Texas Property Tax Revolt

"When a government has ceased to protect the lives, liberty and property of the people, from whom its legitimate powers are derived, and for the advancement of whose happiness it was instituted, and so far from being a guarantee for the enjoyment of those inestimable and inalienable rights, becomes an instrument in the hands of evil rulers for their oppression." 
 First Sentence, Texas Declaration of Independence - March 2, 1836

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal well meaning but without understanding.
Louis D. Brandeis
American Judge

The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
Karl Marx

Why Revolt?

The stated purpose of both the United States Government and Texas government is to protect the persons and property of their citizens. When government is filled with lawyers and paper-pushers who have no compunction about levying taxes on other people's homes and property to advance programs that serve their personal aims, or give them the appearance of fighting for the poor and the children to gain political points while actually undermining the rights of all citizens, it is time to take government back from these socialist nimrods and put people in their places who understand that the government is supposed to work for the people, not the other way around. Under the current property tax system, all of us are effectively RENTING our personal property from the state, who can seize it and dispose of it if their demands are not met in what they determine is a timely fashion. 

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance and it appears that Texans let this violation of our personal property rights slip by. Now it has grown into a monster that threatens the very existence of private property ownership in Texas.

We're all serfs.

Under the current system of property tax, liberty is just a word. The state is lord of the manor and we are all, high and low, rich and poor, in a state worse than serfdom. Here are some salient points to consider:

Serfdom is the forced labor of serfs, on the fields of the privileged land owners, in return for protection and the right to work on their leased fields.
The state has the advantage of not even owning, or investing in, the property. It waits until an industrious citizen accumulates enough capital to buy a homestead and then asserts its right to be paid an annual sum to allow the worker to keep it. At least the lord of the manor had some legal claim to ownership of the land and provided a degree of assistance to aid the serfs in their efforts. Government has not bought the property or spent any time or money improving it for the benefit of the tenants. It is more like a band of raiding pillagers demanding tribute payments in exchange for not evicting the owner of a farm.

Serfs were taxed on the produce and profits of their holdings.
None of us are strangers to this concept - this is income tax in its earliest form. However, we now have the additional burden of "appraised value". This means that the government entities hire professional extortionists to go about the countryside and arbitrarily assign values to a homeowner's property. In the U.S. Declaration of  Independence, the founding fathers listed this type of activity as one of the reasons they were willing to lay down their lives in the battle for liberty: "He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance."
True value is the selling price of a property. If the property is not for sale, its value is what the current owner paid for it. Appraisers conjure a taxable value based on hypotheticals such as "In a good market, with the right buyer, if he's near-sighted, on the first day of spring, this property would bring X." or "Although the homeowner hand-felled every tree and sawed every log in his home, it is worth X, because it would have cost a lot of money IF he had to pay for the labor.  This is a tax based not on value, but opinions and hypotheticals. If a person plans to live in their home till the end of their lives, they will never see this "appraised value" or realize any profit from it. Yet they are taxed as if it is something of material value.

A serf had some freedom. A serf might accumulate personal property and wealth. 
We enjoy many freedoms and can accumulate personal property and wealth. However, do we ever OWN anything, when governments can assess a value and charge a percentage to allow us to keep it? It's extortion, plain and simple. We work to earn money and are taxed on that. We spend the money to buy property and materials to improve it, and we are taxed on that. We are then not only expected to pay annual fees to retain ownership of what we have bought, but to pay ever increasing rates based on a perceived value determined by a government agent.

The restraints of serfdom on personal and economic choice were enforced through various forms of manorial court and the manorial administration.
Here we are stuck in the same furrow as the serf. The poor peasant could only go to the lord of the manor with his objections to his treatment. In essence, if we seek redress to halt the extortion being perpetrated on us, we must go to the appraisal districts and courts that sanctioned the racket in the first place

We don't own our homesteads - we effectively RENT them from the taxing authorities. At least the serf had no illusions about his situation. We don't have true home ownership in Texas - we are all tenants - the only difference is whether your landlord is a human being, or a ravenous government bureaucracy.

Joseph Stalin said "One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic." It could also be said that "Theft from one man is robbery; theft from millions is Texas Property Tax."

I agree, but what can I do about it?

The United States Declaration of Independence states, "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, - That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

We can ACTIVELY remove our consent by phoning, faxing, e-mailing our state and local representatives and letting them know in no uncertain terms that they are NOT entitled to dispose of citizens' personal property in order to fund even well-meaning (yet mismanaged) programs, such as education.

If our legislators and elected officials don't hear and respond to the will of Texas property owners, we will do our level best to get them removed from their seats and replace them with people that understand the basic concepts of a FREE society.

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