Review-Journal Advocates Property Tax Repeal

Discussing the latest effort to bankroll an anti-property-tax ballot initiative, the editorial board at the Las Vegas Review-Journal comes up with this doozy:

[W]hy should those who buy real property with after-tax dollars then have to pay additional "rent" to their local governments indefinitely? It's interesting to note how the political class recoiled with horror at that portion of last year's eminent domain initiative that would have declared property rights "fundamental rights." Can we be taxed for exercising a "fundamental right"?

This argument-- that property taxes are simply illegitimate on their face-- isn't one you hear that much anymore, and it's almost shocking to see it in writing. So it's worth taking the opportunity to respond to the R-J's questions.

1) The implication of using the phrase 'after-tax dollars' is two-fold: first, that every dollar you spend has already been taxed once, and second, that taxing each dollar of income exactly once is both desirable and attainable. And this is all pretty contestable. In a non-income-tax state, it's hard to see how anyone can comfortably assert that Nevada has already taxed each dollar of income once. And if they're referring to the fact that the federal income tax is already in play, the R-J clearly hasn't thought through the implications of not allowing different levels of government to tax the same dollar. Does the existence of a Nevada state sales tax mean that local governments should not be allowed to tax the same transactions?

2) If you own a home, then your federal, state and local governments are, right now, spending money making sure that no one robs it (or bombs it) and that it won't burn down. Owning a home imposes costs on government that need to be paid. The property tax is based on the (quite reasonable) principle that if the government is protecting your home from all the bad stuff that might otherwise happen to it, you maybe ought to pony up a little bit to defray the costs-- with the condition that if the costs exceed your ability to pay them, you should get some help.

3) Property is created by government. If all governments disappeared tomorrow, the whole concept of "property" would lose its meaning because there'd be no legal system left to enforce it. But government can't exist without taxing something that someone considers their "property." In other words, there simply can't be an absolute right to property. If the right to property is absolute, it's a meaningless and unenforceable right.

I don't know enough about the R-J's editorial board positions to know whether they're really serious about this position, or whether it's a tossed-off one-liner that isn't worth the trouble of rebutting. But rhetoric aside, it's astonishing that anyone would even jokingly assert that property taxes are wrong.