Today we are going to talk about the formal justifications that governments use to tax people. How democracy is supposed to work is explained in the lesson Who Watches the Watchers, and the theft that is taxation is explained in Taxed to death No just into slavery. The bottom line is that through these processes you don’t own the government, the government owns you.
We need to look at the formalities that governments use to steal your money because governments need formalities to appear to be just and fair, which they are not. They need to appear so because otherwise they would have a revolution in their hands; it’s a smoke screen and nothing more.
In order to perpetuate this smoke screen, they created what they call the Justice System, which is obviously very unjust. They run taxation through the Justice System to appear fair.
The so-called power of governments to tax usually comes from some sort of founding document, constitution or a master document which was supposedly agreed by all the citizens of a country. This document states that the government is entitled to make and collect taxes.
This process is supposed to be fair because the government is supposed to be nothing more than the representation of the will of the people. Therefore, governments do not tax people, people tax people.
The point is that theoretically, formally or legally speaking, they seem to have the right to tax you and they do.
There are quite a lot of suppositions in there, as you may have noticed.
In reality, all this taxation process is nothing more than a scam, since politicians only represent themselves and the Democratic system is broken and completely disconnected from the people.
But what is the processes that countries use to impose taxation?
Taxing Intangibles
For intangibles, such as profits of any nature, they simply impose taxation because the master document or constitution allows them to do so, and that is enough. Matters not that most of the citizenship wasn’t born when the document was drafted and therefore there is no way that they had agreed to it. As usual, governments do whatever governments want to do simply because they can. The root reason why they can is this: they use force to impose their will on us.
Taxing Tangibles
When we come to tangible property, or more specific, certain types of properties that are large or widespread, such as lands or cars, the previous scheme or reason for taxing intangibles does not apply any more. Properties are not profits.
Most of us have a house or an apartment or a car from which we don’t make profits. How is it possible that they tax us on properties and cars if the reason for taxing intangibles does not apply?
Because it so happens that we don’t actually own neither our cars nor our lands. The government does. This is true. All cars and all lands are technically owned by the government, and because the government owns those properties, the government is allowed to charge rent on those properties. Of course, they don’t call it rent, they call it tax.
For example, for cars you have license plate taxes, driver license fees, highway fees and many other impositions, such as insurance, traffic laws and other terms and conditions. All these stem from the fact that we don’t actually actually own our cars.
The same is true for our land. We pay property taxes. But how is it possible that we need to pay property taxes when we purchased the property and we don’t own money to anybody? Simple, because we didn’t actually buy the property. We purchased what’s on top of the land. The land belongs to the government and as such the government is renting that land to us. Because of this, the government is entitled to charge rent. Again, they don’t call it rent, they call it property taxes.
In many English speaking countries, land is referred to as “Real Estate”. This term is not a leftover from dark ages, but a very legal term. It means “held of the Crown” or Crown’s property. That’s right, it is not your land, it is Crown’s land. When you “buy” property, you are actually signing a rental agreement with the Crown; you don’t “own” anything.
In order to understand how this works, we need to go back to first principles.
Originally, when you have land that it is without owner, if you occupy that land and you start working that land, it becomes yours. Because that land had no previous ownership, you are the absolute owner of that land.
This type of claim is called an allodial title. This title means that the property is your property and that you don’t own rent to anybody under any circumstance. Therefore governments have no right to charge taxes on those lands because you are the absolute owner of them. In Wikipedia Allodial you can find more information about this type of titles.
The same happens to your car. The original certificate of manufacturing, which would be the allodial title of your car, was originally created by the car’s manufacturer and sent to the government.
If this is the case, why is that you keep paying taxes for your car?
Simple. Governments typically destroy those records and create new documents stating, in essence, that that car indeed exists. Then they send you this document. But this document is not the original certificate of manufacturing (the actual allodial title) and without the original, you can’t claim ownership of the car. Meaning, that you are doomed to rent the car from the government forever.
Going back to lands, how did we go from allodial titles to everything being owned by the government? The transition was done by legal means without ever making it clear. What most governments did instead, is to declare that certain taxes needed to be paid on certain properties, typically lands. They justified those taxes based on the fact that they had an originary document that allowed them to do so. But the trick was that the document didn’t allow them to tax allodial properties. They just ignored this fact.
Remember that a property held in allodial title, being an absolute property, can be sold or rented to anybody without the government having any part in this process. But that never happened. People with allodial titles never sold or rented anything to the government. The government simply took over without ever saying that they were taking over.
Originally, taxes imposed in this manner were very low, and since people are differential machines they did not notice too much. Over time taxes grew and over many decades this excuse for taxation and this routine of taxing people become ingrained in law. Once this happened, once people got used to this scam, then justifications were created.
These excuses have different names in different countries such as Compulsory Purchase or Expropriation or Eminent Domain, which are all based on the theory that governments can simply take properties if these acts benefit society. Eminent Domain means “supreme lordship”. The question that remains unanswered is, how is it possible to have a supreme lordship with a higher hierarchical position on top on an absolute title? Answer: it is not possible. It is a fiction.
We have also seen why the concept of society is BS in the lesson Don’t talk to us about society, and so the government’s argument is also invalid for this reason.
However, what is most interesting is that governments created a circular argument. It goes something like this:
We tax your property. We ignore that is allodial. Because we have been taxing it for so long, now we have some sort of right on your property. That right says that your title is not allodial any longer because we have eminent domain. Therefore, we have the right to tax your property.
Which does not justify anything because the title is still allodial!!!
Or they simply declared that allodial titles had expiration times or were not transferable!!!
In most countries, governments simply declared that there are no more allodial titles. They did so directly (by abolishing allodial titles) or, more likely, indirectly by enacting expropriation laws. The sad situation is that nowadays an allodial title is more rare and precious than a living dodo bird.
Governments in and by themselves, without ever saying, have simply declared that all the lands in a country belong to the government. They overwrote all the existing rights, privileges, and property practices. The government simply declared ownership without previous occupation which is not an acceptable way to own un-owned land.
But as usual and right on cue, governments do whatever they want a do. They wrap their lies in a jungle of legal terms. They lie, cheat and ignore our rights. However, at the end of the day, all of this legal jungle doesn’t hide the fact that governments keep taxing our properties without any proper reason. Our titles are still allodial. It’s just that the government does not recognize that fact.
If our titles are not allodial, then it is up to the government to prove so. Alas, they can’t. Our titles can only originate from the following sources:
- we occupied un-owned land, hence our titles are allodial
- somebody holding the property in allodial title sold it to us, therefore our title is still allodial
- we purchased the property from the government, but since the government did not have the right to that property because it did not own it (occupy it) to begin with, we wasted our money but now our property is held in allodial title because we are occupying it
Which means that our titles are indeed allodial and we have been royally scammed. It does not matter what legal explanation they use, they are still committing fraud at a massive scale.
Tired of paying property taxes? Now you know. Keep paying them or join the evolution. Your choice.
Note: please see the Glossary if you are unfamiliar with certain words.
