This commentary from Susan Handelsman appeared where folks are not likely to find it, so I thought I’d publish it here:

We citizens are advised that the only way to survive against marauding tax-raids by our county-level rulers is to individually protest property assessments.

This means we are restricted to trying to save ourselves by beggaring our literal neighbors.

I do not believe we have leaders in government now, only rulers.

Leaders put themselves at risk alongside their brothers.

Any individual receiving public salary/benefits with COLA, holding a higher secured creditor priority that private debt, cannot claim Leadership title.

A Leader would rally us to work together with our neighbors to reach compromises that help one another, rather than pitting us against one other as adversaries, encouraged to grab a bit of the pie before our neighbor gets it.

Rulers set citizens adversarial to each other and benefit themselves in the process.

A Leader would not coincidentally inordinately benefit from policies set under his watch.

Nobody is listening to pleas from homeowners for property tax relief.

It is therefore insane to expect that further pleading, or appeals to honor or logic, will lead to change in policy.

Is there any alternative?

Could the money each of us might spen

for a real estate tax assessment analysis attorney be better spent by hiring attorneys to explore radical solutions, such as forcing closure of entities this county cannot afford to support (MCC?), or demanding free market competition to monopolistic public school free-spending practices?

Could citizens petition ‘higher powers’ to help police out-of-control spending by local government (one California county recently had to resort to that, and Federal government did step in).

McHenry County tax policy in the past few years seems similar in nature to the classic “reverse-pump and dump” scheme I witnessed employed in Zimbabwe since 2000:

1. Government/ministers set public policy (encouraged through state-controlled media) such that business or landowners could not survive the marauding onslaught. In Zimbabwe, for example, government ‘price-fixed’ the cost of milk below the production costs: “it’s for the children”.

2. There was no way to produce milk for sale at well below cost-of-production. Milk could not be bought in neighboring countries (South Africa, Botswana) at anywhere near the Zimbabwe ‘fixed price’, it would have had to be purchased at above the fixed rate. SA and Botswana would not accept the Zimbabwe dollar currency as it was being printed without restraint by Zim equivalent of our Federal Reserve. The Zim currency had no value, even within Zim it was effectively worthless.
Within a short time, dairies and farms and retail operators had no milk to sell.

3. Government/ministers raised public cries for ‘justice’ and ‘help the children’ against the ‘murderous greedy (farm owners, retail operators) interests who are starving the children’.

4. Farms and stores went dark.

5. In rapidly transacted, secretive, private deals, property ownership of bankrupt farms and stores was transferred to government ministers, for nominal consideration paid.

6. Once ownership was transferred to government ministers and insiders, the public policy restrictions were lifted, milk prices free-floated higher to well above production costs, and despite very high milk prices, no more public media accusations were heard about ‘starving and murdering children’.

Will this happen here?

To my eye, it looks like we are in the portion of the program akin to devastating the value of property through legal taxation and enforced with public approval due to some vague implied ‘benefit to children’.

The end game parallel would need to be determined by scrutiny of who ends up buying the devalued property, and their connections (if any) to those empowered to have engendered our property devaluation crisis.

Whatever we have been doing is not working.

We have a property tax rate in the uppermost bracket of the nation.

California mansions pay lower taxes than Woodstock bungalows.

Our schools are not producing exceptional test results befitting their top-bracket-funding.

Our property values decrease annually–how can that not be correlated to our ever-escalating property tax rate, when property values in most every American community but ours are back at pre-recession-crash levels?

Time to think outside the box.

We do not have the luxury of time to survive our own rulers’ policy.

Any ideas about a novel legal strategy to protect ourselves from our rulers’ taxation policy?

Nobody wants to have to resort to extreme and expensive legal tactics, but even frogs slow-boiling in a pot at some point realize they have little time left to try to survive, and few options for survival methodology.

(What a better place we might inhabit if we were not pitted against one another as adversaries, but encouraged to reach mutually agreeable solutions as brothers within a community. If a political candidate with such a platform exists, could this be made known?).