at the end of a basketball game.
Equal men are not IMHO free However equitable it may have been the Pilgrim’s experiment in socialism did not have an outcome I would consider fair – rather I would say the shared poverty failed the community.
Further I’d say this formulation pushes the issue back one step (in an infinite regress? or to circular reasoning pick one) to what is a reasonable person. The reasonable man standard at law can be interesting in a <ham sandwich world as Glenn Reynolds writes.
I’m not planning to debate it but the phrasing is close to John Rawls Justice as Fairness and A Theory of Justice. Myself I’m thoroughly on the Nozick side. Where might you on the Rawls or Nozick question?
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Taxes are theft, tolerated if the State is sufficiently useful to those stolen from. The United States governments have been pushing that threshold for a while now. I don’t think the Political class is going to like it when the eruption comes.
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An argument in support of property taxes is that it discourages abandonment of property by allowing it to be claimed and resold by the neighbors (through action by their agent, Teh State.)
This is not an argument I necessarily endorse, but to the extent such taxes are reasonable* and reasonably* established it is one I could consider.
*WWA — Weasel Word Alert. Loophole of sufficient size for trucks potentially established
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Abandonment can be avoided via code enforcement, that is, if a property turns into a fire hazard or a vermin-ridden hazard, it can be cleaned up and the costs assessed on the property owner, and when this has to be done a few years in a row, the property is auctioned. Not saying it’s ideal, just saying it’s better than making grandma and grandpa pay rent on property they’ve theoretically owned for forty years. Perhaps we could simply eliminate taxes on primary residences.
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If taxes are theft, so is the check at the end of your meal.
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I THINK it was a mobi. Perhaps the guy who is trying to get us to say “extreme libertarian” things…
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I’ve got a friend from the Navy who has fully bought into the “taxation is theft” garbage. He holds lots of silly ideas, like the LP being a viable political force.
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I totally agree about “taxation is theft”being garbage…..it’s much closer to extortion
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It depends on the level of taxation. Ideally, it’s payment for necessary services rendered. Start saddling government with too many “good ideas” and it quickly turns extortionate.
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Well, just claiming that taxes are theft or claiming that someone’s opinion is garbage is merely screaming bumpersticker slogans and does not actually approach any actual argument.
On one side you do have the radical idea that funds extracted from the citizenry at the threat of force, distrainment of property* or loss of rights is not distinguishable from theft, robbery or extortion, and on the other that fact that the way our society is now patterned makes such mandatory payments essential to our form of government.
Now ( I say making a purposeful strawman argument) I think we can agree that forcing someone to participate to fund a greater good they may neither support or benefit from is regrettable, but we also have to agree that governance is essential, without it we don’t have security, coordination of things like roads and power and what not – and that has to be paid for in one way or another.
But we cannot discuss this with bumperstickers.
Instead lets look at other possible models, say, the local mall.
The local mall, like a small city, provides to its tenants access to power, water, security, cleanliness, and transportation that are in demand. In doing so cheaply and efficiently it is making money through rents freely paid, and when the standards are not met the tenancy falls off and so do the rents. In result most malls tend to be cleaner than the downtown areas they replaced as shopping districts. Would this be a model for a city that would depend on rents instead of taxes to survive? It would appear to have a reason to improve on the operations to the benefit to the leaseholders so as to increase what tenants are willing to pay in rents, instead of maintaining the status quo while trying to increase tax revenues to pay for future improvements. Would there be any actual benefit to running a city or a neighborhood on the mall-style profit model; and even more important what are the possible abuses possible under such a system and are they better or worse than what we suffer now?.
(*and yes, “distrainment of property” is redundant, and only done for clarity because I like those $20 words, and I couldn’t think of any word that means “taking from you without your permission” that doesn’t imply theft)
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Now there’s an alternate government stile to write about. Imagine if the “office of compliance” had to work like a privet business to get your $$ out of ya.
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No matter how poor the service or crappy the food, if you have a meal the restaurant is entitled to demand you pay the bill.
Of course, you could always go somewhere else, which is why it’s an analogy, not an allegory.
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Taxes are simply spreading the cost of government around.
Now, you may wish to assert that all taxes above the level needed run a government in it’s defined scope are theft, but that’s a completely different arguementt.
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Taxes have nothing to do with morality or fairness in most places. In parts of Cook County, IL, where I have lived and practiced law, taxpayers without political pull are paying property taxes so high that their property is effectively confiscated in a ten year period. Where does the money go? Patronage for the Democratic machine, ruinous pensions for public workers, billions for the Mafia on construction contracts.
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…still hear people bitching about Prop 13 in terms of revenue…
The thing is, it’s self-correcting, since every time a property sells in CA it gets reassessed at the current market value except in a short list of exception circumstances.
Prop 13 basically did two things. First it prevented inflating property values from driving property taxes up so high that owners could no longer afford to live in their paid-off homes by freezing the assessments at 1975 levels and allowing very small annual increases, which with the reassessment provision, is relatively benign as every property sells eventually. The second was more tricksy, as it removing property tax revenue from local control and concentrated it in Sacramento, where those tax revenues were supposed to be re-distributed back to the localities. That didn’t really happen (I know, big surprise), so school districts in wealthier areas in particular did see big drops in their available budgets as some of their revenues were instead distributed off to more needy ((or better connected) areas. So the big downside was not, as you will be told by local teachers union activists, the result of the tax cuts, at least not at this late date – it was in fact the result of centralizing control of the cash at the state capitol.
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“school districts in wealthier areas in particular did see big drops in their available budgets as some of their revenues were instead distributed off to more needy ((or better connected) areas.”
“More needy” and “better connected” in this context might be translated as “neigborhoods where school quality was of greater political salience.” Wealthier neighborhoods already had ample tax base to meet minimal school funding* needs and were better able to meet such shortfalls as occurred.
*When we were involved in PTA activities the Daughtorial Unit was attending a magnet primary school — that is to say, a minority neighborhood school (hers was mainly fed students from the projects) in which a specialized “school” had been established (in this case, advanced AG programs targeted at the top one-half of the top one percent, academically.) The idea was to add some middle class (or higher) parents to the school PTA to better advocate for the school (this had mixed success, as many minority parents would resent these outsiders and reflexively oppose their efforts.) When we moved on to middle school we noticed that many of the folk raising funds for the PTA were accustomed to far higher sale amounts for, say, wrapping paper, than were expected at the primary school from which we had graduated. Put simply, a dollar amount considered highly successful at Primary A was disdained as pathetic at Primaries B, C, D & E.
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The thing that gets my proverbial goat is, real spending has gone up consistently both on a total and a per student basis, but at the same time there are no more shop classes, no more school drivers ed, cuts in band and sports, cuts and elimination of AP and gifted programs, new fees charged to parents, and long lists of stuff that needs to be bought for each student to tote in to class that used to be part of the school budget when I was a callow yout’.
But there’s lots of administrators, especially at the school district level!
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“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the
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One wonders how much of that “spending” goes toward teacher retirement payments. I read somewhere that has become a major drain on school funds.
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For discussion on this topic try visiting Walter Russell Mead’s blog at Via Media, where a recent post [http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/10/08/philly-school-reformers-to-teacher-union-the-war-is-on/] provides some solid figures and useful links.
Or try the Mackinac Institute [wwwDOTmackinac.org/10361] for analysis of operating costs of schools in Michigan. Keep on mind that some portion of such spending (e.g., unfunded pension and health insurance liabilities) are off the books. According to figures on the Detroit public schools, Expenditures: Instruction: Subtotal represent 45.7% of Total Expenditures For Education. Be aware that some portion of those other expenditures represents property acquisition and construction.
The M.I. was, IIRC, a primary intellectual supporter of Scott Walker’s Wisconsin school reforms which are credited with bringing state school systems under financial control.
In North Carolina the John Locke Foundation [JohnLockDOTorg] provides useful data analysis on a variety of topics. An example appropriate for the current Senate race:
Finally, in today’s NY Post there is this column:
Helping good schools save themselves
By Naomi Schaefer Riley
{SNIP]
[The study] found that students in Catholic schools “took more advanced classes in science and math than their public school peers.” They were more likely to have taken geometry, trigonometry and calculus, as well as chemistry and physics.
The study authors note, “These findings may reflect the importance placed on a core academic curriculum for all students in Catholic schools.” No kidding.
Yet these schools operate far more cheaply than public schools do. New York City spends more than $20,000 per student in its often-horrible public schools; the city’s Catholic schools spend just $7,000 per kid.
{SNIP]
A little over a year ago, the Archdiocese asked the [Partnership for Inner City Education] to manage six schools — three in Harlem and three in the South Bronx.
These are classic urban schools: All students are eligible for free lunch; 94 percent are black or Hispanic. The six together have a little over 2,100 students in grades K-8 — but enrollment’s been steadily dropping.
The Partnership aims to “develop Catholic schools that are strong operationally and financially by maximizing enrollment, improving efficiency . . . and stabilizing revenue sources.”
In other words, bring these schools up to the 21st century.
The first thing that the Partnership did, explains Executive Director Jill Kafka, was “separate the academics from the operations.”
She notes these were largely “mom and pop shops,” typically run by priests or teachers who’d been pushed into the position of principal. Yet that job involves making decisions about budgets and management that they had no experience with.
The Partnership hired operations managers, some with MBAs, to deal with the non-academic side of running a school.
nypostDOTcom/2014/10/09/helping-good-schools-save-themselves/
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Oh, one more thing. By way of illustration, the NC education budget “has increased every year since Tillis became speaker in 2011. According to a document prepared by the General Assembly, the state education budget was $10.8 billion in the 2010-11 fiscal year and $11.5 billion for 2014-15. (These numbers are adjusted for inflation and include both K-12 and higher education spending.)
“Additionally, state expenditure per pupil for K-12 has increased since 2011 — from $5,156 in 2011 to $5,395 in 2013.”
So, that $500M “cut” would still have been less than 5% even if it was not a phony political cut which is actually merely a lesser raise than desired.
ALSO: “the vast majority of state education spending growth over the years comes down to rising healthcare and retirement costs.”
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/oct/07/kay-hagan/debate-kay-hagan-says-thom-tillis-cut-education-50/
Gol-Dang right emphasis added!!!!!!!!
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Thanks, RES. This is exactly the type of thing I was talking about. I need to keep these links.
IMAO, part of the issue is the tooth-to-tail ratio and part of it is the cost of retirement. In my district they have the idea of “coaches”. These are teachers who only job in life is to “help” other teachers do their jobs. It is an admin position done by a teacher (so it takes a teacher slot) and has nothing to do with kids. It was a pet project of the last superintendent and I’m not sure why it’s still around. It is something of a sinecure for older teachers who are tired of grading, students and parents.
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Heck yes, Prop 13 is fair.
Nobody who’s flipping real estate benefits from it since they don’t own long enough, they get taxed at the current assessed rate when they buy, and a retiree on a fixed income who spent decades paying to own the home doesn’t get raped by rising property taxes taking their home away.
In the mail today, we got a property tax notice (for about $1700) from Santa Clara County, California. It was nice to tell them we don’t live there any more, contact the guy who just bought the house. My guess, judging from current property tax rates, is that he’s getting hit up for about $3900 this year… and that’s for an entry-level 1200 sq ft single-family home built in 1976.
Most of the anti-Prop 13 enthusiasts are just mad because they aren’t able to squeeze more blood out of those turnips in the suburbs. The rest are too stupid to know they’re being lied to by the first group, and too lazy to find out how the proposition actually works.
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In regards to eminent domain, I live in California in an area that is not as insane as the Bay Area or L.A. but which is crazy by the standards of the rest of the country in regards to pricing. During the height of the bubble, someone I know was being eminent-domained to the tune of $300K for part of his 2-acre parcel because of a road. The problem with that is that the setbacks would put the road literally up to his doorstep, making the whole of his property unusable… and at the time, you couldn’t buy a CONDO for a paltry $300K. This was the house he’d lived in and loved for decades, so he fought it.
Funny thing; the crash came shortly afterward. The development company went bankrupt. The subdivision across the way never got built… and the road, the big through road with setbacks… narrows to one lane a bit west of his property, which is still there, still intact.
The lesson? Eminent domain needs to be fair. If they’d offered him the then-current value of the whole property, rather than arguing for a pittance for “unused land” (just things like the driveway and yard, you know), he’d have sighed and accepted. But because they were jerks about it, he’s still there after they’re long gone. And the city-planned road may someday have a jog in it rather than be straight (I mean, it’s UNDEVELOPED LAND across the way, why fight a homeowner?) Do you really need roads to be dead-straight anyway?
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One important step in eminent domain reform would be to require the government body that wants to seize the property to pay the assessed price according to the last n years tax records (where n is sufficiently long to prevent the government suddenly dropping the assessment and then grabbing).
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Having dealt with an eminent domain sale of land I can assure you that the assessor is a critical element of getting fair value. As the State licenses assessors there is a clear conflict of interest in the State assessor’s assessment of eminent domain purchases (a conflict often displayed on the mirror treatment of a well-connected landowner’s sale to the State — somehow every variable gets decided to the well-connected one’s advantage.)
It is critical that valid comparisons be used in valuing comparable properties, as that is an area permitting significant fudging by the assessor.
In the instance cited above, proper compensation should have looked not at the strip of property sought but at the impairment of value of the whole property. Putting it in terms of the Old West, it is absurd to pay 5% of the whole range’s value for the purchase of the only 5% which has water.
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While I agree there are instances for eminent domain to be used, it should be tightly regulated and seldom used. How about we all push for laws stating that if you’re eminent-domained, you get DOUBLE the market value for your property to compensate you not only for your property, but for the inconvenience of moving as well. And if they try to eminent-domain only a portion of your property, you still get double the market value of the full property.
Market values then act as a natural restraint on the government, helping them to use eminent domain very sparingly.
And almost everyone who gets hit by eminent domain would be very happy. :D
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I don’t know about other states, but when NC took my house so they could expand the University’s baseball stadium they paid all moving expenses up to some generous percentage — I am sure there is a max, but we didn’t graze it and we had A LOT of books (adds to box and weight counts.)
I would have liked them to pay our decorating costs (lots of repainting) but that was going a bit far to ask. It’s been twenty plus years, but as I recall the eminent domain price was settled and then legal fees, moving expenses and (a bonus?) were added on top. It was actually quite generous once we managed to get the original seriously low-ball appraisal tossed (initial offer at about 75% of what we eventually settled for.)
The new president of the university, who had been given a new house (a very nice bequest from one of the local community philanthropists) and then spent a million of university money “decorating” it (gotta look nice for the fundraising, eh?) was quoted in the paper complaining about “a few greedy people holding up the acquisition” — the sales tax on her redecoration would have settled for our price.
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Then you were very lucky (I’m assuming you are not one of the “well-connected” people you mentioned above). Every case of eminent domain I have dealt with (dealt with from the surveying end, so as a neutral third party) has consisted of the government basically forcing the people out and paying them a pittance. Usually under the excuse of, “that is all it is worth, because it is zoned X. I don’t care if you have lived here for forty years, it is no longer zoned residential, so it isn’t worth near as much.”
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which tends to be BS as most commercial properties are now more expensive. Others go with the “Condemned” excuse. When they did the Cowboys stadium I recall they offered a bit over market, for a length of time, but warned holdouts after a certain date it was “We’ll just kick you out and give you the minimum appraisal amount.”
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I’ve also seen holdouts properties be remapped as floodplain, and actually seen an area be designated floodplain once, weeks before the federal government decided they needed to expand an airport. Which interestingly enough they didn’t have a problem with building in a floodplain.
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funny that,,, Wetlands and floodplains never seem to be an obstacle to those kinds of plans
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“While I agree there are instances for eminent domain to be used, it should be tightly regulated and seldom used.”
I was going to say I disagree and eminent domain should never be legal; but I will make an exception for certain military installations necessities. Otherwise, no I don’t think the government should have the right to take your property, regardless of what they want to do with it.
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“Seldom used” does always seem to lead to Kelo style “Were taking it to give to someone we think will pay us more in taxes” With what happened with the Kelo properties after confiscation, everyone involved, including the SCOTUS judges who voted for it, should be tarred, feathered, and ridden out on a rail, with most light up with a candle as well.
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Yup. Maybe for putting in dams and freeways. As a general rule, infrastructure yes, but anything that will actually directly generate revenue is a bad idea.
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“The needs of the state”… Hey, that’s only true if the state is us! I find it hard to believe that you can do whatever you want on your land in the US, either. Don’t you need authorizations to build houses, or to modify your apartments (so that the building doesn’t collapse)?
In Europe it gets a bit complicated, especially if you bring in communism. It’s not that the state perpetually interferes in how much and what you can own, but there was communism indeed, in some areas. And the state did indeed own everything, but that’s pretty much the definition of communism. It wasn’t a system based on prior beliefs, it was the new boss in town who bullied everyone to get its own way.
Between the two world wars, for example, people in Romania owned land, property, businesses, whatnot. The moment communism came, the comrades threw all great landowners, nobility etc. in jail, confiscated their fortune and distributed it. It wasn’t a change of policy, it was a hostile takeover. A hell of a lot of people rotted in jail or died in work camps. Suddenly you couldn’t own a business – or one too many cows, for that matter. It isn’t Europe, it was the socialism (nazism was part of that trend) and its messed up ideas about fixing the world.
Although in a way, you’re right: all property ultimately belongs to the state. You need approvals to build a house, or to do things in a certain way. Just because you own a plot of land in the middle of the city doesn’t mean you can start a factory on it (due to pollution etc.). It’s about making sure that the stupidity of some people doesn’t lead to a lot of evil happening to other people. It’s about not cutting down the forests just because you own them. It’s about not taking down the supporting pillars of your apartment, so the whole building goes down. It’s about waste being disposed of in a way that’s safe for your health. Otherwise? If I own a house, I can live in it, give it to someone else, sell it, rent it, whatever.
As for returning old confiscated lands and stuff, this is where it gets fun: the state confiscated a lot (including the king’s castle, which he built from his own damned money), then gave it to other people to use. Who maybe improved the house/destroyed it/let it fall apart. Maybe it sold the house to someone who bought it for a good price – and now the old owner’s sons or grandsons want it back. Who owns it? The original owners? The people who have been living there for forty years?
I think I could technically say my grandparents owned some land on which apartment blocks were built – what now? Do I demand those buildings be destroyed so I can have the garden my grandparents had when they moved here? This is the thing about land: it doesn’t hold still if you don’t own it anymore. This is the thing about tyrannies: they do things forcefully and against people’s wishes.
You can’t mistake a few dozen years of history for he whole of history.
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To address one small bit of your discussion, if you live outside the limits of a municipality in a county that does not have specific zoning, you can build whatever your heart desires as long as it is for your private use. Castle in Texas? Go for it. Straw-bale house? Feel free. Jam making plant, or meat-smoking facility? Those might be a little different, depending on size and how often you plan on perfuming the neighborhood with the scent of brisket. Even in town, you can tear down one kind of house and build a different one so long as the building meets safety requirements and the neighborhood is not otherwise restricted (not in a historical district, for example). Your neighbors might take you to court, but it’s not illegal. Once you get into zoning and usage laws, then it gets messy. Which is true anywhere on the planet where you have zoning.
Thanks for the information about Romania!
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Roxana, if you are interested in alternate theories on property rights you could go to The Freeman, or the Mises Institute, and put “property rights” or “homesteading” into the search bar, and you will find ideas to make your neighbors’ heads explode.
In the US each state has its particular laws about the rights you have over your land. In Oregon, there are specific land-use laws that allow the local authorities to set urban growth boundaries and specific use. The counties and the state government also gets involved with land use laws outside of urban boundaries. There are mechanisms to change zoning but lawyers are involved so the price is high, and you have people that would object to a free-money mine powered by unicorns, and they always get involved. There are certain reforestation laws, that if you clear your property or harvest timber you are required to replant in a specific period of time, and we are going through a series of arguments about who actually owns the rain that falls on your property and if you can build a pond to hold it.
Building codes depend on the state and locality. In Oregon I would need specific permission to build a bale house or an underground house or to put in a composting toilet. Everything has to be permitted and inspected, (and if it falls down or kills someone after the inspection it is still my fault) and there is a long tradition of stupid, lazy, petty and corrupt inspectors who either refuse to work, don’t know what they are doing, or expect a bribe to ok construction.
Now in Montana where two of my sisters live, I’m told you only have to have the electrical installations permitted and inspected because the power company doesn’t want you destroying their equipment when your house melts down.
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Such inspectors as you describe in Oregon have long been treated as a sinecure for politicians’ idiot nephews, brothers-in-law and the similar members of families of their political
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Plumbing and Electrical are Federal, most other codes and inspections are either state or county based (depending on state). Now some states and counties have additional plumbing and electrical requirements on top of the federal ones, but everywhere you are supposed to have plumbing and electrical inspections by nationally certified inspectors. Of course certain counties in Idaho and Montana (and I assume some other states) you are not required to get a building permit, so there are not so many flags that pop up informing the government that you likely need a visit from the plumbing and electrical inspectors. If you are hooking up to grid, most power companies do require proof of a new installation being up to code, I assume for their own liability reasons.
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When I was in college, one of the things we had to deal with in the course on International Laws was how Philippine inheritance laws outright clashed with American inheritance laws. I thought folks might find it interesting. (I’ll note as a disclaimer that my recollection is a bit dusty, so I may have some errors.)
In the Philippines, the death of say, the husband results in the wife getting half of the property, and the other half divided equally amongst the legitimate offspring. If the deceased had any illegitimate children, they cannot inherit unless they were acknowledged by the father as one of his, in which case by law the acknowledged illegitimate child has an inheritance that is valued at half of what a legitimate child is entitled to inherit.
If the deceased is a mother, the division is as follows: Her husband gets half, and her children, regardless of legitimacy, get an equal share. (I think. I know the rules were different for men and women, because of there being no doubt as to who gave birth to the children.)
If the deceased wishes to have a part of their legitime dispersed to other purposes (Say to a cat or a charity), a will must be written out and the total amount which is alloted to this is not allowed to be more than what a legitimate child may inherit. Individual items may also be granted out via the will and may likely be counted toward the total amount mentioned, unless the other legitimate inheritors choose otherwise (see below).
This is primarily to prevent the deceased from leaving their kin destitute out of spite or assigning all the wealth to a mistress.
It is possible for an inheritor to choose not to inherit – either in full, or partially, such as not wishing to inherit land because they’ve settled elsewhere – and a document must be signed for that to happen. It isn’t just the person choosing not to inherit, but also the other inheritors who must sign it as well (and, if the person passing the inheritance is still alive, that person too.) Similarly, such agreements may be worked out in the case of leaving, for example, Grandmama’s favorite Marian statue to the grandson who became a priest.
^^; and my brain fizzled because it’s late.
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That actually sounds pretty similar to what we have here in Finland. A married couple is supposed to own everything jointly as long as there were no prenuptial agreements so when one dies the other should get half of their joint assets. But that can become complicated if some of those assets came, from example, from a previous marriage by one of them because what a person gets from a deceased spouse is theirs only as long as they live, once they die that money or property should go back to the close blood relatives of the first dead spouse, especially if there were children from that first marriage they should get it then.
So (as far as I understand our system, I have been looking at this lately) lets assume a married couple with two children. The husband originally owned everything. He dies and then the wife gets half, the children one quarter each. The wife remarries, and there are no children from the second marriage. And then the wife dies. She hasn’t had any resources which could be considered hers only, so what she brought to the second marriage, and which had not been used by the time of her death (that she is completely free to do, there is no requirement that she shouldn’t spend everything while she still lives) should now go to her two children from the first marriage, her widower gets to keep only what he owned before getting married to her and independently earned during their marriage.
But let’s assume that in the first marriage both spouses brought resources to the marriage, and they both had separate incomes during it. Now we need to find out how much each owns individually. So lets assume the first husband could be proven to own three quarters of their assets, the wife one quarter. Then, still, what they owned is counted together, and the wife gets half, that one quarter which was her own, and one third of her husband’s assets as a – I’m not sure how the term for that should be translated, the word for word translation would be leveling portion or something like that.
And then she marries a second time.
All this means that who inherits or gets what can become very, very complicated. Especially since testaments (and those prenuptial agreements) can affect the results: for example children always inherit some, but with a testament that can be cut to half of what they’d get without one.
Okay, good points and bad points: when, in systems like ours, you have to leave some inheritance even to that slacker son you would have preferred to leave with nothing, you could say that at least one good point is the reverse cases, that, for example, when you get a real life evil stepmother or stepfather, one who manages to dominate a weaker willed remarried father or mother, the children from the first marriage can’t be left completely without inheritance (so the weak willed remarried parent who would _want_ to leave something to her children from the first marriage but in the American style systems can be browbeaten/sweet talked to leave everything to the new spouse and maybe his children, gets off easier…).
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There is a strange logic to that, but I prefer our system.
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Here in Colorado (in the U.S., inheritance law is almost all state law and varies), you can will property to whomever you wish, but a surviving spouse and minor children have the option under the law to claim a percentage of the estate – overriding the will. As you note, “legitimacy” is not legally relevant.
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You don’t even own the money in your wallet. If you are driving down the road and the police pull you over they can declare it looks like guilty money to them and just steal it. They can take the car too. Really nothing is stopping them from stripping the ring off your finger and your socks if they want them too.
You own what you can keep by force.
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You own what you can keep by force.
Which would mean that nobody owns anything as there is always a greater force than you.
Just laws are what make private property possible but even they aren’t enough. What is also required is knowledge of those laws and the willingness to stand up for them and use them. There is a great video on the web where some guy keeps a couple of cops out of his home who really wanted to get in. He didn’t use or threaten force but he did know the law and was willing to use it.
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“Which would mean that nobody owns anything as there is always a greater force than you.”
Might mean that. Force Majeure or Might Makes Right has a certain application. In the law so does self help.
Could mean that a statement of ownership is always relative. As between two parties one will have a greater right than the other but never an absolute right. Though some say ownership implies a right to use and abuse – define degree of abuse? Little right to raise noxious weeds and in Kansas prairie dogs are treated much as noxious weeds if somebody raises the issue.
There might be no right to log as being waste or there might be a right to log which if abused is made good by triple stumpage but there might not be a right to clear up to and beyond a boundary line with napalm while it’s OK to clear cut or hoe or harrow or rototill..
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I think ideas and the words that express them can trump force just about every time.
As per Heinrich Heine: Mark this well, you proud men of action: You are nothing but the unwitting agents of the men of thought who often, in quiet self-effacement, mark out most exactly all your doings in advance.
Don’t doubt that there are many who will refuse to push the magical button to kill an anonymous Chinaman and win a fortune.
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I vaguely remember a web comic (can’t remember *which* web comic) in which one character was offered that box and pushed the button before the explanation was finished. Then he asked if he’d get paid every time he hit the button. Then, while the person who gave him the button tried to explain that it was an ethical conundrum, the recipient went on a button-pressing frenzy.
It was very amusing:-)
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vaguely remember a web comic
You kind of got me thinking. Once upon a time, run-of-the-mill mainstream newspaper comics (Far Side, Bloom County, Calvin and Hobbes) actually had humor like that. I betcha the guy who cooked up that web comic would be a pretty wealthy household name if he was 20 years older.
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I mis-remembered, it wasn’t a web comic, it was a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJQ-LZYAMBQ
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LOL
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It may also have been a web comic — it sounds like the kind of joke Randall Munroe likes to employ.
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Okay, maybe Munroe and other web comic meisters don’t so much employ jokes as enslave them — opinions vary.
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“I think ideas and the words that express them can trump force just about every time.”
Not really, your idea might be great, but 240 grains of lead applied to your brainpan at velocity tends to stop ideas dead in their tracks; and sentences mid-word.
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“I think ideas and the words that express them can trump force just about every time.” . . .Not really, your idea might be great, but 240 grains of lead applied to your brainpan at velocity tends to stop ideas dead in their tracks; and sentences mid-word.
I’m a firm believer in the principle that guns don’t kill people do. Most things are done with a motive and even most accidental deaths/injuries could have been avoided with a little thinking.
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I always hated this video, because it exemplifies pompous idiots who think they’re better than everyone else and should have power over us all. “I’m the only one in this room professional enough to-” [BLAM].
Clearly some of the kids are better qualified to clear and holster a Glock 40 than this moron.
And he probably STILL tells all his neighbors that only the cops should own a gun.
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Dittos. I think that this guy has a badge bugs me exponentially more than that he has a gun.
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I’d be interested in asking him who has had more negligent discharges; him, or Tupac? And if Tupac had fewer, does that mean Tupac is more professional? [EVIL GRIN]
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“I’m a firm believer in the principle that guns don’t kill people do. Most things are done with a motive”
So am I. Often that motive to kill people (use force) is to shut someone up. Now it doesn’t always stop the message, but it can very effectively shut up the person delivering the message.
The ideas and words expressed in Tiannemen Square may eventually triumph, but you will have a difficult time convincing those slaughtered there that they trumped the soldiers weapons.
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The ideas and words expressed in Tiannemen Square may eventually triumph, but you will have a difficult time convincing those slaughtered there that they trumped the soldiers weapons.
The soldiers with the weapons were following somebody’s ideas too don’t forget.
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Philosophical question of the day: Does one own or rent one’s home when you have to pay the state $8G per year to keep it?
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And the answer to your question is self evident.
Just fail to pay that property tax bill and see what happens.
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When you drill down to it, the concept of “ownership” as opposed to “possession” can only exist in the framework of a government. Since there’s no such thing as a free lunch, government requires money to function. Since property only has value because of the concept of ownership created by government, it isn’t unreasonable for the government to claim a portion of that value to support the preservation of the remainder.
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it isn’t unreasonable for the government to claim a portion of that value to support the preservation of the remainder.
The reasonable part depends entirely on the portion claimed. What if the tax is such that the remainder is not preserved i.e. the resident feels compelled to leave since he cannot afford to pay the community’s taxes. Would such a person be an owner or renter?
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I had this discussion recently with a rather liberal friend of mine. “But if you don’t pay property tax, where would money for services come from?”
“Sales tax.”
“But what if someone buys all their stuff in another county? Then they get the benefits of the infrastructure without paying for it!”
“Dude, what’s your problem? From WHERE do you get this fear that [GASP] SOMEBODY might get a little out of the system without paying in? For most people, it’s not that big a savings. They won’t ALL run across the county line. It will even itself out, man. And it’s still better than charging RENT for property you OWN. And if it’s THAT big a problem, start ticketing people who neglect their property so much that they become fire hazards. That will cut down on services rendered while increasing revenues.”
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I can see fuel taxes (fee for use) when they go to roads (and not D.C. or Austin for the general fund), and some sales taxes. I’d also support shifting property taxes to fee-for-service for things like public schools, fire, water, sewer, drainage (where applicable). Use the sales taxes for a base minimum (i.e. rescues not necessitated by stupidity), with additional fees for service levels. So the fire department will check to make sure you’re not in a burning building, but if you are not a member of their service pool, too bad about the house. People in apartments or other rental properties would have their share of certain fees itemized on their rent, and the municipal ombudsman would do spot checks to make certain that the landlords were putting the $$ where it was supposed to go. Landlords could point out the amenities of fire protection, extra school funds, and the like.
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“… they get the benefits of the infrastructure without paying for it!”
What, you mean like the people collecting Welfare?
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Your friend’s complaint is common in the big cities, where they resent folks who live in the suburbs because they like walking the dog without having to carry a couple spare mags, letting their kids ride bikes, play in yards and attend schools which at least manage to teach reading, writing and ciphering to nearly half of grade level and where bars aren’t necessary on ground floor windows. They keep trying to impose extra taxes on those who commute in to work, or take advantage of some of the cultural opportunities offered in big cities, such as Lilith Fair.
This is part of what underlies Obama Administration policies designed to reduce “urban sprawl” and force people to live where city administrators want them. See Stanley Kurtz and Powerline, although I don’t think either has written on this recently.
For people who make such a big deal out of how generous they are, Libtards seem awful resentful of folks getting something for which they haven’t “paid.”
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One of the things about taxes is that when there is more than one stream it gets a lot easier to pluck the goose.
People who talk about the need for higher taxes for safe streets and good schools are almost invariably not interested in either but in making a buck for themselves in some way.
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At least when you’re dealing with Scrooge McDuck, you KNOW he’s out to get every last penny from you. With liberals, it’s not until you’re on welfare that you realize by “fair share” they mean “all the money.”
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At least when you’re dealing with Scrooge McDuck, you KNOW he’s out to get every last penny from you. With liberals, it’s not until you’re on welfare that you realize by “fair share” they mean “all the money.”
Yup. Libs are wannabee dukes and kings. And they want us to be peasants who bow before them carefully avoiding eye contact.
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For most jurisdictions it is actually a sales and use tax. Use is mostly self reported and so not reported. Buying abroad is easily covered by a tariff approximating the sales tax.
The underlying issue is soaking the rich or otherwise making the tax structure progressive. A vacation abroad will be untaxed locally and destinations may compete by offering lower taxes.
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I like this a LOT.
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If a revenuer gets shot in the woods and there was nobody tending the still, did it make a sound?
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Depends, the action will tend to make a noise no matter how efficient the silencer is, so you need to take that into consideration.
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The Three SH’s : Shoot, Shovel, and Shut up.
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This applies to county inspectors too, I believe. :D
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If a revenuer gets shot in the woods and there was nobody tending the still, did it make a sound?
Yes,
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More importantly, did the ‘shiner still turn a profit? ;)
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How about if you have to pay the state $1.00 per year? How about if the home cost you $25M to build and another $30M to furnish and decorate?
What services do you get from the state for your $8G per year? Should the state provide fire, police, road maintenenace and record-keeping services gratis, on a fee for use basis or purely on a basis of consumption/income taxes?
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How about if you have to pay the state $1.00 per year?
I can’t see how a $25 million home could end up at a sheriff sale for failure to pay $1 tax. So if the millage could not go beyond .00000004, I’d
agree that you own the home.
What services do you get from the state for your $8G per year? Should the state provide fire, police, road maintenenace and record-keeping services gratis, on a fee for use basis or purely on a basis of consumption/income taxes?
Around here 70- 80 percent of the property tax is used for public schools.
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So, if I correctly understand your response, you agree in principle and would merely haggle price?
Leg-pulling aside, the question as originally posed is unanswerable for lack of specificity of relevant variables. If you don’t like the property taxes imposed through a democratically elected representative body your choices include selling and moving, working to get more congenial representation to lower the taxes and pleading to the court that the tax is an unconscionable burden. Initiating arguments over whether you or the community “owns” your property is taking a joke too seriously.
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So, if I correctly understand your response, you agree in principle and would merely haggle price?
I don’t oppose taxes and I don’t object to the property tax in principle.
Leg-pulling aside, the question as originally posed is unanswerable for lack of specificity of relevant variables.
Putting not-unreasonable numbers into the equation can make the case that your taxes have become your rent.
Or to illustrate the issue at the opposite extreme of a .0000004 millage, what if a democratically elected board decides to tax you for the full value of your home annually? If you are outvoted can you keep them from having you for lunch?
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At that opposite extreme you postulate, bills of attainder being denied, such a rate would apply to the whole of the community and likely provoke a popular recall of the assessing board. Alternatively, such a rate would probably be overturned by any responsible court.
Your initial postulate fails to recognize that a community demands from their government a particular level of services and must supply the funds to support that, regardless of individual wishes (thus the democratic component of popular democracy.) Facile arguments over whether you own or rent your property fail to address that inconvenient truth.
Property taxes too high? Work to elect representatives who agree with you and will find ways to cut services or reduce costs. Whinging about not “owning your property” merely serves to alienate people whose support for lowered taxes might aid you. Your argument fails on the principle that you accept the premise of such taxes and are now haggling over price.
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At that opposite extreme you postulate, bills of attainder being denied, such a rate would apply to the whole of the community and likely provoke a popular recall of the assessing board. Alternatively, such a rate would probably be overturned by any responsible court.
“Probably” and “likely” are not certainly hencey they make my point, which is if the tax rate becomes high enough you arguably no longer own your property. The power to tax is the power to destroy.
Property taxes too high? Work to elect representatives who agree with you and will find ways to cut services or reduce costs.
The first step to do that is point out that the taxes have reached the point where you no longer own your home but rent it from the state.
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“Around here 70- 80 percent of the property tax is used for public schools.”
Which causes me to see red. I don’t have kids, why should I have to pay for your kids education, just because you vote and think I should? Even worse, what about those who do have kids and homeschool or pay to send them to a private school? Why should they STILL have to pay for public schools? In their case they are not only paying for something they aren’t using, they are paying twice, once for the education their kids are getting and again for that they are not getting.
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“Around here 70- 80 percent of the property tax is used for public schools.” . . . Which causes me to see red.
And one sees even redder when one realizes that one can’t change a curriculum that is basically propaganda about how bad you are for not worshiping government (and how much you need the government RES) and can’t fire incompetents and can’t even stop those incompetents from getting big raises and very, very sweet lifestyles.
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Because those kids will be in the electorate 15 years from now, and will be your doctor’s and nurses when you’re in the nursing home.
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Unlikely, for those attending public school :/
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yes, but we are paying for them to be indoctrinated leftoid, and that euthanasia is cool so letting the old pass quickly is a good thing.
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So you and Sarah have issues with what kids are being taught and wish to change it. Good thing you’re paying the piper.
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of the 70-80% most now goes to Admin, and Unions who vote against our best interests. Not as bad for me being small town Texas, (though mine are through rent, not direct) but all that money sure has done ‘great’ work in Chicago, Detriot, Cali, etc. but if we are to protest it by not paying to have garbage taught to the kids, the gov’t will gladly come and evict us. So not only are we paying the piper, but we are paying him to steal our kids, not rid us of rats.
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You don’t protest by withholding money, you protest by voting for a new school board.
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At which point they school board tries to get a less anti-American curriculum and merit based pay, the teachers organize sick out and convince their charges that “It would be a good idea to hold a protest and show the world you can’t be forced to learn Bad Thought!”, it gets picked up by the national news and pretty soon everybody is wondering about the whack-job conservatives they have running your district. To which I like to reply “Elections have Consequences.” I’m kind of hoping the JeffCo school board breaks the union. Apparently NEA was sending in people from out of state to muckrake.
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Not apparent — fact. I forget where I read it, Washington Free Beacon or PJ Tatler, I guess, but the “mastermind” of the Colorado Walkout was sent from the national union.
This is part of the NEA playbook. They have long practiced contract negotiations by sending in representatives of the national union to
hornswogglebrowbeatnegotiate with the local school board while letting the local union play the “we’re trying to be reasonable” game for the public. The NEA negotiators do these contracts 52 weeks a year while the local board does it once every three years, and does it as a part-time job, in most cases.Which is why Sccott Walker’s end run of the unions has generated so much panic.
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If you cannot influence policy politically, what makes you think you could influence it financially? The vast bulk of people will simply think “I like schools, so I’ll pay.” Meanwhile, the lefties will blame all of their failures on those evil conservatives withholding vital funding.
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right … and how has that been working for the USA as a whole? Like I said, it isn’t quite as bad here for me, but I still find some of the stupidest ideas being foisted upon the kids by what is here, then one sees what is going on elsewhere and egad, the smart folk are forced to do stupid things (have teachers in the family) just to try to do their jobs (and keep them) and even in conservative areas they have an uphill battle to get even functional kids.
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I TRIED to change it, then gave up (teacher’s colleges) and did homeschooling beyond/beside the public schooling.
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I TRIED to change it, then gave up (teacher’s colleges) and did homeschooling beyond/beside the public schooling.
Thank you for that. The system is rigged and the sooner this is realized the hand-waving about “it doesn’t matter what they do because school boards are elected” can end. It should be noted that school board elections around here are in off-years and rarely reach 20 percent turnout.
This sort of thing is why I’m a Republican and not a Democrat. Most voters have no idea as to what, how and why affects them, and why life for them is getting suckier.
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Good thing you’re paying the piper.
Whether you want to or not.
The best solution is to treat teachers like doctors and lawyers and be able to replace them if you should find their service to be unsatisfactory. If the state gives you the money to choose what teacher to hire for your child it is still public education and you would actually be “paying the piper”.
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They require teachers to have teaching degrees. Teaching degrees are factories of leftoid indoctrination. we can change the school board all we want to. We’re not changing the blackboard.
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Teaching degrees are factories of leftoid indoctrination. we can change the school board all we want to. We’re not changing the blackboard.
Yup!
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and even if your kids keep their brains and become good teachers, they have horrendous restrictions and are forced to do idiotic things. I know one teacher who refused to go to public schools so she could avoid being forced to join the union. Luckily she lives in the New Orleans area and even rather poor black people fight to send their kids to private schools (When I lived there, biggest majority black school in N.O. was a private religious school). Another teacher I know has had union bosses admit they will do things to stay in power as opposed to actually take care of the teachers or the kids. In my opinion, Public School teachers are gov’t workers, and no gov’t worker should be allowed to be in a union let alone forced to be.
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Which is why the unions are so against the idea of Charter Schools or vouchers. They really hate the idea of competition. It would mean they might have to work for a living. (Don’t ever tell my wife I said that.)
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Because those kids will be in the electorate 15 years from now, and will be your doctor’s and nurses when you’re in the nursing home.
And will not think twice about sending you to the death panel when it becomes inconvenient to them to keep you in the nursing home.
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“Because those kids will be in the electorate 15 years from now, and will be your doctor’s and nurses when you’re in the nursing home.
Yep. a) I will be paying them to doctor and nurse me, if I need it, I fail to see why I should be forced to pay for something unless I use it. b) I DON’T WANT those who will be in the electorate 15 years from now to have been taught/indoctrinated in a public school. c) your kid is either your responsibility or his own responsibility (depending on his age and what age you figure kids become responsible for themselves), not mine. Claiming he is my or societies responsibility is how we ended up with all the entitlements we have today.
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Things aren’t actually all that simple, in the US, either.
Our early history is full of perfectly legal land grants, issued by legitimate governments, nullified in favor of the squatters who had actually settled on the land,
Most states still have adverse possession laws.
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No, they aren’t nearly as simple in real life as I sketched, and things have changed a great deal since I was growing up to today. Regulations have replaced laws to the point where your name may be on the papers but regulations determine actual usage and possession of the property.
Both the English and Spanish legal systems recognized preemption/adverse possession, which I found fascinating. The Spanish tradition apparently dates to part of the Reconquesta, and the assumption that if you wrested the land back from the Moors, you had a right to it, even if the state (the king’s armies) had not caught up with you, provided you improved the land and actually lived on it.
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Just so! There are a number of “laches” that account for this–the legal justification being that if you can’t keep good enough track of your property to know if someone’s living on it or not, you’re obviously not behaving like you’re responsible for it.
As regards your estranged husband… if I’m recalling my Wills class correctly (and this will also vary from state to state), a spouse can trump the will and insist on some amount that’s considered a spousal share, if he/she chooses. (This one goes back: I forget which guy, but it was one of the Early Ones, had willed to his wife *more* than her spousal share–on the condition that she not remarry. She did remarry, and took the elective share.)
(This was mentioned right before the guy who apparently offered the greater-than-elective share on the condition that his wife *does* remarry–because he wanted at least one man to reget his death. :-P)
I also remember a bit about how you want to explicitly name the folks you intend to disinherit, so that they can’t argue to the court that they were merely forgotten. “To [Jackass Son], I sincerely wish you to have a good life,” or whatever. Which means that there’s lots of grounds for arguing even a clear and legal will.
But–well, that’s why lawyers, I guess.
Lots of stuff like that! It’s complicated, and I’ve got a five-year-old memory of Associates-degree courses. But it was fun to learn.
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That reminded me of one peculiarity we have here in Finland and neighboring Scandinavian countries: Everyman’s Rights.
Meaning a property owner can’t forbid people from walking or doing some other things on the land he owns, except for fields under cultivation and yards, and residences have a protected zone around them which does extend some distance from the actual yard (which in practice means that Everyman’s Rights exist only in the countryside, not in towns or cities). Everybody who feels like it can go for a walk in any forest, can pick berries and other such produce, like mushrooms, can pick flowers and herbs (as long as they are not a protected species, and you should not destroy the whole patch even if they are not, except when we are talking about invasive species).
Anybody and everybody can even camp on your land, as long as they don’t stay more than a night or two and don’t start fires, for a fire they’d need the owner’s permission. And they should clean after themselves.
Fishing with a rod and a line is also allowed. As is cycling, skiing and skating. As far as I remember also horseback riding. You can take your dogs too, as long as you keep them in a leash (I think there are still some times during a year when you could also let them run free, at least deeper in forest, provided they are well enough trained to obey you under all circumstances). Swimming and boating, as well as even washing are allowed (personal hygiene variety of washing, washing all your clothes or rag rugs gets over the line because then you’d need to use a lot more soap and that might cause damage to the lake or pond or river… and you should also not wash yourself in the one good spring in the area :) )
Basically people can do pretty much anything they want in a forest or on a waterway somebody else owns as long as they do not cause any damage (picking those berries or herbs does not count because they are a renewable resource – on the other hand cutting down a tree, even a small one, would be a definite no-no) or disturbances (so from the camper’s point of view: putting up a temporary camp far enough from a residence that they can’t see or hear you is always okay, but putting it close enough that they can see you, then they can tell you to leave, even people who do not own that particular patch of land you are on. And playing a boombox in your camp during the night is not advisable unless you are several kilometers from everybody).
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Believe it or not, it simplifies things. If you’re using it long enough, openly, and they don’t object….
Like a common law marriage.
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There are common law right-of-way laws in the UK and the US – if a path that runs through your property has always been used, you’re not supposed to fence it off.
My old apartment building had steps out of the parking lot up to the neighboring shopping center, and when they closed the shopping center and rebuilt with new commercial properties, they weren’t allowed to fence off our steps. My current neighborhood also has a public right of way path through an easement and a vacant lot up to a shopping center.
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We had a lumber company gate our road one time and not give us the key or any notice. My dad cut their lock off with an acetylene torch. The company supervisor was surprised when my dad slammed the still-smoldering lock on his desk and said, “Next time you close off my f*ing road, I’ll cut the GATE to pieces and dump it on your doorstep!”
Yup. Easements are KIND OF a big deal.
Why YES, I AM from a very interesting place, why do you ask? ;)
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My dad had a friend who cut a lumber company gate into stovewood sized pieces and stacked it up alongside the road for that reason. ;)
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This gives me a few ideas for a couple of stories I’m writing, and a few quandaries (In story so all good) for Kings and various nobles with different systems of managing the land than some of the historical ones. (What does the King actually own and how can he redistribute it?) I think I just figured out how to liven up some rather predictable politics.
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Does the king (or his family) own the property as a personal possession, or is it part of the larger kingdom? For example, the Habsburgs owned some property outright, acted as kings of other areas that functioned under their own laws and customs (Bohemia and Hungary), and had administrative rights but not actual ownership of other places. That’s one reason why the titles of the latter Holy Roman Emperors included Duke of [place], Archduke of [place] King of Bohemia, King of Hungary, prince of [place] and so on.
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for a while we had a chemist working for us who grew up in China. He was asking me one day “If I buy a house, who owns the land?”
The concept of owning the house worked for him, the land ownership was boggling his mind, then I explained that the laws now made it too easy for the gov’t to come along and take your land in too many ways (the new Cowboys Stadium was in its annexing land stage and Kelo was still being hammered on talk radio so we had fodder aplenty for discussion) but even then, they had to pay you something.
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I was going to say after Kelo v City of New London and given what happens with Civil Forfeiture, you don’t really own anything anymore unless the gubmint SAYS you own it, at least for today.
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that was the direction we ended up discussing.
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And for those who haven’t heard, the property seized in Kelo has never been used for anything.
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Some places in LA, the land itself and the mineral rights are owned by somebody else than the one who owns the building. The building owners lease the land. ObSF example: Larry Niven and his famous little chat with the convention hotel sitting on his land.
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Do tell! I haven’t heard that story.
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It’s a true story, but I can’t find the actual convention name and year at the moment – late Sixties or early Seventies. It comes up in several fannish memoirs of the time. (Unsurprisingly.)
Anyway, once upon a time the LA fans had a con and hung out at the hotel bar, as fans are wont to do. The hotel refused to let many of the female fans come to the bar and was even harassing them for their presence in the hotel, saying that they were probably hookers. (Possibly some of these fans were scantily dressed, but the way I’ve heard the story, many of them were fully clad and frumpy. So it was not the clothes that were the problem.) The convention committee was freaking out. Everybody was surprised when Larry Niven said he could straighten things out. He was mild-mannered. What did he think he could do? But he seemed so sure….
So the committee and Niven went along to the hotel manager’s office to argue about what was in the contract and why convention members with room reservations were being harassed. The manager was unrepentant.
Little had the other fans known it, but Niven’s family had money and bought land all over the place, including in LA, some of which he owns. Mr. Niven removed the mask, and allowed as how he could revoke the hotel’s lease on the land it stood on, and would be happy to tell the hotel’s owners why he was doing it. Suddenly the manager became agreeable, and the convention ladies stopped being harassed.
So basically, that’s how Mr. Niven saved a convention. He doesn’t like to talk about it, but you can ask him about it if you’re curious and have no shame, like me. :)
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Right. IIRC, one of the pharma companies had a facility in New London, and wanted someplace to put up someplace nice for visitors to stay, so they (or a hotel chain) were seizing the land to do so. Then said pharma company merged with another, and the facility was either closed, or seriously declined in importance.
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cf. John Ringo’s The Last Centurion and discussions of Public Trust. A government which egregiously abuses its power tends to delegitimize itself.
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Hawaii has some interesting and useful teaching opportunities for “who owns the land”. Colorado more people should be asking who owns the water rights.
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Sis and Bro-in-law own a cabin in Pagosa Springs and he had a big gripe about sorting out the water rights
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Colorado water rights are simple: Water flows toward Money.
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The state government owns all of the water in California.
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Surface water perhaps, but home real estate deeds in this part of The Valley of Melted Silicon include “…except for the water rights, which were sold by (the subdivision developer) to (the local water company) as recorded on page (whatever) of the (big county book of recording stuff) on (somesuch date, 1960-ish).”
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If I end up going to law school (if I do it’ll be paid for up front; I’m NOT taking out a loan for it), I’ve thought about going into property law. It’s better quality of people, I suspect, than working in prosecution, which would be my second choice.
Although I DO like the idea of putting bad people in a government-mandated timeout (ACTUALLY bad people, not decent people contravening law without intent). :D
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“Although I DO like the idea of putting bad people in a government-mandated timeout (ACTUALLY bad people, not decent people contravening law without intent). :D”
That’s an attractive idea – let us define ACTUALLY bad people? Or is it the famous I know it when I see it standard?
I used to know a decent guy, successful prosecutor, who was eager to punish sinners. Not so worried about the law and precedents. Oddly my own experience bears out the observation that hard cases lead to bad laws. In one of his prosecutions I agreed the scoundrel deserved a good thrashing but I thought the rule of the case abhorrent. There’s a quote everybody knows from A Man for All Seasons but a perhaps more apt one yet is:
from the mouth of Cromwell.
My own observation is that the best prosecutor I ever dealt with was more concerned with educating enforcement and tempering justice than with throwing bad men to the prison rapists.
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That truly IS the problem; how to define evil. I won’t even attempt it, because A) too much work, B) I’m surrounded in here by people far more experienced at it than I am, and much more articulate, and C) I’m far more pragmatist than philosopher. I’ll content myself with observing that one of the officers that trained me in the police academy and on field training were very likely to use discretion when bad situations were unlikely, and far more likely to throw the book at someone they perceived as being a problem child to the people around them. This seemed prudent and far less labor intensive in the long run than having a passionless law that treated everyone identically, but is an ideal, assuming both wisdom and integrity on the part of the cops, which is a very big assumption. Bad cops throw the book at people indiscriminately to intimidate the rest of the neighborhood into not being a bother, a very shortsighted approach.
Finally, I think any discussion regarding the law without a discussion on civic duty is very foolish, as we can see from the war on poverty. The liberals have trained four generations of people to fear anyone who teaches about morality, to teach their kids that they’re an abhorrent mistake of nature, and to place total responsibility for their well-being on either the government or on people of another skin color, whom they’re also supposed to hate, incidentally, and then they sit back and act surprised when the dependent class riots in the streets and act like animals. They’re either stupid or duplicitous. My money is on the latter in the case of leftist leadership, the former in the case of middle class followers. In the case of the dependent class, it’s most likely self interest.
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Glenn Reynold’s assorted writings on Ham Sandwich Nation especially the extended piece Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything Is a Crime Columbia Law Review and especially comments all over the place say some useful things about prosecutorial discretion with Sturgeon’s Law applicable to the comments as everywhere.
Fred Reed has written well on the nature of police and the dilemma of policing.
Supra not Reed
I suppose. But then again sometimes good cops do too. Often enough intimidating is enforcing community standards for a definition of community as living in “the rest of the neighborhood.”
Reed
Civil rights lawyers mostly didn’t live in that neighborhood.
Colonel Kratman among others has some useful words on the general subject of war on nouns “How do we easily keep a straight face when someone pretends to be waging war on a technique?”
I’d say that a large part of the issue is what happens when short term becomes shortsighted with no switch to a longer term technique. James Q. Wilson has a pretty good history of being research based. Broken Window policing was a good idea in 1982 and an example of insanity when continued until “Eric Garner, a Staten Island man, died of a chokehold last month [July 2014] while being taken into custody for illegally selling [loose] cigarettes.” I used to know a welfare case worker in the Chicago/Cook County System who was the last link in a chain selling cigarettes brought in from the low tax tobacco states – maybe the best she could do for her clients was cheaper cigarettes for all I know.
There’s a pretty good case that communities where police kill citizens illegitimately are the same communities where citizens kill police illegitimately with causation flowing both ways.
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IIRC in England there were “property” that belonged to the “title” not the present holder of the title. Thus a noble could be cash-poor and have valuable jewels (for example) that he could not sell because they had to be passed down to his heir.
For that matter, Nobility often could not “chose” who their heirs were. Their heirs were mandated by laws that they couldn’t over-ride.
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You’re thinking of the laws of entail, where the property and title must pass through the male line, even if it is collateral (_Pride and Prejudice_, _Downton Abbey_). It was a way to keep property intact as a block and so preserve the wealth of the title. Primogeniture developed for the same reason, which probably worked out very well for the English in the loooong run, because it led to more social mobility. Not great if you are the third son and your brothers are healthy and don’t have dangerous hobbies.
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“Hey, older brother, have you thought about taking up Bullfighting? Or skydiving? Or daredevilling? I hear chicks dig scars!”
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Ah, the hunting accident.
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Every family with its own has that.
I am current possessor of a fair number of items that belonged to my family that I can dispose of as I wish, so long as it remains within the family. E.g., there’s a crib that my gggrandfather made that always goes to the most recent new mother.
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How could that crib possibly meet all of the safety regulations our betters in government impose to prevent children from bursting into flames, speaking in tounges, or thinking for themselves?
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FAMILY TRADITIONS ENCOURAGE THOUGHTCRIME!
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Family tradition…
I actually got into a comment discussion recently, in which I asserted that the People’s Republic of California forcing kids to go to a mandated class about “gays and lesbians throughout history” differed only by degrees from the late 19th/early 20th century when “benevolent” governments forcibly removed children from Indian Reservations and adopted them into White households in order to “civilize” them. I flat-out told a guy that this is what liberals were trying to do to Christians. I said to him, “Hey, let’s make it legitimate. I have Cherokee and Apache ancestors. Just take my kids from me, give them new names, don’t let them speak their native tongue, beat them if they don’t learn Leftese, and tell them that I and all their progenitors are simply savages who believe in a mythical sky daddy, but they get to be ‘liberated’ and learn a new political belief system because they are an accident of nature, members of a subhuman race, and how they’re a scourge on the planet, and how they should have no sexual self-discipline. And when they ask why this justifies you overriding the wishes of their parents, you can tell them it’s just because YOU’RE ONLY CIVILIZING THEM.'”
Needless to say, the only response in the room was crickets. [EVIL GRIN]
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Why do so many liberals despise Christianity?
Liberals increasingly want to enforce a comprehensive, uniformly secular vision of the human good. And they see alternative visions of the good as increasingly intolerable.
http://theweek.com/article/index/269462/why-do-so-many-liberals-despise-christianity
Damon Linker, The Week
Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a consulting editor at the University of Pennsylvania Press, a contributing editor at The New Republic, and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.
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Where’s that like button???!
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I can’t help it; the older I get, the more I become a quiet, reserved, soft-spoken, polite little fuzz ball.
And I can even say so with a straight face. ;)
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Depending on how much time and energy one wanted to put into it, you could even go into getting them to set standards for what kind of behavior is unacceptable and use it to prove they are both supporting the Indian reeducation, should support civilizing the middle east, want to take all the kids who are in the ghetto away… and are probably over-reaching to aim for traditional Christian kids.
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Perhaps you should be called the Trapdoor Spider instead of the moniker you’ve chosen? I’d love to see this happen! [EVIL GRIN]
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Ummm … Who owns First, What owns Second, I Don’t Know owns Third …
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You don’t ‘own’ your iTunes music library, you lease it from Apple. Can you give your iTunes library to your descendants? If you burn your tunes to cd and give those CDs to your heirs have you violated copyright laws?
Is the same true with Amazon’s eBooks?
iTunes songs, protected songs, and protect books with Digital Rights Management only work/play on ‘authorized’ computers.
If you ‘trademark’ a name, no one else can use that word without your approval. If you try to use a name that is ‘owned’ by someone else, you will be visited by an army of lawyers.
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I don’t lease/rent my iTunes collection. They’re ripped from CDs that I own and still possess. (There’s likely to be a lot of “you take that one … no, *you* take it…” when I pass on.)
Meanwhile, the rules have recently changed regarding ownership of iTunes content, so even purchased content isn’t restricted to a single owner.
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Medieval Irish property law was interesting. Personal property was generally yours. If you got sued for criminal activity (technically, that was the whole of criminal law) or had to give security, pretty much all your stuff could be “distrained,” but not the basic stuff you needed to live and pursue your trade. Women could always keep their comb, mirror, needle, and sewing bag, IIRC. Men had a standard list, too. Then there were differences by trade: Harpers could keep their harpkey for tuning their harp. Filidh poets could keep their horse, because it’s not ritually right for a poet to walk when he travels.
Anyway, you could own your house, but the usual early medieval situation was to have a walled/fenced settlement and farmland/pastureland outside that you went to work. The clan owned all the land (unless a monastery, convent, etc. had a piece somewhere), which was supposed to be divided into pieces which seemed about equal value. The land pieces were distributed every year by lottery. Of course, the main food and money source was cattle, so you wanted good farmland and good cattle land. You could own cattle, or you could sharecrop cattle for other people, or both. Owning sufficient cattle or having the right trade made you free; doing nothing but sharecattling made you unfree/a serf/a slave. (It’s not clear how this all played out in real life, but there does seem to have been some social mobility along these lines.) The rules for raiding cattle from other clans were interesting (and often meant the raiding was temporary) but stealing from your own clan’s people was a big no-no.
Once the clan stopped owning everything, you got English tenant farming. Once that started to go away, the Irish generally divvied up the land equally among sons, which meant that a lot of people owned a postage stamp field full of rocks. In practice, a lot of people would go off to the city or the US, and let a member of the family farm their land for them.
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English Common Law was a fascinating mixture of Roman, Celtish and Scandanavian legal concepts that slowly evolved the foundations of our legal and political culture in the U.S.
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I’m sorry Mrs. Hoyt, if the (any) state can tax your possession(s), they’re not really yours.
Try not paying the tax on something. You’ll find that the relevant jurisdiction will take some or all of your property/liberty/life all while solemnly pontificating about ‘our shared responsibilities’ and invoking The Last Refuge Of The Scoundrel a/k/a The Law.
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A) This post is not mine but Alma Boykin’s. B) That is highly debatable.
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I realized my mistake afterwards. My first comment here, and I step in it. Jeez.
As for B), no it’s not debatable at all. They’ll first up the ante (penalties and interest), if you continue to refuse, you’ll be hauled into court. If your refusal continues, the men with guns will show up. No debate, none at all, sorry.
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Peter, I apologize for not adding my usual opening disclaimer that my posts are generalizations intended to spur thought and discussion, rather than hard-and-fast statements. I was speaking in general terms of 1) the system I learned growing up and 2) the difference between the Anglosphere traditions (even honored in the breach as they are today) and other systems. As I wrote above, the Common Law and constitutional law tradition was that you, as an individual, had a right to property, and (like the Brehon Laws Suburbanbanshee described) that property belonged to you, not your tribe or clan, nor did you enjoy the use on sufferance from the state.
By legislative law, in many states in the US, there are limits to what various levels of government can claim. Regulations change that. I believe I mentioned the creep of more European practices into the Common Law/ constitutional law system, including the taxation problem. (And I consider certain limitations on use of one’s property to be a form of tax and taking, and often taxes and takings of questionable legal standing). I am not a lawyer or legal historian per se, so I may have been less than clear, especially since I removed the opening note when I sent the post to Sarah because of length concerns.
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The need to apologize is entirely mine: I didn’t take the second or two necessary to check the author before I clicked Post Comment.
And as I mentioned to my reply to Our Gracious Hostess, that the eventual use of force to ensure compliance is hidden behind various nonviolent procedures doesn’t change the eventuality of that force.
Seriously, withhold your property taxes. You can claim any number of good reasons to not pay up (such as government inefficiency and waste) but at the end of the day armed men will be at your door to remove you from your property. Men who will not hesitate to kill you if you resist.
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I made that point about the men with guns in a law class I had. The professor was very, VERY liberal. He was NOT amused when someone said, “Not all law is enforceable by the cops.” And I retorted, “Any law not enforceable at the point of bayonets is NO LAW AT ALL.” The class all turned pale as they thought of the implications of this and realized it was exactly correct. :D
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You might want to look into some of the writings of Philip K. Howard & Stephen L. Carter, two liberals (in the old-fashioned, non-totalitarian sense) and lawyers (Carter is a professor at Yale Law School.)
I forget which one, as I took to reading both of them about the same period in the first Clinton Administration, made that very point you do: all laws ultimately must carry the death penalty. Jaywalking, if the perp resists arrest and uses force in that resistance, for example. Therefore you should advocate no law that you are unwilling to sentence a man to death for violating.
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There’s a movie playing uptown, “My Old Lady,” staring Maggie Smith, that centers around a truly goofy property ownership law in France. IMDB will have the details, I think.
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OT, but Sarah, have you considered making Friday posts a simple link to your PJ Media book plug post? It would not necessarily eliminate the Saturday plugs and would open the text of the post —
Lawrence Block is also, BTW, experimenting with alternative modes of TV adaptation of his novels, IIRC, Amazon streaming, working with a production company that grants him far more say in such elements as casting … there was a WSJ article about it some time back
— for discussion in this forum.
That would enable you to deploy Alma’s excellent post on yet another day, reducing the demands of blogging and allowing more time/energy/creativity for Through Fire and other such works.
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I have considered it, RES. One thing that has become evident is that I DO need to cut down on the wordage in non-fic if I’m going to write fic, where, after all, my bread and butter is. it’s not that it tires me, but htey’re very different… parts of the brain and one inhibits the other.
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Just model your blog posts on the news media. Sod knows there’s precious little non-fiction in that.
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More officially open threads? Recipe days? More shopping lists?
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Dropped to restart the indentation.
“We’re not changing the blackboard”
Local school boards have next to no power to affect curriculum, which is why Common Core is becoming such a dog fight. State school boards don’t have much more ability to set curriculum, as the details of that are mostly worked out in the bowels of the state Dept. of Edumacation (and we all know what is excreted from the bowels.)
The system is established to render assignment of responsibility impossible, leaving us not knowing whom to shoot.
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Another look at the problem of education …
Hacker: Education in this country is a disaster. We’re supposed to be preparing children for a working life. Three quarters of the time they’re bored stiff!
Sir Humphrey: Well I should have thought that being bored stiff for three quarters of the time was an excellent preparation for working life.
From a different portion of the episode:
[discussing Hacker’s proposal to allow parents to choose their children’s school]
Sir Humphrey Appleby: In any case, we’re not talking about health; we’re talking about education. And, with respect, Prime Minister, I think that the DES will react with some caution to your rather novel proposal.
James Hacker: You mean they’ll block it.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: I mean they will give it the most serious and urgent consideration, and insist on a thorough and rigorous examination of all the proposals, allied to a detailed feasibility study and budget analysis before producing a consultative document for consideration by all interested bodies and seeking comments and recommendations to be included in a brief for a series of working parties who will produce individual studies which will provide the background for a more wide-ranging document considering whether or not the proposal should be taken forward to the next stage.
James Hacker: You mean they’ll block it.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Yeah.
Whole episode available:
wwwDOTveohDOTcom/watch/v22901234xA9xT6WY?h1=Yes+Prime+Minister+2.7+-+The+National+Education+Service
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