Showing posts with label Henry George. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Henry George. Show all posts

Saturday, April 29, 2023

Property rights: the reality vs. the ideology of it

Here is the article by the same name by Alex Krainer, "Property Rights: The Reality vs. the Ideology of It," Alex Krainer, April 22, 2023. 


Croatia has no property taxes.  

Today, American taxpayers pay more taxes than medieval serfs and work a lot harder than medieval serfs.

Krainer is not supporting the communist system of private property.

Huge difference between ideology and actual practice.  

What's on the brochure doesn't correspond with the actual practice.  The West supports private property rights, and habeas corpus but in practice, the government will give itself a lot of leeway in how it executes its principles.  

Governments invoke emergencies in order to sidestep the legal strictures that protect the people from the government.  People say, "Oh, well, we can understand it because there was this emergency," well then the government can always invent emergencies in order to sidestep the legal strictures, and then people will little by little get used to more and more infringements upon their civil liberties and their rights, and then you find yourself a couple of generations down the road rather than paying zero income tax, you're paying 35 to 40%.  In Europe, it's close to 50%.  In some countries, it's more than that.  You find yourself paying property taxes on property that is supposedly your own.  And people don't question this as they should, because if you're obliged to pay property taxes on property that is supposedly yours, what happens, if for some reason, you're unable to meet the property taxes, you can't pay 

10:40  That happens all the time here in the United States.  Old people lose their 

10:50  People lose their houses, their land, and their houses.  Sometimes they lose houses owned by their family for generations.  And because their ability to pay taxes can't keep up with the pride bubbles, then they lose their property.  So what does this imply?  It implies that it was never yours.  You only enjoyed it with the indulgence of the government provided that you paid the tax.  

11:11  Paul Fitzgerald and Liz Gould, coming on my live show this Friday, they support Henry George's theory which is that there should be only 1 tax.  And that should be on land, and it should not go up [in price] with the improvement so that the value of the land itself with no improvements should be taxed and the only tax that anybody ever pays, saying that this would optimize economic performance.  

12:00  I don't know, but I think that income taxes and property taxes should be zero as they have been through most of human history.  I'm in Croatia now, but I normally reside in Monaco, and in Monaco there is no income tax.  I've lived in Monaco for 27 years.  I haven't declared my income even once in my life and nobody ever asked me how much money I make or I never had to sweat waiting for my tax returns.  

12:40  It's nobody's business really, is it?  That's the worst thing.  The worst thing about taxes is the violation of privacy.  The government claims the right to examine every single penny that's passed through everybody's hands because what I'm spending is income to somebody else.  So essentially the government demands the right to surveil every single economic transaction so they can tax it.  

13:05  Yes, it's absurd, because they kind of got the people to acquiesce to think, "Wow if we didn't have income taxes, how could the government even function?  How could they even make their money?"  Well, in Monaco, the government collects no income tax.  They tax businesses, and they tax them based on their profits.  It used to be in the United States as well.  And then, you know, if you look historically, personal income taxes even when they were introduced were a minuscule portion of the government tax receipts.