Knappster has a couple of good posts on the tyranny of local government http://knappster.blogspot.com/2005/07/because-they-can-part-two.html . Local is not necessarily better than global, and local is probably worse in many ways because it has nothing better to do than get into your daily business. Anyone who has ever lived in a planned community or a coop can tell you horror stories about the “covenant fascists” that inhabit the boards of these entities. These are not “government”, per se, but they are a good example of the tendency of people close to you to be tyrants just as much as or more than the faceless bureaucrats in the capital. Your own neighbors are willing to drive you out of your home if you keep your Xmas lights up too long or plant the wrong flowers on your porch.
Towns, school districts, counties, and various “authorities” exercise power over the minute details of our lives. I can’t erect so much as a shed on my own property without clearing it with some functionary in Hopewell Junction. When a tree took down my power lines and the utility pole on my house, I actually had to get permission from the gang in Hopewell Junction to have my own house repaired. And start a business? Fuhgeddaboutit!
For this regulation and surveillance, we pay in property and school taxes more than some people pay for their entire mortgage, and one of the biggest obstacles to affordable housing in our area is the high property tax rate. You have to figure in payments of hundreds or a thousand dollars or more per month in taxes in addition to the cost of the house. What is most difficult for me to fathom is that homeowners appear to tolerate these tax rates with little protest. To some extent, this is because tax rates are even higher in Westchester and Putnam Counties to our south, and folks who have moved from those high tax areas think they are getting a bargain. Worse, they think nothing of voting for tax increases to subsidize the educations of their children.
The racket is to increase tax rates to improve the schools to increase home values to drive out the riff raff, etc. It’s tough to be the riff raff in these circumstances, and you simply aren’t allowed to question the program. Everyone wants good schools, right? Everyone wants his home values to go up, right? Only a complete troglodyte wouldn’t be on board with the better schools/new library/new police station/new jail/more extensive building code/(insert proposed local action). As such a troglodyte, I wish more of us would stand up and problematize what local government is up to. I would like to think that there are more troglodytes than local tyrants, and the only way to find out is to challenge the program.
I don’t see that I am getting anything out of these local tax payments or the income taxes I pay to Albany except to keep all these local and state authorities from abducting me and seizing my property. I have to pay for the privilege of living in my own home. If you add sales taxes, we probably pay more than a fifth of our earnings to state and local government. So at least one day a week that we toil, we do so entirely for the benefit of the parasites in Albany, Hopewell Junction or Carmel. This is a big deprivation of liberty in my book and is, in a sense, involuntary servitude. I do not have independent means and must work to live, and the state and locals take everything I make one day a week. The feds take the next day and a half, so we have to get by on half of our earnings. We don’t start working for ourselves until Wednesday afternoon.
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I could not agree more, there are many examples of bad local government, and I cannot figure out why people put up with it. We are conditioned to believe that oppressive government is natural. One of my colleagues told me that in her town, she needs a permit to add a screen door to her house. For what purpose, nobody knows, except her local government charges a fee for the permit.
When arguing the case between centralized federal government and local government, I usually make three points. First, I believe that our local governments take their cue from the federal government, which routinely interferes with our lives and produces the rationalization to do so (it is for the poor or for our protection). Second, I believe bad policies on the federal level are far more damaging to life and liberty than on the local level. Compare high property taxes to the number of wars the federal government starts. Third, local governments should be more accountable to voters than the federal government. The power of a single vote exponentially inversely relates to the size of the electorate. One vote on the federal scale is meaningless, while one vote in a local election is much more significant. In other words, as an individual you have a better chance of lowering your property taxes and loosening up local regulation than you have of ending the war in Iraq.
In any case, we must be as diligent at protecting our liberty from local governments as we are from the federal government.
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