As I was mowing my front lawn one day, I noticed a couple of large bikers stopped in the middle of my street. They seemed to be interested in what I was doing, but I figured they were looking for someone else's place, so I ignored them and continued mowing my lawn. When I made another pass and started heading back toward the street, the bearded men had moved their Harleys onto the sidewalk in front of my house. One had dismounted and it was clear they wanted to talk to me. I stopped the mower and approached them. "How's it goin'?" I asked in the most booming voice I could muster. The biker was holding some papers and alternated between looking confusedly at them and looking confusedly at my house. "Do you live here?" he asked. I replied that I did. He read my address from the paper he was holding and I confirmed that this was my address. "You ain't gonna like this", he said as he handed me the paper. It was a list of houses to be auctioned off in a tax sale which was to be held the next day. The burly bikers were checking out homes on the list and knew something was screwy when they found me in the middle of maintaining the property.
I was very confused because I knew that when we purchased the property the previous year we had arranged for our taxes to be included in our mortgage payment. And we had not missed a single payment. What the hell was going on here? One of the large men dialed up the county treasurer and I began trying to get to the bottom of the mystery. The person on the other end of the phone (not the actual treasurer) was very irritated that I was calling her late on a Friday. After some pleading on my part, she grudgingly looked up the info I was requesting. It turned out that my garage was on a lot that somehow didn't get included in my mortgage (apparently my house sits on 6 lots. It looks like 1 to me). They had the previous owner on the hook for the taxes and had been sending delinquent notices to our house. Since we don't read other people's mail, we would always put the envelopes back in the mailbox with the note "Doesn't live here" scrawled on them, never suspecting information we desperately needed was inside.
"Why didn't anyone warn us before it went up for auction?" I demanded. "We did send notification to the owner", she snapped back. I could almost hear her roll her eyes. I decided to try a different tack. "Ok, obviously there was some confusion and you guys are auctioning off the wrong house. You didn't know, but you do now. How can I get this auction stopped?" She responded that there was no way to stop the auction. "Is there any way to get it delayed?" Nope. Quite impossible. Especially late on a Friday afternoon. "Can you at least have it clarified that it is just the garage and not my house? People are going to bid thinking they are getting all of my property!" But her hands were tied. Absolutely nothing she could do. The county was completely powerless to do anything other than take my property away and sell it to someone else. So, my garage was auctioned off. The real estate company bought it from the winning bidder, put it in our name, and we were forced to pay back taxes on it.
Fast forward to this morning. My wife woke me in order to inform me that our van, which we had taken to a mechanic the day before, needed a part that the mechanic did not have in stock. Without this repair, we would have no air conditioning. It would take until tomorrow to get the part, and once they did get it, it would take 8 hours to do the job. This presented a huge problem because we are leaving for the Gulf Coast tomorrow! We cannot drag our small children (Ages: 10, 4, and 1) to the Deep South in the middle of July with no AC. I advised my wife to start calling other area mechanics to see if any of them had the part so that we could take the van there. Since I had worked the night before, and had only been asleep for a couple of hours by this point, I immediately returned to my slumber.
She reappeared after a time and woke me once more. She had been unable to locate any area mechanics who could help but she had called the dealership from which we had purchased the vehicle in the first place. They had sold us this van just last winter and assured us back then that the AC was working properly. We tried it out, and it seemed to work. Once the weather warmed up, my wife attempted to use the air conditioning on a trip to Cincinnati. It worked again...for part of the trip. It turned out that it was leaking freon. My wife was now calling to chew them out for putting us in this predicament. But they had some good news for us. They had the part in stock and could fix it in 2 hours. It would only cost $450. It made me wince to think about paying $450 to have them repair something they sold us as already functioning properly. But vacation looms and no one else can do it. Since the dealership is an hour away, and since I had to return to work in the afternoon, I got out of bed and watched the kids while my wife went and retrieved our van from one mechanic so that she could take it to another.
A couple of hours later, I received a text from my wife. She had more bad news. The dealership was claiming that they had run into further problems with the AC. They would not be able to finish the job until the next day and the new price was $650. My blood boiled. I had had enough. I called into the dealership and explained to them that I had no intentions of paying $650 and that I would instead pay the originally agreed upon price of $450. The customer service rep then launched into an explanation of what was wrong with the car and why we had incurred additional costs. I could tell he had no intention of lowering the price without a struggle. But unlike the lady from the treasurer's office a couple of years before, he was not rude. On the contrary, he remained extremely polite as I continually insisted that we would not pay a penny more than the $450 I already didn't want to pay. My tone was also different. Instead of fruitlessly pleading to the person on the other end of the phone to have mercy on me, I was giving the commands. 'You will fix the air conditioner. And I will only pay $450.' At last, the customer service rep agreed. I will only be charged $450. And I can now choose to cease business transactions with that particular seller.
Not so with the county government. The only way to escape the clutches of one thieving government is to run into the arms of another thieving government. The new government will have the same disconnect with consumers as the last. On the market, the customer is always right. But the various governments do not see you as a customer. They see you as a subject who must submit to their demands. If a business owner makes a habit of displeasing consumers, he will lose his business. The government might change faces from time to time, but the machine lives on. It continues to thrash all who oppose it.
Conclusion: On the market, the customer is the boss. When dealing with the government, those same customers cow to the will of state officials. We must shrink the public sector and let the private sector grow in order to increase our control of society.
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