Bad enough being forced to pay for government “services” you didn’t ask for and don’t use. But how about “services” the government forces you to not use?
Like government schools, for instance. They are closed – fully or partially – across the country and yet the payment – in the form of ownership taxes on people’s homes – is still demanded, in full.
Even more obnoxious, the same government that forces people who aren’t allowed to avail themselves of these “services” also forces them to stay home – and do the work the government is charging them for. Because who else is going to school the kids when the government isn’t doing it?
A reader writes:
“I am the primary caregiver for my child. My wife is the breadwinner so I get kid duty. But I do online work and want to also contribute to our family finances in any way I can. Our idiotic school district has decided no in-school contact until October. After that, it’s two days a week in school and the rest is remote learning . . . I can’t work a normal job while my kid is in school. I’ve spoken to everyone from teachers to principals to the district superintendent and nobody seems concerned that parents are stuck home unable to work and doing the job of the school without compensation. I should be paid if the school is going to half-close this school year as well as the last one. Where is my money?”
Indeed.
The answer, of course, is that the government has it.
The question therefore should be rephrased: Why does the government have it?
The simple answer, of course, is – because the government can take it. Because your home (among other things, including yourself) doesn’t actually belong to you. It belongs to the government.
Which forces you to pay the ownership tax in order to be permitted to occupy it.
Many people – this writer among them – object in principle to being forced to pay for government schools by being forced to pay endless and exorbitant ownership taxes (styled with the usual disingenuousness as “property” taxes) on our homes – rendering ownership a pathetic fiction since anything you make never-ending payments on isn’t yours by definition. You may possess it – but only so long as you continue to make the payments.
This is objectionable for many reasons but the main reason is the reduction of the entire populace to tenanthood.
Tenanthood – which actually means state ownership of property, since the government is the landlord – as per the Communist Manifesto. People ought to read the thing; it helps in understanding what Communism is.
The object of Communism being to reduce the population to a state of perpetual financial/economic insecurity for the sake of the government’s power over them – achieved by making them pay the government perpetually to be allowed to temporarily (and very conditionally) possess things at the pleasure of the government.
Americans – all too many – bought into tenanthood for themselves and their neighbors in exchange for “services” such as government schools for their kids. Which they get billed for, of course. Which bills they can generally pay only if they work.
But now, they can’t.
The government forced them not to, overtly, by cancelling their work in the name of “stopping the spread” (which morphed into the cases! the cases! and will soon morph into just because, never ending). For tens of millions – as opposed to the fraction of that number we’re told have been Corona’d – this cancellation has become permanent. Their employment isn’t coming back.
But the bills keep coming – including the bill for the government schooling of their kids, via the ownership tax.
The same government has now offloaded the work of that schooling onto the backs of those who are forced to pay it, who are now forced not to work to pay the bills that keep coming, including the ownership tax on their home.
The effrontery of this is as staggering as a mile-high tsunami.
One hears lots of talk about reparations to people who cannot establish they’ve personally been done any harm vis-a-vis slavery but because their skin color happens to be the same as someone unrelated to them who lived and died generations before they were born.
Why not more talk about the actually-living-right-now people being actually victimized by some of the most vicious government policies since slavery? Why not any talk about the fact that it is slavery to compel a man to work for the benefit of another?
Why not any talk about the refunds these people are due?
Better yet, how about defunding government schools, since they’re not schooling the kids? Why should parents – why should anyone – be forced to pay for empty buildings and silent schoolbuses and darkened cafeterias . . . and the salaries of “teachers” who aren’t?
If people weren’t forced to pay twice – once for the schools their kids aren’t using and then again by being forced to not work in order to pay for the work the government isn’t doing – they’d be able to afford to send their kids to a non-government school. Or be able to school them at home, since they wouldn’t have to leave home to work in order to earn the money the government takes from them in the name of providing the “service” it no longer does.
But then, Americans have become used to being tenants – which is to say, serfs. And serfs know better than to raise their voice to the lord of the manor.
. . .
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Years ago, probably before I found this website, I was reading a thread on the CTA (The Chicago Transit Authority). Someone argued that the CTA would like to have their full budget by sucking in tax revenues from Chicago, Cook County, the surrounding counties, and often the state as a whole and provide only one ride a year. That comment when I thought about how government “services” work is so very much on the money. Time and time again I found the goal of a government “service” was simply to employ as many people as possible for salaries as high as they possibly can be while doing as little as possible.
Once a tax levy has started, it will constantly go up, unless it is repealed, which it almost always NEVER will, short of a bloody revolution…
My property taxes go up every year by about 6% despite the repubklican governor promising it will not go up more than 4%, party of red and blue… for the record, I am a registered libertarian.
Hi MA SH,
Yup. As others have observed, once the principle is accepted that you must pay tax on anything, the principle that you can be forced to pay any tax they decree has been accepted. It’s either – or.
I consider taxes on property to be even more evil than taxes on income because you can avoid income taxes by not earning income. But the only way to avoid taxes on property is to be homeless.
I’m always amazed that the teacher’s unions are still able to get away with the “teachers are underpaid” narrative. Often followed up with “We (who’s ‘we?’) pay an (fill in your favorite entertainer) player millions of dollars but educators are on food stamps!” bulls***. If one of those teachers was able to teach millions of children at a pop they’d get millions of dollars in compensation. And education would probably cost a few dollars a month per student. Hell, MIT puts their courses online, for free. And as most libertarians know, there’s courses like the Ron Paul Home School, where kids can be taught by great minds like Dr Tom Woods, not someone who “earned” a teaching certificate after a few classes.
https://openlearning.mit.edu
Amen, RK –
The market speaks. The entertainer’s services are valuable as measured by people willing to part with value to be entertained. And teachers of value never have trouble earning their value, either.
Hi RK, not only are most teachers overpaid, they’re getting full time pay for a part time job. They get the whole summer off, all the school vacation weeks, and snow days when I had to be out repairing power lines. Plus they get a great pension after only 30 years, all compliments of us homeowners forced to pay “rent”, as Eric points out, to whatever town we reside in.
Hi Mike,
Yup! The simple boil-down here is no one has the right to force anyone else to pay their salary. This includes teachers. They have a service to offer, like anyone else. If it is valuable, people will freely pay for it. But if it isn’t, then… which is as it should be.
Communal edumacation paid for via redistributed wealth- and people wonder why their kiddies turn out to be communists……
oh I forgot about the pensions. Engineers don’t get those any more. Teachers do. Lavish ones in my area. There was a big scandal about some guy who found a loophole to buy his way into an illinois teacher’s pension because he had substitute taught and worked as some or lobbyist or employed by the union or something tangential. He wrote out a check for several tens of thousands, like 80K as I recall and bought his way in. It’s literally like spending a $100K to get a few million over time.
I don’t know how they get away with it either. Their experience based salaries tables are public. If I had gone into government school teaching (in the wider area of where I work) instead of engineering I would make as much today as I do as an engineer. However I have to work 12 months as an engineer instead of nine as a teacher. Teaching is a much easier path, no where near as demanding and the customers are generally locked in. Just to be paid the same would be a huge raise.
I don’t deny there are school systems where teachers don’t make much. But those school systems are also in places where I couldn’t even work as an engineer. Teachers even if “poorly paid” in some location it is reflective of the salaries of that location so relatively they are usually in the same place.
Any teacher who even believes in the idea that is possible to be “underpaid” for anything” should not be allowed to call themselves “a teacher” -because no one who voluntarily chooses to participate in any profession at their own discretion.
Only slaves can be “underpaid”.
Well-said, Nunz!
In a free market, people are paid what they’re worth – that being defined by what people are willing to pay.
As the reader who was chosen for this article, let me say a few things:
I’ve taught for over 25 years off and on, been tenured, been a Crisis Counselor and done a lot for kids in public school.
I’m now also on the other side, having a child in public school (for now).
Never did I look at it as free food or child care. None of it is free. It’s paid for by those of us who “own” property with and without kids. Frankly, if you don’t have kids, why should you pay school taxes? Find a good, logical reason. I’ll wait.
Education is absolutely done. It can’t be fixed, it has to be razed and get a new start.
I’ve seen incredible waste- tenured teachers who just sit at their desk and surf the web because nothing can be done to them, small buildings with multiple administrators each making six figures, committees set up that never accomplish a thing.
I’ve been chosen many times to be on these committees and time after time after nothing happened, I’d question why the same committee was set up for the next year. That made me unpopular. Which doesn’t bother me one iota. I prefer it, being a staunch individualist.
I was happy to be tenured because it let me actually teach. I was told to teach to the test and here is the curriculum. I was literally aghast. This wasn’t teaching, this was indoctrination.
So I’d read the stupid textbook, then snap it shut and say “But here’s what really happened”. I was told by admins that I was wasting their time by doing this because they’d have to have a meeting with me. I told them they were wasting everyone’s time with their inane nonsense and that they forgot they were supposed to be educators, not state drones.
I worked with at risk kids mostly and they need a positive male role model and truth. That’s what I did. It was rewarding and fulfilling because it was true and it actually provided a proper education and an example to kids who might not have a good one at home.
I was never part of the problem, but I knew many who were and still are.
There is no solution. Wrong is wrong.
Education will absolutely NOT get any better unless we decide once and for all that it needs to be better. And deciding means action, not typing up an “action plan” or any of the other nonsense these institutions come up with.
I was never part of the problem. I intended to be part of the solution.
But working in the current education system and trying to make a difference is a Sisyphean effort. You’d have an easier time trying to win Pike’s Peak with your emergency brake on.
Also, while I’m at it, this WuFlu bullshit with the masks is complete nonsense. I was a science teacher at one time. No scientist with a modicum of self respect would take any of the “data” from the Plandemic seriously. It’s skewed to almost the point of hilarity. It actually would be hilarious if it didn’t affect the population so adversely.
There will always be the next invisible bogeyman on the horizon, let your immune system at it unless you’re in the demographic that may be ill or die from it.
Fear, division and control, hmm, seems I’ve come full circle in my tirade about the state of public “education”.
I don’t know everything and I’m not always right, but I know with every fiber of my being when something is patently wrong.
Thanks to all for the comments and perspectives😎
This is excellent, James – top shelf!
A teacher such as yourself – obviously intelligent, thoughtful, etc. – will never lack for students. I think one of the core problems with the idea of government schools is that parents have very little meaningful control over what their kids are taught and by whom. They pay taxes to support the schools, but they are in the position of a “customer” of the DMV’s. They cannot refuse to pay for shoddy services, so they have no real power to question shoddy services.
This is why I like the idea of private education – which simply means that you pay for the services, directly. And can withhold payment, if the services are shoddy.
This restores accountability, largely lacking from government schools – for the same reason that the DMV doesn’t care that you’ve been waiting for three hours to transact business that should have taken 5 minutes.
“I think one of the core problems with the idea of government schools is that parents have very little meaningful control over what their kids are taught and by whom. ”
Years past mothers took care of their children and their education. The schools were terrified of these mothers and the end result was decent schools and decent educations.
Then came the feminists, abortions and no bibles (Korans are okay) in schools. The mothers went to work,,, wages for men dropped,,, more mothers to work and so on,,, and now had no time to monitor little jenny’s education. The schools slowly made the PTA a joke,,, then started limiting a parents access to the school. Today schools are literally a prison. The wages are so low it requires two to work so the schools became baby sitters. With the plandemic tyrants shutting down the schools now one of the parents have to stay home.
The result is a almost 30% mortgage delinquency rate. Soon many of these kids we love so much may be living under a bridge… but they’ll probably get one meal and free masks at school.
The science of “climate change” and “COVID19” is so bad, so horrible, it can’t even pass things I learned in the fifth grade. Nobody should be falling for this crap. If there actually was an educational system people would see right through it. It’s not difficult to see the scam. A fifth grader could if taught by a teacher who went off the program.
The US treasury is still paying off debt from WWI.
The simple major flaw in how the general population regards taxes is its failure to acknowledge that once a tax is “legitimized” in its imposition, there is no limit to how high it may go. The authority to tax income, for example, grants authority to take it all, every single penny. The same for property taxes. The only thing keeping the Psychopaths In Charge from confiscating every single penny and every single piece of property you own is friction. The sheeple have certainly granted them the authority to do so. The only source of friction is our right to vote for which psychopath we prefer to suffer. All it would take is for the red and blue teams of the intramural sport called politics to limit our choice to two “candidates” who agreed in principal that ALL property be confiscated. A thing we get closer and closer to every election.
The power to tax is the power to destroy that which is taxed.
Hi JWK,
Indeed. And, to a very real extent, they already do … take it all, I mean. I calculate that if I live in my house another 30 years, I will have paid for it twice. Once, back in 2003 – when I bought it. And then again, every year I’ve lived in it – to the government. The sum will be well in excess of $120k, without assuming the inevitable increase in the “rent” over the next 30 years nor the lost opportunity cost of that money. Conservatively figured, the total exaction will likely amount to around $200k.
This, of course, is on top of them stealing 15 percent of every dollar I earn in “self employment” tax, plus the federal tax, plus the state tax. Plus all the incidental taxes we all pay.
Anyone who has worked regularly at almost any job for say 30 years and been prudent should be able to stop working – out of necessity – by the age of 50 and spend the rest of their lives working at what they want to, for the sake of the enjoyment – without needing to worry about money. But that’s reserved for free men. We are slaves – only we don’t see our chains because we’re allowed free reign of the plantation (well, we were allowed free reign of the plantation) and can pick our form of servitude.
I find it perplexing that these so-called Christians aren’t pushing for the abolition of compulsory government schooling. I mean, the state is their enemy. Why the capitulation?
Because of the myth that the United States is a Christian country.
Hi RK,
I’d characterize it as follows: The United States was a Renaissance country. One founded on the general drift of the Enlightenment, which was basded on humanism, on respect for the individual, on the unshackling of the mind.
This Christian does.
When you send your kid to government school, you are literally worshiping Molech.
All the private schools here, religious & secular, are doing land-office business since the local public school district decided to start the school year via “remote learning” only.
Even the ones which were on the brink of closing because of declining enrollment now have barely a handful of spaces left.
Remember the Alamo, don’t forget the beer.
One of our senators in OR proposed to eliminate property taxes for all homes under ~$500,000, and to replace that revenue with a small sales tax. He got voted down, the people never got to vote on it.
[sung to the tune of a Beach Boys song…]
Everybody’s gone SERF-in, SERF-in USA!
Listened to the Bill Meyer broadcast. I especially liked Roy who said we need to use hair spray on rioters busting into our cars and homes. I never understood people like him,,, apparently he has never been in a life threatening situation or he is a comedian. What is remarkable is he never mentioned the lawlessness of rioters/lootersarsonists.
The same goes for that young boy trying to help people in Minneapolis. The talk is “he was illegally carrying a weapon because he was too young”. That takes the cake. On one hand we discuss the legality of carrying a weapon,,, on the other there is no talk of the legality of burning down and looting private property or beating innocent citizens. We really have our heads up our asses in this country.
And wouldn’t it be interesting to watch Roy surrounded by a mob destroying his vehicle and threatening his life threatening the rioters with a can of hair spray. I’m sure the rioters will be scared off. God help us…
Actually if hairspray is the same formula as when I was a kid it makes a great flamethrower 😆
Just what I was thinking as I read this. Hmm, haven’t tried it for a long time.
Yup. At the very least, if they really wanted to be non-lethal, then maybe they could organize a group and everyone use pepper balls in paintball guns. That way they can keep some distance but still annoy the rioters enough to stop their rioting.
But no matter, because the mouse people never organize anything anyways. So noone will do anything. They’ll all just chit chat with each other about it.
I’d love to douse a bunch of them with Skunk spray. Then their smell would match their actions.
Uhhh, I think it was BEAR spray. IDK, that’s what I thought. Dang cell phones are so crappy nowadays — landlines were always clear, now we have cell phones and we can’t hear each other — so much for progress, more like … IDK the word… regress?
I have zero sympathy for any of those parents unless they’ve been advocating for the complete privatization of education. The rest of them have been happy to get something for nothing–or for a greatly reduced price–by sucking off their neighbors, including their childless neighbors, and to shed the responsibility of deliberately and rationally planning their own kids’ educations. They foist their jobs off on morons who can’t produce correctly-spelt assignments and they vote to raise my taxes so their kids can play in $70 million sports stadiums. They’ve never objected to being parasitized before because they’ve been able to parasitize someone else in return. Now they’re paying for something and getting nothing, just like some of us have been all along. Suck it, cupcakes.
For years I’ve wondered why The Education/Industrial Complex has been unfazed by the advent of the Internet.
What is the basic premise of “education” if not the transfer of information from one person to another?
The paradigm for the system now in place was developed in the early 1800’s in Prussia. It has changed not a whit in since that time. We now have, in our pockets, the sum total of all human knowledge at our fingertips. So many industries have been turned upside down due to this invention yet, schools remain the same. I think what we will see in the next few years is a total abandonment of the current structure. It has to collapse under the weight of its own failings. This doesn’t even take into account that more and more people are waking up due to the fatwas over the WuFlu and the realization that their kids are stupid and what little brain they have left has been washed, rinsed, fluffed and folded.
I recently had (4) 20 year olds in my barn working on dirtbikes and I was telling a story that interested them. I used the word ‘mutiny’, and none of them knew what it meant. I was flabbergasted. Our public school failed these kids. Such a shame. Needs to be fixed now.
I’ve resorted to handing out books and demanding that they start to read or no dirtbike work. We’re going to have to do it ourselves.
Government schools have done exactly what they were always intended to do: produce a sub-literate, historically ignorant populace of unthinking, easily-ruled cattle.
Bingo!
The theme song for the perpetually dull and dumb:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO5dcW0P75M
Exactly what they intended, to confine the education of children to the expedition of the acceptance of whatever the Psychopaths In Charge throw at them. The “success” of public education is all around us. The willing acceptance of insane policy regarding a flu without any facts in evidence that it even exists, much less that it’s especially dangerous. From the very beginning, this “new and improved” flu virus was never isolated and examined, nor is there yet any effort to do so. This was previously unheard of in epidemiology. But now, all of a sudden, is not even considered.
Absolutely spot on Mark. The internet is an amazing tool, absolutely amazing. Yet, it’s just used for frittering & shopping. What a travesty.
It doesn’t matter. These scumbag parents love the free childcare and meals schools provide. They could care less what their children are being taught and by whom.
Hi Handler,
Your point in re “free” childcare and food is spot on. I have never understood, though, why people have kids in that case. I mean, why have them if you don’t want to raise (and teach) them? Is it a vanity project? Or just because it “happened”?
Eric, I suspect its the usual expression of thoughtlessness. All too many lack the concept of consequences. They also lack self discipline, and many of the other traits that at one time, was expected of the average person. One more reason to consider that the Progs are guilty of real Crimes against Humanity. If there is any justice, that will be their title in future histories.
Most children are a result of irresponsible sexual activity.
Mark, the system is anything but a failure. Its doing exactly what it was originally designed to do. Produce generations of obedient, docile, ignorant, consumerist sheep. Look around you. You can see the results everywhere. People fit only to be cannon foder in the Empires endless wars, and/or cogs in its corporate machines. The very last thing those who Rule us would want, would be people capable of seeing through their schemes, and educated enough not to fall for their corporate mass medias endless propaganda.
John Taylor Gatto’s book, The Underground History of American Education, backs up everything you say! I don’t know if you ever read the book, but it’s an eye opener…
Marky, I’ve LONG been a fan of John Taylor Gatto. His insights about the real history and origins of the “educational” system are very profound.
I see the point being made here. Needless to say, I absolutely believe local governments owe tax rebates to all homeowners availing themselves of the lokle publik skoolz (which shouldn’t exist, but that’s fodder for another rant elsewhere) that they are being denied use of. However, I draw the line at the idea of compensating parents for educating their own children
Parents, educating your children is your responsibility as parents – NOT the State’s, not the church’s, not your neighbors’, but YOURS. You no more deserve “compensation” for educating your own children than you deserve it for feeding them, toilet training them, teaching them how to dress themselves, and disciplining them. THAT’S WHAT PARENTS DO AS PARENTS.
No, I don’t think Eric ever meant to seriously suggest in this post that parents should be paid for being parents. I perfectly understand the absolutely legitimate point he’s making. I bring this up only because I actually have heard people with children –I won’t call them “parents” because they’re not worthy of the label– bitch and moan about not being paid to homeschool their own flesh and blood. Sickening, that our social fabric is so degraded that parents now see their children as both burdens and opportunities for economic exploitation., depending on what circumstances confront them.
Hi lib,
Agreed – and to be clear, of course I never advocated parents be paid to parent. I do, however, advocate that they not be mulcted – and that no one be mulcted because someone else is a parent. This isn’t about whether one likes kids. It is about whether the fact that someone else had kids obliges those who didn’t have them to pay for them.
The country is coming apart at the seams. The fake virus has destroyed the economy. The place will explode after the election. New York has a bill to incarcerate people in detention camps if they don’t play the Covid game. Virginia and Connecticut has made the shot(s) mandatory. China now says the Virus can flow through bathroom piping (it just gets sillier and sillier),,, Riots, looting and burning the joint down because a black homicide suspect committed suicide. They thought the police did it. I’m not so sure taxes are going to be our major problem. Might want to invest in the important metals…. Gold, Silver and Lead.
I often wonder how those hipsters who paid half a million bucks or more for some 15′-wide 100 year-old recycled row-house in places like the Bushwick section of Brooklyn- which until recently had been burnt-out war-zones, are faring now. I’d often said “The first hiccup, and those places will be reverting back, as many of the former residents are still there- thanks to housing projects and subsidized rents. What we have now is about as big of a hiccup as one will ever see!
“But all deez white peepul moved in an took everything and made our once-great slums unaffordable!” [But who moved in to these formerly poor white working-class neighborhoods before that and burnt everything down and filled the place with crime and drove all of the poor white residents away, forcing them to have to literally abandon their very modest homes and seek refuge in some cheap basement apartment in the suburbs? Huh? HUHhhh?].
Bushwick before the hipsters:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/61/ce/6b/61ce6ba7ad48e7c0dab13a3864cd84a0.jpg
Bushwick before the homies:
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-17xRFTnvzBc/W1hN3i09q3I/AAAAAAAAHoI/Y9IexKIpaHUGFua1iIKbuIcOjZX2zwNFgCLcBGAs/s640/brooklyn-new-york-1946-11.jpg
Hi Nunz!
The house I bought in Northern Va as a fixer-upper in the mid-’90s for $160k recently sold for almost $500k. It’s the same house – on the same 1/4 acre lot. In a neighborhood that is even more iffy today than it was then.
I was paying around $4k a year in Ownership Taxes when I left in 2003. The poor bastard who “owns” it now is probably paying twice that.
The typical Muni. never thinks ahead. Never.
We needed a new school for all the new arrivers, suburban sprawl and the like. 15-20 years ago.
A new school was supposed to be $8M. The smart people in the room knew it would go 10-12M, and demanded the town downscale the school. They didn’t. “but It’s for the children!!!” and the average towns folk buys in.
Then it goes to $12M, and we’re still paying, and after ’08 crash, lots of those newbies moved out. Many empty classrooms.
Sick of these idiots and this crap.
The double whammy is the schools have become indoctrination centers to teach the kids to be good compliant serfs to their ideologically possessed public school system masters. So to complain that you can’t work because your home with the kids because the indoctrination center is shutdown is ironic. The indoctrination center is why we are in this evil choice today. People may have to come to the conclusion to change to less expensive lifestyles to educate your own kids or perhaps people can do it in groups via private one room (in your garage) school houses.
Easier said than done. We should have a tax revolt to not pay taxes going to closed indoctrination centers. A referendum on the ballot sometimes gets the message that people have had enough.
Throw it in the woods.
Indeed, Hans –
And that brings up a potential upside to all of this, which is that more people will simply keep their kids at home and school them there. In my neck, homeschooling is increasing and the kids I’ve met who have been are much more articulate and thoughtful than the government-schooled ones.
I’m somewhat conflicted in my feelings regarding the corona transformation of what used to be our schools. On the one hand, my mom was a lifelong school teacher and raised our family under the wings of the profession; she put all her heart and soul into it and paid her dues admirably when the profession was still admirable. But fast forward to the scamdemic era, and it’s apparent that those in the teaching profession are perpetuating one of the largest scams ever imaginable with remote learning. Unfortunately, we are too far gone as a society to be able to go back to “normal”. We needed a person of substantial influence to call out the bullshit early on, and sadly we never got it. While I still believe that we humans could functionally go back to our lifestyles from seven months ago, the fear and resulting expectations have warped things too much for it to be feasible; you can’t go back to pre-corona because too many people simply wouldn’t stand for it. That being said, if given a choice between remote learning and having the kids jump through all the stoopid hoops of doing it in person, I’d opine that the former is more desirable than the latter. I mean, six foot social distancing, mandatory face condoms even on the littlest of kids, no drinking fountains, etc.?! If I had a kid I sure as hell wouldn’t want to put them through that. But I’d also argue that the value of remote learning should be lower in cost and reflected in the serf/property tax, but we all know that’d be a pipe dream.
In much of Latin America, taxes on property are minimal. They fund garbage collection and street lighting, not schools.
Apparently, arrearages can accrue for years without anyone being evicted in a tax sale. Some would call this Third World inefficiency. But practically, security of property ownership in these civil law countries can be superior to our English-law system, which never contemplated militant teachers unions.
Once I was threatened with the tax sale of my house in the northeastern US over an erroneous six (6) dollar municipal water bill which I refused to pay.
Schools, from K-12 to colleges, are headed for a total rethink. Probably a third of liberal arts colleges will disappear. DUH … shoulda mastered plumbing or auto mechanics instead of Derrida and gender studies!
But teachers unions will keep public schools expensively floundering until municipal bankruptcy clips their wings. During this troubled decade, PROMESA (a special-purpose law that facilitates Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy) will be extended to the fifty states.
When it comes to the depredations of dotgov, too much wasn’t a damned ’nuff.
But teachers unions will keep public schools expensively floundering until municipal bankruptcy clips their wings.
Teachers unions will eventually be obliterated, sooner rather than later. Too many people will discover, as they are now, that publik skool teechurs are not only useless, but harmful.
School taxes piss me off especially because I DON’T HAVE KIDS! What’s more, at 58, single, and a confirmed bachelor, I never will. WTF do I have to pay for something I don’t use and never will use?
Hi Mark,
Amen.
I did the math awhile back and – so far – I have been mulcted of appx. $35,000 in “rent” on the house I thought I paid off back in 2003. I have no kids; I don’t use any of the “services” I am forced to pay for.
As a result of this, I am unable to pay for the shoulder surgery I need – and which I could have easily paid for, if I had the $35,000 that has been ripped from my hide.
And my “rent” is low compared with what others are forced to pay.
Sounds like time for some medical tourism, Eric. I work for a large hospital system and the care in our facilities is great, but if I needed any kind of expensive surgery, I’d be on a plane for Turkey in a heartbeat. The medical care available there is excellent and cheap. You can fly over, get a fancy hotel, see the sights, have the surgery, and recuperate for a while then fly home for a small fraction of what the surgery would cost here. And Turkey is open and welcoming travelers. If you don’t like Turkey you could go to Thailand, same deal. Although I don’t know if they are open for business or if they are still in a corona bunker.
Mulcted is a good word, I’ve never heard it before. Thanks Eric.
It is not the “government’s” job to teach the children. That is what created this mess. It is the parents job to teach their children. Unfortunately, too many Americans have embraced the communism that they learned in “government” school. They feel this relationship is normal, perhaps even desirable. Most do not even realize that “government” school is communism.
“Free education for all children in government schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.” = 10th plank of the communist manifesto.
Rent and Tenanthood are better terms for this arrangement than “property tax” or “ownership tax”. (Property has never been assessed or taxed.) (If you really owned something, who on earth could you possibly pay the tax to?)
A better term is theft.
“Abolition of private property in land and application of all rents of land to public purpose.” = The 1st plank of the communist manifesto.
I suppose the “public purpose” of which they speak is to help pay down the interest on the glorious war debt. There is no provision for paying down the principal. We must invite the world because we must invade the world!
Thanks for the interesting article Eric.
I hope you have a great day.
☮