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Originally Posted by JJRousseau
Oh dear, the topic drift... Well let's see what I disagree with.
Infrastructure allowing me to make more money. No, infrastructure creates the jobs. Hard work, or blind luck gave me the job with the higher income.
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If there was no roads, no electricty, no clean water, no heating oil, no gas, no police, no justice, no maps, no money, no laws -- you wouldn't have your job.
Your earning potential would be barely-above-starvation (well, actually, below starvation, given our population density), most likely.
Instead, thanks to the infrastructure that taxes pay for and maintain, you have a job that earns X$ per year. I have a job that earns me Y$ per year. Without social infrastructure, we'd both be earning 0$ per year.
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Ownership as fiction. A society can chose to work around the concept of ownership but to the society that enshrines it in it's principles and laws, it is certainly not fiction.
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It is a nearly essential fiction, but it is a fiction. The society determines what the principles and laws and rules of ownership are.
The most direct benefit one recieves from such principles and laws is purportional to how much stuff those laws grant you.
The cost to maintain those laws and principles should, thus, be levied in purportion to the benefit granted by those laws and principles.
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At the basic level, individuals must trade and barter services and goods to survive.
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That is one model of good allocation that has proven effective. However, in many smaller societies, the boss-chief has ownership rights over everything in the domain. In other societies, you "own" exactly what you can defend, and if you cannot defend it someone else "own"s it.
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If I build the farmer's fence and he gives me fruit in return, society will fall apart if it doesn't protect my right to keep and use that fruit. Even true communism must recognize a limited form of individualism - including if not ownership at least the right to exercise control over some personal assets.
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I'm not saying that ownership isn't damn useful. I'm saying that ownership is defined and enforced by society -- having more assets allocated to you by society is a
huge and massive benefit to society that the "rich" recieve that the "poor" do not.
I'm not saying that this is a bad idea to allocate resources like this -- I'm just saying that the cost of enforcing property rights and maintaining a society which respects property rights should fall on those with property, not uniformly on the population.
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Property taxes. Your argument falls flat because my house in my town receives the same value from the Municipal govt as my neighbour's more expensive house.
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It does not! When the city makes itself a better place to work, both you and your neighbours house tend to go up in value at about the same rate, percentage wise.
The more valueable house
gains more value from the improved state of the city than the less valueable house.
Now, the city doesn't have to get uniformly better -- sometimes lower value housing gains in value at a faster rate than higher value housing, or vice versa.
Also note that many municipalites have multiple tax rates -- a fee for water/sewer service, a fee for garbage, a fee for mail, a fee for street clearing, a tax rate for education (and in many cases, this goes to the local school), and tax rates for things like city infrastructure.
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Further if the whole town's property values increase, the taxes should stay the same because the mill rate will drop.
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*nod*, that is how it works in some places.
Right back at ya!!!
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