Property owner: I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.
County: That’s the display department.
Property owner: With a torch.
County: Ah, well the lights had probably gone.
Property owner: So had the stairs.
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“With stories like this you can understand why many Americans hate “socialism”. They figure the state will just get more power to abuse people.”
So, just to get this straight, you are pointing to a terrible thing that happened in a Democratic society, and saying that socialism is bad because maybe it would be worse.
Than this thing.
That happened in a Democratic society.
That’s comedy gold, my friend.
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Democratic society white supremacist capitalist plutocracy.
Socialism and democracy are not in opposition. Rather the opposite, really.
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no, thats not what was said; thats why the “socialism” here is in quotes. at least as far as I understood.
That happened in a Democratic society
that is comedy gold. cause I dont see any “democratic” society anymore anywhere.
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At what point in American history was access to the ballot equally available to Americans of all races? Not just in theory, but in practice?
The USA has never been a democracy.
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You forgot genders as well. In Canada native aboriginals couldn’t vote until 1970’s but they could be drafted prior.
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And disenfranchised prisoners, and the undocumented, and the ethnically cleansed latinx Americans, and the people functionally disenfranchised by gerrymandering, voter suppression, bipartisan corruption, etc. etc. etc.
None of this represents a failure in the system; it all represents the system working as designed.
In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.
— James Madison, Statement (1787-06-26) as quoted in Notes of the Secret Debates of the Federal Convention of 1787 by Robert Yates
Or see here:
QUESTION: Do you see much evidence of a revolutionary spirit in the America of the 1990s?
CHOMSKY: You didn’t find evidence of it in the America of the 1790s. The Revolutionary War was an important event. But it was in the first place, to a significant extent, a civil war, as most revolutionary wars are. And it was a war of independence, as opposed to a revolution against the social structure. The social structure didn’t really change significantly. There were problems right after the war was done. For example, Shay’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion and so on were challenging the social structure, and there were efforts on the part of radical farmers to take seriously the meaning of the words in the revolutionary pamphlets, but that was pretty well quieted down.
If you go back to the record of the Constitutional Convention, which took place in 1787, almost immediately after the end of the war, you see that they are already moving in another direction. James Madison – who was the main framer, and one of the Founding Fathers who was most libertarian – makes it very clear that the new constitutional system must be designed so as to ensure that the government will, in his words, “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority” and bar the way to anything like agrarian reform. The determination was made that America could not allow functioning democracy, since people would use their political power to attack the wealth of the minority of the opulent. Therefore, Madison argues, the country should be placed in the hands of the wealthier set of men, as he put it.
QUESTION: Isn’t that erection of barriers to democracy woven through the entire history of the United States?
CHOMSKY: It goes back to the writing of the Constitution. They were pretty explicit. Madison saw a “danger” in democracy that was quite real and he responded to it. In fact, the“problem” was noticed a long time earlier. It’s clear in Aristotle’s “Politics,” the sort of founding book of political theory – which is a very careful and thoughtful analysis of the notion of democracy. Aristotle recognizes that, for him, that democracy had to be a welfare state; it had to use public revenues to ensure lasting prosperity for all and to ensure equality. That goes right through the Enlightenment. Madison recognized that, if the overwhelming majority is poor, and if the democracy is a functioning one, then they’ll use their electoral power to serve their own interest rather than the common good of all. Aristotle’s solution was, “OK, eliminate poverty.” Madison faced the same problem but his solution was the opposite: “Eliminate democracy.”
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Naive me, I thought all states had a Homestead law that allowed tax-delinquent homeowners to remain in place until death, and then the county would auction off the property, collect back taxes, and gift any excess profit to the heirs. Perhaps it is past time to have a federal homestead law to protect all residents from abuses like the one in this story.
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If a system works, why change the system? The entire looting program set in place in the late 70’s and given steroids since Bill Clinton (and super steroids since him) is working like a charm.
It’s probably going to result in severed heads, but while those heads remain intact, life is a party (for just those heads).
I wonder if posts like this land me on a list? It has to be a growing list, anyway.
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And let’s not forget that many Socialists oppose “Big Government”. For example, a guy named Lenin described one of the goals of Socialism as a…
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…“withering away of the state.”
Capitalists don’t want us to know things like that, of course, because they’re a dependent of Big Gov.
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Wouldn’t really help in this case. He didn’t live there. It was an investment property.
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It’s also worth noting that he said that he had tenants who were evicted as a part of this mess.
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I was specifically talking about why Americans worried about a bigger government. Go to Europe and while not perfect governments tend to work considerably better.
I didn’t catch that. If an investment, then it is a whole different game and he likely got what was coming for cheaping out not having a local rental firm manage the property. The story sounded like he was a destitute geezer out on the street.
He had interest on his tax payment, that means he was late already. Then he figured the interest himself and never checked to make sure he was clear with his taxes. And why didn’t he have his new address as his mailing address. Just saying, even though the laws seem screwy this situation was not unavoidable.
Here’s one “advantage” of the slow and bureaucratic justice system in Brazil: if you owe property tax the city may take your home, but there are laws that protect it if its your only home, and when the city can take over it, it takes months or years, and there are many steps involved. In any case the debtor always knows exactly what is he owing, and there are lots of leniency on late payments. I personally have never seen or read about anyone losing their property due to taxes (but there are far too many that do lose it due to non payment of mortgages).
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They seized one of his houses, not his home. And that was after much negligence on his part, not just the initial $9 mistake. The fact that the county can auction his property and just keep the money is ridiculous, but let’s not misrepresent the facts here.
Yet this example is of a very small governmental unit. The only folks that would equate this with big scary Socialism are those that don’t use dictionaries.
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Laws passed by DEMOCRATs that smile and say this is for the good of all people.
