Trevor Dailey's Weblog

Property tax is a confusing tax almost everyone must pay. If one is a property owner, one pays property tax. If one is a tenant, one pays the landlord's property tax through one's rent. Why must one pay property tax?

If one asks the municipality that determines the rate of and collects property tax, one might be told the tax is to pay for the roads, sewers, sidewalks, street lamps, traffic lights, garbage collection, snow removal... basically the essential services and the city infrastructure. This is partly true.

This City also uses the property tax money to spend on other things, like arenas, tourism, culture, promotions, festivals, and just about any impractical idea incompetent city councillors can come up with. But that isn't the only reason. The most important reason one must pay property tax is to keep the City from stealing one's property.

If property tax is not paid for three consecutive years, the City has the legal authority to expropriate the property. Do the municipal services and the infrastructure development and maintenance continue for the property owner in those three years? Yes. May a property owner ever opt out of paying the property tax for certain city services such as garbage collection? (arranging private garbage collection) No.

The City may say the property tax is for services, infrastructure, tourism, urban renewal, or whatever else, but it all boils down to a property owner pays property tax for the 'privilege' of ownership of his or her property because the City is always ready and willing to seize the property if the tax is not paid.

Property tax is set seemingly arbitrarily by the municipal government because there is no logical formula to setting the property tax rate. Property tax is a forced debt to the City, rent one must pay on one's own property, that can never be paid off, unlike a mortgage that a property owner enters into voluntarily. Pay the property tax, or the City will take the property.

Does property tax sound like the extortion tactics of gangsters and mobsters to you? If you think so, I do not think I would disagree. But I would add:

"In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."

"We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence."

"In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend."

- The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

© Trevor Dailey