Civil forfeiture obviously gets a bad name from police departments in the US that have devolved into theft rings with help from the FBI and the justice system. I’m not sure as an enforcement tool it is really the problem. Deeply corrupt police departments all across the US stealing things is the problem. There’s a deep body of case law in Canada on how administrative law works, and our courts are way more independent in the ones in the US that prop up their system of theft by cops.
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There was a tragicomic effort by the owners of multimillion dollar second homes to generate some protest against this fairly modest tax. Unsurprisingly they found little sympathy among the rest of us.
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Do these concepts really work? How do you monitor whether a house is empty without massive privacy violations? And requiring a passport makes sense, until you realize that such a move puts pressure on passport agencies, and that system will only be as strong as its missing link. For example, my wife’s old library started a passport agency, and really pushed for increased volumes. They would be susceptible to fraudulent appliers for passports, and they wouldn’t have the resources to watch against certain types of fraud.
I think you’re onto something, but I’ll bet the measures would end up being super-complicated.
In my area, property taxes keep increasing every year - whether or not the school district receiving the money needs it. People on fixed incomes or those with wages too low to pay the taxes go through foreclosure in numbers that increase every year. During the last election cycle, the candidates for county sheriff pointed out that foreclosure eviction proceedings and the tax sales that precede them have become the main part of the job. When new homeowners come in, and the tax rates are reset/raised, the municipality profits. Are they encouraging it by raising the rates regardless of need? Probably so.
I hope that you never see the seizing of property become as common as it is here. I wish that it wasn’t possible, but over the past couple of decades the lawsuits filed in attempts to stop this cycle have failed. Of course it doesn’t help that the courts and laws favor the government enabling this and banking lobbyists in pursuit of increasing profits.
“How do you monitor a house being empty or not without massive privacy violations?” a) Maybe track power and water usage? b) When people say ‘privacy,’ 90% of the time they mean ‘I want to break the law and not get caught.’ So I don’t mind invading the ‘privacy’ or crimelords, speculators and other absentee owners. “This move puts pressure on Passport Agencies.” a) Good and b) Still less of a concern than crimelords, speculators and absentee owners.
I grew up in Canada, so I have experience with a functioning government that makes efforts to improve people’s lives; your experience may be different.
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Okay, but I’d also argue that buying a house in one payment with no financing or anything similar is sketchy as hell and should trigger SOME kind of automatic review/audit/ etc.
I am in strong agreement with most everything you’ve said in this thread, but I must take issue with the above.
I understand that this is likely the reason I must disagree with your position on privacy.
I agree, it would be tricky and invasive; maintaining a society is tricky and invasive, and you don’t always get to do what you want to do. I think that privacy is fine when you’re talking about people’s personal lives and effects, but finance can and should be utterly transparent so we know that we’re not boning each other oer a few nickels. It’s just that most pro-“privacy” arguments are libertarian, and libertarians are, uh, not that clever? Yes, those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither, but if you’re arguing that, under your idea of privacy, people have the right to cheat on their taxes, hide behind shell companies and buy houses they never intent to live in, then that’s an extreme idea of privacy that damages, if not negates, any common good.
Everything I’ve read from every region of the world leads me to believe that at least 30% of all luxury real estate transactions are actually money laundering operations. Trmp has been involved in this scam since at least the 1980s and it is my fervent wish that this aspect of Trmp’s criminality is not ignored as his house of cards collapses.
Or as Francis Urquhart would say, "You might very well think that but I couldn’t possibly comment. "
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A functioning government without concern for privacy isn’t one I’d want to live in.
In addition, the question is how expensive such an undertaking would be, or how easy it would be to undermine the intent of these undertakings. For example. if you’re tracking water usage, what’s keeping me from just running the taps on end? That’s not a very good solution.
My suspicion is that if it were that easy to track how often a property is occupied, cities would do it now. A city works best for all when it’s thriving, when people are actively participating in society, using transit, participating in commerce, and paying taxes.
I work in Brooklyn. I have a clear view of the skyline in Manhattan. There are so many new towers popping up in the city. Many of these new towers will be unoccupied, inconvenient monstrosities forced upon those who live and work in Manhattan. It’s a shame. A beautiful skyscaper is really wonderful, a testimony of the industriousness and ambition of man. These new towers are ugly reeds, useless and empty.
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