Category Archives: Private Property

UPDATE II: The Evergreen State’s Profligate Oink Sector

Constitution, Crime, Debt, Democracy, Government, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Private Property, Taxation, The State

“The Evergreen State’s Profligate Oink Sector” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“By now, Americans with a modicum of cerebral alacrity have a sense of the attitude among Washington State Democrats toward the immutable right of the people to keep their earnings. You all witnessed the despicable Jim McDermott’s intimidating verbal assaults, leveled at conservative property owners, during the House committee hearing on the den of iniquity and vice that is the Internal Revenue Service. For what is the seeking of ‘tax-exempt status’ if not a plea, directed at our overlords who art in D.C., to keep more of what is rightfully ours?

What Edmund Burke said about the House of Commons in his day applies in spades to a House packed with the likes of Rep. Jim McDermott D-Wash. ‘Designed as a control for the people,’ the House has become a control ‘upon the people.’

And the trend extends to local governments, gone from which are the old-fashioned county governors, once devoted to low taxes and careful spending.

Here goes.

While trying to be neighborly, I made the mistake of being less than reverential about my property taxes in ‘The Evergreen State,’ and in particular, the 51.4 percent appropriated for ‘State and Local Schools.’

I was informed in high decibels that my husband and I, hardworking both, ought to thank our lucky stars for this valuable index—thousands paid per year toward ‘State and Local Schools’—for without it we’d be clueless about … the value of our home. (If anything, taxes distort market prices. But more about the curious fallacy of the benevolent property tax, as a price signal in the housing market, in a follow-up column.)

Yes, siree. The bad tempered diatribe then swerved to the plight of local law enforcement, who, my interlocutor alleged, were powerless to police a squatter camp in the North Bend vicinity, for lack of resources. Some believe that twice did a man from this homeless encampment invade a homestead in the community.

We fork over thousands in property taxes per annum, yet, as was being asserted, the police were without the necessary funds to fulfill the State’s only constitutional duty: protecting the people. Naturally, where the State fails to carry out its sacred duty, as is almost always the case, The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution instantiates the individual’s natural right to do exactly what the heroic homeowners did to safeguard life and property: hastened the intruder’s descent into hell.

Commensurate with the value this Washington-State locality places on limited authority and republican virtues—none at all—law enforcement is not even itemized in the property-tax bill issued.

The truth is that the lion’s share of our property taxes goes toward …

Read the complete column. “The Evergreen State’s Profligate Oink Sector” is now on WND.

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UPDATE I: The “wasteful monstrosity” discussed above was celebrated by the local newspaper’s intrepid reporters. It too is local in name only—for most “local newspapers” are corporately owned. In our case, the pabulum published weekly is by permission of The Seattle Times Co. When our local rag is not reporting on a theatre that will close, a cinema that is hiring, or a pizza place that’ll host “Raise the Dough for Seattle Children’s”—the newspaper simply parrots the partyline on everything. I know, because I line my parrot’s cage with its pages.

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UPDATE II (7/24): For more of an idea of the all-pervasive profligacy of the oink sector in my state, check out the “Seattle Parasite-To-Resident Ratio.”

Demolish The Den Of Iniquity And Vice

Natural Law, Neoconservatism, Private Property, Republicans, Taxation, The State

After recounting the “scale of depravity [in the IRS] hitherto unknown to the tax authorities of the United States,” neoconservative Mark Steyn concludes predictably and in error, that the IRS “should be disarmed and disbanded — and rebuilt from scratch with far more circumscribed powers.”

Suppose that disbanding and rebuilding this den of iniquity and vice, the Internal Revenue Service, were the solution here—which it most certainly is not—how does Steyn propose to get it right this time around? We live in an age unparalleled for moral relativism, plain immorality, lack of religiosity, debauchery, corruption and general decadence—all parading as normalcy. One thing we know for sure: As bad as they might have been, IRS bureaucrats at the agency’s inception would have been more virtuous than the degenerates that run it now and in the future.

Jack Kerwick follows the natural law and nails it: “The IRS … is inimical to liberty. Its very existence is a scandal to a liberty-loving people.” In other words, “The IRS Is the Scandal”:

The money a person legally earns is his. There is no morally conceivable justification, none whatsoever, for anyone else to touch one cent of his earnings without his consent. And there is certainly no justification for allotting anyone, like the IRS, the authority and power, to confiscate a person’s wages before he sees one dime of them.
There is no liberty unless property is dispersed wide and far. And it is only under a set of arrangements in which individuals are permitted to acquire as much property as their talents and good fortune enable that this situation can be secured.
In short, liberty presupposes the old Lockean notion of “self-ownership.”
But the income tax, to a far greater extent than any other kind of tax—for that matter, to a far greater extent than anything else the government does—undermines both the concept and practice of self-ownership. It undermines liberty. Indeed, matters can’t be otherwise, for as Walter E. Williams once said, the only thing that “fundamentally distinguishes” a free man from a slave is that the latter labors under coercion so that the fruits of his labor can be used to gratify someone else’s desires.
Whether the slave labors to satisfy the needs of one master or those of 300 million, and whether he lives on his master’s estate or thousands of miles away from it do nothing to change the fact that as long as portions of his property are confiscated to subsidize the desires of others, he remains a slave.
This isn’t hyperbole. When a person’s material assets are forcefully taken from him, it isn’t just his material assets that he loses. Taken from him as well are his resources in time and labor. Put another way, man does not live by bread alone. Work is as much of a psychological, and even spiritual, necessity as it is an economic and physical one. When a person is deprived of his bread, his sense of wholeness, his integrity, is assaulted as well. …

MORE.

Or, as yours truly put it in “SIXTEEN, THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST,” “However you slice it, there is no moral difference between a lone burglar who steals stuff he doesn’t own and an ‘organized society’ that does the same. In a just society, the moral rules that apply to the individual must also apply to the collective. A society founded on natural rights must not finesse theft.”

The Parasites Pursue The Productive

Business, John McCain, Private Property, Taxation, Technology

The greatest company in the world, Apple, is also an “American job provider that employs 600,000 people.” Our elected Grand Inquisitors, who’ve never created wealth—only seized and distributed other people’s money—want what does not belong to them: the stash of Apple and its shareholders.

To that end, the Torquemadas of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations summoned Apple’s Timothy Cook to justify the company’s tax strategies.

That Apple uses creative ways to keep more of its private property is a good thing, and is reason to cheer the company on. It is just and good that property remain privately owned. While economic efficiency is secondary to the issue of natural justice, more private property in the hands of its rightful owners (Apple and shareholders) means greater prosperity for all.

And at last a Young Turk has taken on John McMussolini:

[Rand] Paul went on to accuse the committee of “bullying” one of America’s greatest companies, prompting Sen. John McCain to quickly defend the inquiry and say that Paul’s remarks were “frankly, offensive.”

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The Hounds @ Fox News Approve IRS Hounding Of Lauryn Hill

Conservatism, Media, Private Property, Taxation

Meta-analysis interests me, as you know; the coverage of the coverage. Far more revealing to me than the quotidian details of Lauryn Hills’ hounding by the IRS was the manner in which Fox News, the so-called conservative network, framed Ms. Hill’s failure to pay her taxes.

After all, Hill’s story is humdrum—that of the theft of private property by the state (anyone still want to argue that taxes are not paid at the point of a gun? “Forfeit your private property or lose your liberty”).

Both Shepard Smith and Megyn Kelley gloated that the threat of prison did the trick and compelled the singer to fork over close to a million dollars in taxes owed. At Fox News, this was a good-news story.

The Good “Guy” here is Ms. Hill. Taxation rejects a man’s absolute and natural right to his property and vests property rights in the political establishment. The 16th Amendment (“The Number of The Beast”) does just that.