[geebee]

I'm ok with some karma for the deliquent homeowners, but I see no reason why this should turn into a giant cash prize for a private citizen.

I have noticed that people who support the buyers tend to point out the problem with wealthy and powerful people getting special treatment. I'm against that, but it doesn't remove my distaste for making money this way.

[mikeash]

What did the buyers do that’s so awful? As far as I know, they were going to charge a reasonable rate for parking to cover maintenance and their $90,000 purchase price. It’s not like they were going to start charging a toll or something. They wouldn’t be legally able to anyway. Nobody was being forced to pay the buyers anything, they just had the option of paying to park.

What would you say should have happened here? I don’t see what else you could do with this land if you bought it. If the city didn’t auction it off, then why would anyone ever pay their taxes again?

[geebee]

It's clear that we disagree about the nature of this tax bill, why it wasn't paid, and whether it's appropriate for the government auction off private property under these circumstances.

The strongest argument I've read here on HN is that if the wealthy and powerful don't experience the injustice of their own laws, they won't change them - and that less connected and wealthy residents would not have gotten a similar rescue from government.

[mikeash]

I’ll ask again, what do you think should have happened here? Auctioning off delinquent property isn’t great, but I have trouble coming up with something better.

[geebee]

So, what should have happened here? Not this.

OK, ok, you're asking, what should have happened, not what shouldn't have happened. I can't say it's a totally unfair question. It probably would be worth thinking this through.

But overall, I don't really feel like I need to propose a new a system for collecting minuscule delinquent property tax bills that doesn't involve selling off massively valuable property at auction to point out that this is a really bad and completely unnecessary outcome. Guess that's so obvious to me that I just don't feel inclined to engage with the question.

[mikeash]

I think you do, at least if you want to convincingly argue that this shouldn’t have happened. The existence of a better way is decidedly non-obvious.

It’s not as if there’s a bunch of standard alternatives they could have used. Traditionally, taxation is enforced by garnishing wages, forcibly withdrawing money from accounts, seizing property, or putting people in jail. None of these were possible here except for seizing property. The only alternative I see is to just let delinquents get away with not paying taxes forever, which defeats the whole purpose of taxes.