For all of the recent focus, including my own, on the debt ceiling drama playing out in Washington, it’s critical to remember that some of the biggest and most frequent challenges to limited government, individual liberty and fiscal restraint come from local elected officials.
Local governments have enormous power over our daily lives. And sometimes, these local pols can be as greedy and grasping as the most notorious federal grandee. A recent Supreme Court decision involving a 94-year-old Hennepin County, Minnesota resident and the local officials who seized her home due to an unpaid tax balance is a case in point.
As SCOTUSblog’s Amy Howe writes:
In 2016, a Minnesota county sold 94-year-old Geraldine Tyler’s condo at auction after she failed to pay her property taxes for several years. The sale yielded $40,000; Hennepin County kept not only the $15,000 in taxes, penalties, and costs that Tyler owed it, but also the $25,000 that was left over. The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the county’s actions violated the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause, which bars the government from taking private property for public use without adequately compensating the property owner.
And the court did so with a firm, clear – and unanimous – opinion:
[Chief Justice John] Roberts [wrote] that “property rights cannot be so easily manipulated.” Indeed, Roberts observed, even Minnesota itself “recognizes that in other contexts a property owner is entitled to the surplus in excess of her debt.” Although the county can sell Tyler’s condo to recover the $15,000 that she owes it, Roberts wrote, it cannot “use the toehold of the tax debt to confiscate more property than was due.” By keeping the $25,000, Roberts concluded, the county “effected a ‘classic taking in which the government directly appropriates private property for its own use.’”
Just in case local government types couldn’t understand the point, Roberts made it even simpler:
A taxpayer who loses her $40,000 house to the State to fulfill a $15,000 tax debt has made a far greater contribution to the public fisc than she owed. The taxpayer must render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but no more.
That should be self-evident to anyone outside a city hall or county government complex. Alas, the limits of government power have to be reiterated more frequently than they should. The reason: local pols often think that because so few are watching what they do, they can get away with just about anything. Up to and including seizing an elderly woman’s home, selling it, and pocketing the profit. Though none dare call it what it really is: government-sponsored thievery.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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Local Govts ALL should show Fiscal responsability
I believe MN has turned both totalitarian and Satanic: it allows Satanism on an equal footing with other religions. That says a lot to me.