alt Hacker NewsI'm not saying taxes are bad. I'm saying specifically that taxing property itself is bad. If someone 'owns' a thing, why would they pay rent to some landlord (the state)?
I acknowledge that I'm indulging in equivocation by saying 'assessing taxes from property is essentially paying rent to the state'. I assert that the equivocation is valid because the outcomes of not paying rent and not paying property taxes is the same: you get evicted.
This depends on what you mean by "own". We have property rights, which are colloquially referenced as "ownership" but, by definition, these are rights and don't exist outside the state, which enforces them. So yes, your rights are given to you by the state and you don't really have any without the state enforcing them. If you could naively own your property then you could just tell the tax collectors to fuck off, what are they going to do with your property if it had been truly yours?