Yesterday I got a mailing from the Board of Chosen Freeholders of Union County, NJ, where I live. In it, along with the usual bunch of self-congratulatory promotional boilerplate wherein the freeholders took credit for everything short of the sun rising this morning, was this statement:
We are supporting a citizens' convention of property taxes and any other measures that would reform New Jersey's system of property taxation.
Well, I have a modest proposal for the citizens of this convention: Let's give New Jersey back to the Proprietors.
First, a word of background for those not familiar with the quaint ways of the Garden State.
New Jersey was originally two colonies, East and West Jersey, granted to Berkeley and Carteret as proprietors by Charles II of England in 1664. The original proprietors were largely land speculators, and shortly thereafter sold their interests to others, mostly Scots in East Jersey and Quakers in West Jersey. East and West Jersey were combined in 1702, and became an independent royal colony in 1738, but Thomas Paine, writing at the time of the revolution spoke about how Howe would "ravage the defenceless Jerseys" referring to them in the plural. I'll return to this plurality in a moment. The important thing to remember is that the descendants of the Proprietors still exist, and meet annually at the proprietors' house in Perth Amboy. They retained a statutory function, as receivers of abandoned property, until our current constitution (which our Freeholders are so eager to overturn) in 1947. New Jersey was the original Red State, containing many Royalists, and in fact we are the only state with its original royal governors mansion (again, in Perth Amboy) which in other states survived about as long as statues of King George III. Our county legislators are called "chosen freeholders" from the original practice of only allowing property owners (not leaseholders) to vote.
In the current day, New Jersey is paralyzed by a principle known as "home rule" where whenever two or three are gathered together they can form a city or township or school district or commission with it's own administration and taxing authority, all with conflicting and overlapping responsibilities. Everyone is up in arms against our high property taxes, but no one can say a word against home rule because everyone loves their own little school district, or whatever. I believe that this tendency is a direct descendent of our colonial heritage of each settler for himself, and to hell with everybody else. Today New Jersey is a collection of desperate cities embedded in prosperous suburbs, and a collection of governments which are mostly dens of thieves because the electorate is not paying attention.
I have a solution to this dilemma, which the proposed constitutional convention could easily implement. Our legislators, in Washington, in the face of an unprecedented national catastrophe, are proposing to repeal the estate tax. This would do more to establish a hereditary oligarchy than anything since the British were defeated at Yorktown. Here in New Jersey we have a leg up on the competition: we already have a hereditary nobility, our Proprietors. I say, let's give New Jersey back to them. They can hardly make a worse mess of things than our current government. We can lease our properties back from them like the owners of houses in Ocean Grove lease the land from the Camp Meeting Association. Since all property taxes will be paid by a handful of proprietors, they will have unprecedented leverage to see that they are spent wisely for the improvement of their landholdings. They could undoubtedly use their influence to cause their tenants to vote in block, to create real accountability in government.
A lot of the original Proprietors were Quakers. Maybe some of them still are. They could use their traditional concerns for non-violence, for education and prison reform for the betterment of the state. No property owner is going to want to to let their holdings to fall into decay. The proprietors could use the threat of eviction and the power of block voting to bring real reform to our woe-begotten cities. A sick tenant or an ill-educated tenant is a poor tenant: The proprietors would have a real incentive to bring reform to our school, and our health care system.
A few people might say, Wait! This is our land! You can't take it away from us and give it to someone else! To those, I would say, tell it to the Lenape.
I look forward with great interest to see what fine proposals our constitutional tinkers will propose. They could go further and do worse that to give the whole mess back to those who created it in the first place.