Pacific Legal Foundation Archives - Common Sense with Paul Jacob

In 1994, Scott Pung won exemption from a school tax. He died in 2004. But years later, a local tax assessor contended that his widow, now also deceased, should have submitted new paperwork to retain the exemption.

Pacific Legal Foundation observes that according to state law, “the exemption continues as long as family members continue to live in the home. . . . Based on her misreading of the law, the tax assessor retroactively denied the exemption for several previous years.”

The estate’s administrator, Mike Pung, got nowhere trying to explain things to the tax assessor. So he brought his case to the Michigan Tax Tribunal. The tribunal ruled in favor of the Pungs.

Didn’t matter. When Mike paid the property taxes for 2012, the assessor called it an underpayment, since payment for the tax that the Pungs did not owe had not been included.

Mike still refused to pay the school tax. So the county grabbed the home that it had assessed at $200,000 and auctioned it for $76,000 to recover the amount of that tax.

With PLF’s help, the Pungs ultimately received $73,000 of this amount, less than half the home’s assessed value. Now PLF is headed to the Supreme Court to make the case for further compensation.

Chances are good. Two years ago, the Supreme Court affirmed in other PLF litigation that local governments “are not allowed to abuse the tax system to take more from families than is owed.”

Or not owed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Stark Protectionism

The markets of the ancient world were often sewn up by kings and courts and priesthoods. In Egypt or Assyria or Rome, you had to pay off a guild to practice a trade, at least if yours was a common craft, and even ask permission of the sovereign.

Closed entry was the norm, and it certainly contributed to the age’s forbidding pyramid of wealth (which overshadows present One Percenter concerns): Vast hordes of the very poor and the “just scraping by”; tradesmen; slaves to the landed and wealthy; and then the very few rich and powerful. In Europe, this system opened up, in fits and starts, after the fall of Rome, but the basic idea was retained in the policy of mercantilism, against which Anders Chydenius, Adam Smith, and the exponents of laissez faire argued so persuasively. The social advantages of competition for customers and laborers and capital became widely recognized.

And yet free trade never won full sway anywhere.

Cut to today. Dateline: St. Louis, Missouri.

Michael Munie wanted to go into the moving business, but needed the permission of . . . his competitors.

This, the very opposite of “free enterprise,” is the living embodiment of mercantilist “public-private” collusion, where the state secures existing businesses from “upstart” competitors in what Timothy Sandefur calls “an especially stark example of legislative protectionism.”

So, best wishes to Mr. Munie’s lawsuit, Munie v. Skouby, and the Pacific Legal Foundation, which has helped him bring it. Freedom requires the breaking down of barriers to business entry. Always has. Always will.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.