Property taxes (WAS: On Nh living and commutes..)

[Derek Martin]

On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 11:47:13AM -0700, Michael Costolo wrote:
> --- Derek Martin <invalid at pizzashack.org> wrote:
> > Or something.  Democracy is a myth.  I think it's only really
> > democracy if most everyone participates, and makes informed decisions.
> > And votes for what they truly believe in...  
> 
> That is the point of voting, n'est-ce pas?

Non, il n'est pas.

The point of voting is to make people _feel_ empowered.  Only in some
cases is it actually useful, generally at the most local levels of
government.  Even if it /were/ the point, the fact is that:

1. the overwhelming majority don't vote.  Note that I'm not
   complaining; I think they have good reason not to.

2. Of those that do, a shamefully large percentage do not understand
   the isssues they are voting for, nor the positions of the people
   form whom they cast their ballots...

3. Few people these days believe in their candidates, or for that
   matter even know who they are.  How many people who voted for Bush
   really wanted him as a president?  Many simply thought he was
   better than Gore.  The lesser of two evils is no way to elect a
   leader.  People need REAL choices, before there can be democracy.
   As for local candidates, many people have never heard of their
   councilmember or selectman candidates until they saw their name on
   the ballot.  And ballot issues are all some watered-down version of
   some idea concocted to make it look like the government is really
   trying to solve some problem, when all they end up really doing is
   lining someone else's pockets with government contract money.

The combination of these three factors, in the common case, makes
voting all but useless.

The American system may (or may not) be the best government system on
the planet, but it doesn't have much for competition.  In practice,
it's still the people with money and power who end up making the real
decisions, just like everywhere else on the planet.

> > > Of course that same democracy could be used to amend or even
> > > eliminate the historical district if it was the will of the people.
> > 
> > Apathy in action: the reverse will never happen because no one will
> > vote it down unless they are unfavorably affected by it.  
> 
> As evidenced by what, exactly?  Laws change all the time.

We're talking about zoning of historical landmarks and/or districts.
Can you point to a case where one has been de-zoned?

> > The people affected are invariably a small minority, and stand no
> > chance.  Historical district laws are well-intentioned, I'm
> > sure...  But they're also inherently unfair.  
> 
> Unfair as defined by what?  

I answered this question already.

> If someone purchases a historic piece of property in a town and
> wants to raze it to build a Wal-Mart, are not the citizens of that
> town entitled to their say?  

I covered this case already.  This comes under the header of, "until
and unless they become a nuisance to the community at large."  Is that
somehow not clear?  But being prevented from removing or even
rebuilding my broken-down barn hardly qualifies as a public
nuisance...  It's my damned (hypothetical) barn!

Additionally, you need not have a historic landmark law to enforce
this kind of thing.  There are other existing laws to deal with your
Walmart case.

Finally, Walmart is not a citizen, it is a business.  Once I decide to
create a hazardous waste dump on my property, I am also a business,
even if I am only a single citizen.  Different laws should certainly
apply to businesses than to citizens.  Their goals are very different:
by and large citizens just want to be left alone to live in peace,
whereas businesses want to maximize profits, often to the detriment of
the local community, and sometimes even consumers in general.
  
> > These laws allow some empassioned citizens to essentially dictate what
> > some OTHER group of citizens can and can't do with their own property.
> 
> To some extent, yes.  Is this always bad?  No.  Can/has it been
> abused?  Certainly.

What is always bad is whenever it does happen, the private land owner
gets screwed.  When such a zoning goes into effect, the owner loses
rights to their own property, to a large extent, and it becomes more
difficult to sell for the same reasons, and they receive no
compensation for all this.  I'd love to see you try to explain how
that's not unfair.

> > Preserving historical monuments always sounds like a good idea, so
> > many citizens will vote in favor of such laws without considering the
> > actual owners of the property in question, or often (like in any other
> > case) vote without even understanding what the issue is.  Once the
> > unfortunate travesty has passed, it's virtually impossible for the
> > land owner(s) who have been wronged to do anything about it.
> 
> I suppose that is one way of looking at it.  But when it comes to
> people who purchase (not inherit) historic property, the onus is on
> the purchaser to understand what he is getting into.  Caveat emptor.

I'm not talking about the dumb shmuck who buys the property, I'm
talking about the poor shmuck who was unlucky enough to have owned the
wrong parcel of land when the new zone was voted in.

> > If people want historical districts, then they should be required to
> > BUY the land being turned into a historical district.  No one should
> > be able to decide what another person does with their property, until
> > and unless their actions are a genuine nuisance to the community at
> > large.
> 
> Unfortunately, "genuine nuisance" is a subjective term.  Which makes
> it vague and difficult to determine if it exists.

Precisely why it should take more than a handful of empassioned
lunatics [not that all who vote on zoning issues are empassioned
lunatics] at a town meeting to vote in favor of something like
this...  Like, maybe you shouldn't be allowed to vote on a re-zoning
of a district, unless you live in that district, or at a property
which is immediately adjacent to it.  Or, if you feel the whole
community should have a say, then it should take a majority of the
/citizens/ to pass such a measure... not just a majority of the 15
people who show up at the town meeting.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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