The Police State & Property Taxes…What You Can Do About It

A police officer pulled over Floyd Dent for a routine traffic stop.

A violent altercation followed.

The officer dragged Dent out of his car, appeared to put him in a chokehold, and punched him in the head. He then used his stun gun.

A disturbing but hardly unique encounter. These kinds of things happen all the time. It seems like there’s a new police abuse video uploaded to YouTube every day. In many cases, these incidents turn deadly. Dent is lucky the officer didn’t kill him on the spot.

But what’s really remarkable about this incident is that there was any kind of accountability at all. In many cases, the government and the fawning mainstream media sweep cases of police abuse under the rug. The State is extremely reluctant to hold its enforcers to account. But sometimes it’s forced to when overwhelming video evidence comes to light that sparks public outrage.

Once a video of the Dent incident became public, the officer lost his job. He’s now on trial, facing charges of mistreatment of a prisoner.

Dent also decided to sue the city of Inkster, Michigan, where the incident occurred. Surprisingly, he won. The city of Inkster settled for $1.4 million.

The problem is, Inkster doesn’t just have an extra $1.4 million laying around. So what did the local politicians do? They decided to squeeze a little extra juice out of the taxpayers, of course. They did this by raising property taxes.

A local media source estimates the new property tax will amount to about $179 on a home valued at about $55,400.

Now that doesn’t sound like a lot. But consider that the median income in Inkster is just $26,500 and that 40% of its people live below the poverty line. They simply don’t have an extra $179 to pay for a police abuse lawsuit which had nothing to do with them. The case has outraged people there, and rightly so.

There are a lot of things that are outrageous about this story. But there’s one that I find most instructive. And that’s the very concept of property tax. It’s an insidious perversion of property rights. How can you think you really own something that the government forces you to pay an insatiable and ever-increasing amount of tax on?