One of the more important yet most overlooked and misunderstood features of American government and governance is the fact that a vast amount of power resides at the very bottom, and local officials often have discretionary powers that would be vested in higher level officials in other countries. This is a good thing in many respects, but the other side of the coin is that you have totally incompetent yokels wielding the power of petty kings.
The case in question is an absolute disgrace and an excellent example of the failings of the American system of government in its present state of (dys)function. I would argue that it should be much, much harder to evict people for any reason, and that seizing private property for trivial reasons should be near impossible. Many here would agree, but in this specific case it is purely a local matter.
Sub/exurban Detroit cannot be compared to Singapore. And the problem has little to do with global population or overpopulation, but it is curiously linked to population density. Jürgen Habermas and others have written extensively about the phenomenon of 'Verrechtlichung' or 'juridification', i.e. the process by which an ever increasing amount of human interaction and social and economic life is subjected to legal regulation and codification, corresponding roughly to increases in population density that came with urbanisation, industrialisation, and the advent of urban modernity from the late 19th century on. But that is really not directly related to the given issue exept in a rather abstract way.
1. Coalesce power to the top assuming that those people are more intelligent and deserving of control?
No. That's how authoritarianism starts.
2. Remove the power to seize private property?
No. Because that's seen as an effective deterrent against crime. You can't have drug dealers putting their cash into untouchable multi million dollar homes.
3. More checks and balances on local governments to not abuse their power?
Yes. This is how it's always been done, and will continue to be done in the future. There's the state and federal court systems which can provide relief. There's also state and federal legislators. There's also the free press which can illuminate these issues. Lastly there's elections. If you don't like the way someone has run government, you can vote them out.
1. Not exactly, no. The opposite of a federal state is a unitary state (like France or Ireland), not an authoritarian state (like Saudi Arabia). Interestingly, what you described (moving power upward) has been another major feature of American governance since the early post-war era.
2. I generally disagree with regards to the seizure of property. You say that the seizure of criminal assets is seen as an effective crime deterrent. Who sees it as such? Is there any evidence that it works? Are you familiar with the debates surrounding 'civil forfeiture'? If not, it is worth looking into. There are jurisdictions in the US(primarily at the municipal and county level) that derive a large part of their total operating budgets from the seizure of 'criminal' assets without any sort of due process. The example of drug kingpins parking their money in real estate is a particularly lurid and unrepresentative example--there might indeed be a place for criminal asset forfeiture in the fight against organized crime--but at the very least the threshold should be rather high and not include petty infractions or minor unpaid debts.
3. I see your point here, and you are correct on checks and balances, but I think you are naive with regards to the role of the press and the efficacy of simply voting out incumbent officials. Having said that, I will concede that the strategy actually works best at the lowest possible tier of government, but of course that requires adequate civic engagement in local politics.
More on the free press issue. Here's a story for you. In the early 1970s, my dad worked for a couple of local newspapers in the southern US. They would send him to cover city council meetings. He commented that the reporters from the big papers would show up for about 10 minutes and leave, and then write reports as if they had been present the entire time. And that was yearly 50 years ago, when the American newspaper landscape looked very different from today. Today most of those local papers are gone altogether and the press in general has undergone a total transformation. Beyond the occasional outrage story, I wouldn't automatically assume that the press is going to do its job.
Please don't take offense at my comments and fire back an angry rebuttal. This is not meant as criticism of you or your positions. Just thoughts and debate, nothing more.
1. What you're saying is true. But in the US, the term "Imperial Presidency" is used to describe the scenario when checks and balances fail between the three branches, thus the power primarily resides in the executive branch to make decisions, and with little oversight from the other branches.
Once there is no more legislative or judicial oversight, and the president can choose to make every action classified, then it might as well be an authoritarian system.
2. > Who sees it as such?
The US's political establishment and law enforcement agencies.
Let's be clear about what I am for and what I am not.
There's two types of property seizure in the US:
A: Property seized directly as the result of a crime (cars used to transport drugs, houses used to store or manufacture drugs, bank accounts used to store proceed from drug transactions, etc.)
B: Property seized merely as being suspect to being involved in a crime. So called civil forfeiture. These are the weird cases like "US vs. $5000".
I'm all for A, but against B. And if you say you can no longer seize bank accounts or houses of convicted drug dealers, then that's a non-starter in the US.
3. The framers of the constitution never put an article describing the role of the free press. Nor was the free press an original guarantee of the constitution. That came later with the first amendment. It was the final check on government corruption and overreach.
There's lots of national coverage on the Russia-Gate stories, but the local news doesn't have the resources to cover city-council coverup for a 1500 person town anymore. It's a shame, I agree because the people in the 1500 person town deserve just as strong a protection as those that live in NYC. But if you have a political party that attacks the media as being "partisan", people are going to stop subscribing to the local newspapers, because they're "partisan-by-default".
I just wonder how many unfair (and in this case, quite frankly bullshit) collisions there are codified in law that we rarely encounter. I don't believe the laws are perfect, or that they even can be perfect (especially since you're often catering to different groups with conflicting interests, and oftentimes more than just two). But as our populations grow, our bureaucracies slow, and more and more problems like this will manifest. I fear it's going to become more like trying to argue your case against Google for why your YouTube video was taken down without explanation - tough shit, good luck.
I have an unfounded fear that overpopulation is humanity's greatest threat, and I think we're way past capacity.
Are you talking about global overpopulation, or overpopulation in particular countries or cities?
Globally, we have more than enough to eat. And apart from the US exporting it's legal system everywhere (see https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...), there's not too many spillover effects in terms of laws from one place to another.
When looking at different locales, generally denser places are more desirable. Hence their land rents and prices are higher. After taking higher rents into account, it's a mostly a wash and down to personal preferences---but that just tells you that the prices are mostly in line with reality.
About laws: that's one of the reasons we have human judges. As for perfection: for most purposes laws first and foremost have to be predictable in their effect. (Which this one here apparently was not in practice in this case.)
One of the densest countries on earth, Singapore, has one of the most efficient legal systems, especially in that regard.
Perhaps not coincidentally, almost all of the increased land rent that comes with increased density is captured by the Singaporean state, since it is the ultimate landowner ("privately owned" land is actually leased from the state on a 99 year basis).
This means that as an area becomes more desirable, more people move there, land rent goes up, and the state earns more and more capital to build/maintain infrastructure and bureaucracy that is proportional to its population.
Contrast with the Bay Area (only used as an exemplar of basically all of America/the western world), which is full of extraordinarily wealthy people paying enormous rents to live under a dysfunctional government with a budgetary shortfall of $6.3B.
It appears that high Singaporean rents go back into paying for a society worth living in, while high San Franciscan rents go into the pockets of a handful of landlords (who of course contributed nothing to San Francisco's explosion of productivity over the last few decades).
Singapore is an outlier in so many ways, it's hard to say what essential and what's accidental when comparing to eg California.
For example, NIMBYs seem to have almost no power here. In return for putting up with construction sites everywhere all the time, we get fancy modern infrastructure.
And between 2012 and now, residential rents seem to have come down by about a quarter. Mostly because much more housing supply came online.
Yeah, it's hard to disaggregate causality here and this picture might change over time. Given the state of most western metropolises, though, it's worth considering whether we want to be highly paid sharecroppers forever.
Well, in economic analysis, we can always separate the roles of landowner and sharecropper.
If we have to have any government, then we need to finance that government. Given the government the role of landowner and renting out the land to the highest bidder is the least bad way we know to do that financing. (That's what Georgism is all about.)
If you buy land (and there's not a huge property tax or land value tax), than you are sharecropper and landowner in personal union. But the price you paid for the land was just the capitalised present value of those future land rents. So you don't even get much out of owning the land. In equilibrium, you could have invested in other assets just as well.
In any case, I like living in Singapore. And I especially like that I don't have to buy an owner-occupied home to avoid capital gains taxes, like in most other countries.
Absolutely. To clarify my above statement (can't edit), the "we" in my comment "it's worth considering whether we want to be highly paid sharecroppers forever," is referring to we Americans/westerners/who do not live in a Georgist-like state.
This sounds a lot like how this Vox video [0] describes the situation in Hong Kong. Except without the intentionally established scarcity to keep prices and thus gov revenue up, leading to shitty living conditions.
I'm not sure there is a way to perfectly set up incentives in the first place. The more important aspect seems to be culture: public officials actually wanting to serve the citizens & do good.
That's really interesting. So Singapore basically has almost a georgist type thing going on? Do they collect much revenue in other ways or just predominantly rely on rent?
Income taxes provide more than taxes connected to land.
Singapore is however probably the closest thing you can find to an implementation of orthodox economics' prescriptions. (Especially since Hong Kong introduced minimum wage laws.)
> which is full of extraordinarily wealthy people paying enormous rents to live under a dysfunctional government with a budgetary shortfall of $6.3B.
The state has a large surplus and the City and County of San Francisco has a projected deficit of an order of magnitude less than that amount, and the US budget deficit is on the rough scale of two orders of magnitude larger. What dysfunctional government are you referring to?
From the voter information pamphlet (link: https://voterguide.sfelections.org/en/overview-san-francisco...) it appears that official figures for the city's debt is in the $2.29B range, not including "the San Francisco Community College District, San Francisco Unified School District, and Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART)."
I revise my above statement to "[San Francisco] is full of extraordinarily wealthy people paying enormous rents to live under a dysfunctional government with a city debt of at least $2.29B."
In any case, even if San Francisco had zero debt, it would still be a dysfunctional government. One need only walk through the Mission to see that.
When someone uses a term without qualification, it's a reasonable first assumption to go with the meaning of the corresponding Wikipedia article, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity
Productivity is a technical term in economics. It connects to people's subjective judgement in the aggregate (ie San Francisco is only considered productive if people want what they produce) but doesn't care that one person in particular doesn't like what they do.
For comparison, I don't like 'Light Beer', but a big brewery figuring out how to make more Light Beer from less malts still counts as a productivity improvement.
Maybe he's talking about density in relation to administrative areas? If you have a small administrative area then it's more likely that an individual's complaints will be heard. Eg a problem a person has in Iceland is more likely to be rectified than if the person were from the France.
It's usually not considered when talking about overpopulation, but this has basically already happened. The US population has quadrupled in the last 100 years. The populations of most countries have significantly increased, but the size of the administration that actually creates laws and tries to solve problems for the people has not increased much.
The number of laws and regulations seem to have increased quite a lot. I can dig up some statistics, if necessary. But just remember the reams of pages from the Patriot Act etc.
The number of civil servants (and other people employed by the government) seems to have increased a lot, too. (GDP increased a lot, and the size of government increased even faster.)
The number of people in your House of Representatives was basically flat. That's true. Though they only vote on the legislation, the actual law writing is outsourced. (Similar to how you still have only one president, but the executive has grown nonetheless.)
Not sure about the number of judges. Would be interesting to dig up some statistics about the number of judges per capita over time.
We are paying for it though. The primary cause of wildlife-loss/species-endangerment is from habitat loss for farming/ranching. Even so much as burning rain-forests to grow soy (to feed cattle) and palm-oil. People don't want just any old calories, they want expensive/inefficient/tasty meats!
I dont think the law can be modeled as a logically consistent set of rules, because there are so many laws that its always possible to apply correct deductive arguments to arrive at different "correct" conclusions which contradict each other.
A much better model is to view the legal system as a tool used by the rich and powerful to exert their domination over the oppressed classes. This has historically always been what the law was for, going back all the way to ancient Rome. This is also what makes the concept of a "rule of law, not of man" such a revolutionary concept.
You were right until the second paragraph. Law is a set of easy to apply rules that let us enforce some semblance of our moral/ethical code cheaply and therefore do it at scale. The laws of any given society mostly match its morals. Of course some powerful people and entities get laws that cater to their pet issues but that's the exception, not the norm.
I question how "easy to apply" the law is. It's necessary to have a set of facts before deciding "what the law says", however one of the (many) reasons it's so difficult to apply the law in practice is that establishing "the facts" for real world situations is hotly contested by lawyers for each side.
> I fear it's going to become more like trying to argue your case against Google for why your YouTube video was taken down without explanation
I think that's a perfect analogy. EULAs and other corporate policies are likely just as full of loopholes as government regulations and source code (they're all written by people.)
If it makes you feel any better, America is the third largest country yet its governance is undoubtedly one of the more functional ones. The inverse link between the efficiency of bureaucracy and its scale might not be as clear.
This has nothing to do with overpopulation, I'm not sure where you are getting that bizarre connection. If you read the article you can see that it is predatory foreclosure and tax policies that give too much room for the county treasurer to do whatever they want.
It's not about overpopulation as much as high population. The more people to be managed, the higher the abstraction level. And the higher abstraction level, the more against-common-sense things happen that can't be sorted out.
Did you read the article? This has nothing to do with 'high population' 'over population' or whatever feeling you get from the headline. He went to court multiple times and even though the courts agreed that he had been abused they couldn't correct the problem. This is a county that contains suburbs.
Well, you'd have to separate accidental incompetence from what the specific level can truly handle.
In terms of numbers of people, many US states are bigger than entire European countries. And American counties and cities aren't really smaller in terms of people than they used to be throughout history (or are they) or what we have in other countries in general.
American local government is unlike any other system I know. The most insane thing is police departments - each County has a completely independent police department, within a county each city will have their own police department, even many universities have police department of their own! Within ten miles of my house I think there are 8 police jurisdictions. Besides the silly amount of overhead introduced by having tiny "cities" with police departments making up several percent of their population (https://www.nj.com/news/2017/12/new_jersey_smallest_towns_wi...) this introduces obvious difficulties of coordination and communication - a few years ago there was a serial rapist who spread his crimes over multiple police jurisdictions so nobody identified the pattern until, by complete coincidence, a husband and wife who worked in different police departments talked to each other about a case she was working on. https://www.denverpost.com/2019/09/17/netflix-unbelievable-c...
Next you have school districts, which are approximately 90% designed in order to segregate black kids from white kids, and the other 10% of justification is a race-blind desire to not pay for other kids to go to school, just your own.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/27/16004084/s...
Maybe, but it sucks that the guy that lost his home has gone through 3 courts already - and there is no law on his side. Remember too that courts can't strike down laws unless they violate other presumably more powerful laws. Courts would rather say that the fix is with the lawmakers.
All that being said, I'm pretty sure if this was 1890 they would have just given back the guys house.
Population is expected to level off around 9 billion. The more educated women are, the less children they tend to have. We are approaching having a birth rate that doesn't necessarily replace the existing population.
That doesn’t make much sense. Educated women have choices that women in subsistence farming cultures who need to have ten kids to keep the farm going don’t have.
but it's not overpopulation what you've just describe but over-computation. Too many variables in too many combinations all of which cascade fail hard. We aren't keeping up with the feedback loop well enough of dysfunctional regulation loops.
I don't know how it works in Detroit, but in Texas where I am a lawyer, it is very hard to lose your home to property tax foreclosure. First, the property taxes are on the web, so the homeowner can go anytime and see how much they owe, and in some cases can pay online. Then, if you are delinquent, you are sent many notices that the homeowner must ignore. Then, even after the property sells at auction, the homeowner can redeem the property for the unpaid taxes for up to a year, again after receiving many notices.
The business of Detroit gaining ownership of houses due to unpaid taxes is huge. There are some documentaries on this but the short of it is the main seller of properties in Detroit is the city itself due to how easily it gains control over properties through taxation. The same kind of thing has been happening in Chicago with car impounding that leads to auctioning off cars.
Cases like this make my blood boil. It is really depressing when state can commit great injustice towards constituents without any redress and there is no special power that can fix plain and obvious wrongs right in place (well presidents pardoning their cronys are the exception).
While this is obviously unjust, I'm baffled by why someone paying an already delinquent property tax bill with clear risks of foreclosure wouldn't err on the side of overpaying.
When you overpay your property taxes, they send you a check for the balance. I accidentally overpaid mine this year by $10, the county mailed back a check in that amount with no further information or interaction required. I hadn't even realized the error until receiving it unannounced.
What the f Michigan... I'm assuming it's different in other states?
Usually yeah the government forces you to sell your property and pay the debt, but any extra from the sale is the property owner's... Which makes way more sense.
How can you even call this ownership if your house is sold and you get nothing if you don't pay your property tax...
In US, whether you really own your house is debatable. The appraisal district (the entity taxing your property), the home owner's association and the mortgaging bank can legally take possession of your house if you don't pay your dues.
The states never really have given people allodial titles/deeds to land. Nevada did something close to allodial title for a bit, but stopped in 2005 or so from my understanding.
> The mortgaging bank OTOH is the actual owner of the property up until you pay the full contractual price and they sign over the deed.
No, they are the owner of the mortgage which is recorded on the deed until the terms of the mortgage are fulfilled. While a mortgage is a real property interest, it is not ownership of the underlying property.
This is a misunderstanding of the way US property law works.
The individual is the "owner" at all times. Others can have debts secured by the property, but that does not make them the owner. When you pay off your loan, the bank's interest in the land is released.
And yes, in the US, an HOA has an interest in the land not too dissimilar from the lending bank. And like a lending bank, most of them can "foreclose" by forcing the auction of the property to pay the debt, for very small sums.
Civil Asset Forfeiture (CAF) obviously violates the 4th, 6th and 14th amendments to any reasonable person, but because the police profit from it, lawyering cognitive dissonance continues to legitimize it as legal. What it means is that innocent people carrying large sums of cash or having expensive property will continue to have it taken from them unless they are rich and have aggressive lawyers. CAF requires proving a negative (an impossibility), as well as assuming guilt, deprivation of property immediately and proving innocence later, which seems mutually exclusive with fundamental tenants of the US justice system: "innocent until proven guilty" and "due-process."
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair
For those homeowners in SV (at minimum), remember that your first installment of your 2019-20 is delinquent after Tuesday, so pay (or postmark) by then.
Property taxes are a special form of BS: here's a fine for using the money you earned and we didn't seize from you in other taxes for merely parsing an asset.
Indeed, taxes are not theft especially when people take full advantage of other things the state offers - simple example: the road to your house.
But it does highlights the asymmetry of power. The state holds the people to a much higher standard than what the state itself is willing or able to offer back. The state will never be held to this kind of standard when owing you money. Either by adjusting the law or by simply never applying the same strict outcome to themselves (imagine that no Government building would ever be subjected to this should their tax not be payed for any reason).
And in places where the people care little about righting some wrongs or are tricked into thinking this is what they actually want you end up with absurd situations like this. Losing a house for an $8 debt.
Whether or not it's BS. The reason why is more simple. The states never really have given people allodial titles to land. I think only Nevada has and it was still limited.
You could settle in Massachusetts or New Hampshire, where much local business in conducted in Town Meeting. If you want even more local governance (albeit less competent governance), that settle somewhere HOA-encumbered.
But if the aim is to pay little tax then come to Alabama! The natural lowtax experiment has been run in Alabama. The 1901 constitution was written by the wealthy industrialists and landowners with the express goal to disenfranchise black freedmen and white sharecroppers. The wealthy don't need local services paid through taxes, they can fund their own schools and other facilities and disregard the life of everyone else, so they made it very much impossible to raise local funds without going through the legislature in Montgomery, which they controlled. Now look at the shape of the state today. There is no decent infrastructure, education and roads are awful, no opportunity to profit from investment. Everyone who could leave left long ago.
It's my natural right to own property, with the caveat that such ownership is defined by my ability to defend it by whatever means necessary: socially, physically, logically, legally, etc.
Or at least that's what my country's founders might have believed and tried to establish. We might argue they're still correct in some sense even in spite of a government or society that insists otherwise.
"Every tax, however, is to the person who pays it a badge, not of slavery but of liberty. It denotes that he is a subject to government, indeed, but that, as he has some property, he cannot himself be the property of a master."
What constitutes consent to be governed is still debated. Although, the fact there exists practically no unclaimed habitable territory left on earth. In theory means someone no longer can choose not to be governed. So in some sense it can be argued that people can't fully consent any more.
Although, you could still choose a different government by moving so not all choice is removed. However, you have odd things like the US taxing based off citizenship instead of location. Although the US is one of the few countries that will let you relinquish your citizenship and even become stateless (bad idea don't become stateless).
Also if you purchase land in the US your not getting allodial title. Also I doubt any state or country today would let you get a complete allodial title, it would probably be limited in some form.
The bigger problem here though is it really just to seize all value of property for failing their obligations by 8 dollars. I would argue that is clearly unjust considering the scale of things.
You consent when purchasing the titles to land to a far greater extent than the rest of humanity consents to your purchase preventing them from using that land...
If I own two properties, I pay twice the taxes, but I don’t receive nearly 2 x the civilisation. (Wage taxes are even worse at proportional benefit).
That said, I really like the benefits from taxes - a good government and social cohesion: there are plenty of places in the world with less taxes and less government that appear extremely unappealing to live in.
All taxes are a compromise between what the state wants to collect and what's practical to collect. Property taxes are more practical than most, because the land sits right where it is, it's easy to keep track of who owns it and check that they're paying their taxes. Estate taxes ("death taxes" as they say) are also highly practical, because when someone dies is often the only time we bother to accurately figure out the total value of the estate. We might prefer to tax people in proportion to their total wealth at all times, but it turns out that's very difficult.
The case in question is an absolute disgrace and an excellent example of the failings of the American system of government in its present state of (dys)function. I would argue that it should be much, much harder to evict people for any reason, and that seizing private property for trivial reasons should be near impossible. Many here would agree, but in this specific case it is purely a local matter.
Sub/exurban Detroit cannot be compared to Singapore. And the problem has little to do with global population or overpopulation, but it is curiously linked to population density. Jürgen Habermas and others have written extensively about the phenomenon of 'Verrechtlichung' or 'juridification', i.e. the process by which an ever increasing amount of human interaction and social and economic life is subjected to legal regulation and codification, corresponding roughly to increases in population density that came with urbanisation, industrialisation, and the advent of urban modernity from the late 19th century on. But that is really not directly related to the given issue exept in a rather abstract way.