Today’s Feudalism: Your Property Is Not Your Own

When you purchase a home, or other piece of real estate, you assume that you now have a bit of private property on which you may do what you wish, as long as you are not violating the rights of others.

If you assume this, you would be wrong.

First, there is the tax collector. In many localities, the city, county and state all extract property taxes from owners of real estate. Fail to pay these taxes and you’ll find out quickly that the rights to that property you assumed you had don’t exist in actuality.

Here’s what happens in Riverside, California if you don’t deliver your property taxes to the city:

Q. What happens if I fail to pay my delinquent taxes?

A. Your taxes can remain unpaid for a maximum of five years following their tax default, at which time your property becomes subject to the power of sale. This means that after giving official notice of the pending sale, the property will be sold at a public auction or acquired by a public agency if you do not pay the taxes before the date on which the property is offered for sale or acquisition.

Again, this is not unique to Riverside, CA — you’ll find this in many places around the country.

Nor may you use your property as you wish even if you make your tax payments.

Consider the case of the Salman family from Phoenix, Arizona.

Michael Salman, father of six, has been inviting friends and family to his home for a Bible study for the past several years. To this, the city objects, and is now planning on jailing Salman for two months and fining him $12,000 for his “crime” of inviting people to what he mistakenly believed was “his” home.

According to the city, Salman violated city zoning and permitting requirements.

“It came down to zoning and proper permitting,” assistant city prosecutor Vicki Hill told Fox News Radio according to the Daily Mail. “Any time you are holding a gathering of people continuously as he does — we have concerns about people being able to exit the facility properly in case there is a fire.”

Salman, the Daily Mail reports, has pointed out that Phoenix officials have not similarly ruled against the millions of people who have weekly parties for Monday Night Football or for poker.

“But when someone says to us we are not allowed to gather because of religious purposes – that is when you have discrimination,” he told 3TV according to the Daily Mail.

This suggests that the remedy would be to violate everyone’s property rights much more thoroughly. The real remedy would be to stop violating everyone’s property rights.

But, that won’t happen as long as American officials at all levels of government remain pathologically attracted to feudalism.

Such a statement may seem questionable, or even outrageous. This is, after all, the 21st century, not the 11th or 12th or 13th. But, consider this description of England from that time by historian M.H. Keen:

Those who were villeins by blood, as most virgaters and half-virgaters and many cottagers were, were bound to the soil of the manor and could not leave it without the lord’s license. They must pay the lord merchet, a fine when their daughters married, and leyrwite, if one of them was got with a child outside wedlock. From his manorial (or ‘customary’) tenants, the lord would take a heriot, the best beast, when the tenant died, and the heir must pay a fine to enter his inheritance. The profits of the manorial court were the lord’s. The mill was usually a seigneurial monopoly. Altogether the lord’s rights and demands could eat a long way into such profit as his tenants made from their holdings, while the demands of his own farming, for profit and for the supply his household, always took priority over theirs…. Once again, we see all the advantages of the system working in the landlord’s favour.(1)

Though the terminology is archaic, it is clear that this system sets the precedent for today. Marriage licenses, though not onerously expensive, are still required. The government no longer takes, in a literal sense, the “best beast” upon the death of the owner, but inheritance is still heavily taxed. Currently, the government doesn’t own “the mill.” But for decades government has been regulating businesses of all types, and that regulation becomes more extreme and thorough by the year. Having gained effective control over what businesses may do, at what point does it become obvious that government may as well just take over outright ownership of businesses? Finally, who would say that the present situation differs for most Americans from the feudal situation for most people of medieval England when, as then, the government’s “rights and demands … eat a long way into the profits of its” citizens?

The Americans of the 18th century fought a revolution to throw off the feudal tyranny of the medieval world and establish a republic for the express purpose of protecting property rights. Against unimaginable odds, they succeeded brilliantly.

Sadly, the Americans of the 20th century grew ignorant of their forefather’s achievement and allowed the return of feudalism and tyranny. Now, the Americans of the 21st century will wear the shackles of this betrayal.

Read the article with notes at http://www.themoralliberal.com/2012/07/10/todays-feudalism-your-property-is-not-your-own/