How to lower your property taxes by separating "school and state"

Strategies to achieve consensual schooling in your town.

Also published at: Substack

INTRODUCTION

Ron Rule asks:

“[New Hampshire] property taxes are getting out of hand. What can be done at the state level to cap the school budgets responsible for driving them up? #nhpolitics”

Education consumes about 50-60% of the average NH town.

For example, in 2023, the city of Manchester, NH spent $187 million out of a total budget of $357 million on education, or ~52% of the total city budget. (Manchester, 2024)

So substantially reducing property taxes will require divesting government schools, and shifting responsibility for education to consensual schools. (Ships, 2024-04-18)

However, passage of pro-consensual schooling laws will only happen if:

Towards that end, here are some strategies that pro-consensual schooling advocates can take to push to achieve separation of school and state. Although there is overlap, I’ve divided the strategies into three categories: POLITICAL, BUSINESS, and CULTURE. @handles refer to Twitter handles. Questions, comments, and suggestions are welcome!

POLITICAL

  1. Encourage @NHRepublicans and @LPNH leadership to make consensual schooling a top priority issue. (Fritz, 2024). Write up model legislation that establishes the “separation of school and state” in the New Hampshire constitution. Write up model legislation to strike down any laws (zoning, licensure) that raise the costs of providing daycare, creating microschools, homeschooling, etc.

  2. Send a copy of Richard Vedder’s book “Can Teacher’s Own Their Own Schools” (Vedder, 2015) to all NH politicians and government officials. (Scafidi, 2014)

  3. Donate to the Free State Project (@FreeStateNH). (Sorens, 2001). Offer scholarships to young libertarians who are willing to move to NH and run for office. Encourage them to run for the school boards, city councils, and zoning/planning commissions until pro-liberty individuals control every level of city government. (I recommend concentrating them in Concord initially, so that that it’s easy for them to lobby state officials.)

  4. Solicit libertarian activists to write up a pro-consensual schooling advocacy handbook along the lines of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” / Beautiful Trouble (Beautiful Trouble, 2024). Set up a non-profit to fund the creation of open source lobbying materials:

    • How to lobby manuals

    • Press kits

    • How to protest manuals

  5. Identify which pro-government school politicians are weakest. Offer scholarships to libertarians to move to their districts and vote / run against them. Offer scholarships to libertarians who have run for office in other states to run for office in NH instead.

  6. Start a pro-consensual schooling legal defense fund. Recruit pro-liberty lawyers/judges to move to NH. Create a warchest to defend against the inevitable legal attacks from teacher’s unions, Federal government, and other pro-government school organizations. Create a test case to strike down laws mandating government provision of education.

  7. Score politicians on their friendliness to pro-consensual schooling (similar to @nhliberty’s Gold Standard). Create a “Consensual Schooling Pledge” and invite NH politicians to sign it. (Similar to @GroverNorquist’s “Taxpayer Protection Pledge”). (Norquist, 2024) Publicize government school hypocrites (i.e. pro-government school politicians who send their own children to private schools.)

  8. Push for laws to make make NH more friendly to RVers, sailors, and “technomads”. They will be on the road/seas most of the time, and therefore, won’t need or want government schools.

  9. Push for legislation requiring any government official who earns money from state contracts to recuse themselves from budget votes where they face a conflict of interest. For example, teacher’s union leaders should not be voting on bills related to school funding:

    “…in addition to being the second ranking Democrat in the House, Doug Ley is the paid president of New Hampshire’s chapter of one of the country’s largest teachers unions - the American Federation of Teachers.” (McDermott, 2019)

  10. Encourage cities to pool end of year excess funds into urban wealth funds, rather than fritter away the money due to “use it or lose it” perverse incentives. (McBain, 2021) (Brady, 2019)

  11. Encourage cities to inventory and put government owned assets into urban wealth funds. Government owned assets are underutilized to such an extant that the revenues from using them more efficiently could completely replace property taxes in many cases:

“McAdams commissioned an inventory of government-owned real estate in Salt Lake County. The county then projected the value of these assets if they were used in the same ways as privately owned properties within 500 feet of government real estate.

The comparison yielded a “conservative” estimate that the value of the county’s holdings was $45 billion, a figure almost 45 times the county’s annual budget. “Whether that’s the exact number or not, there’s real value there,” McAdams says. “If you put a third of those assets into a mechanism yielding a three percent return, you’d have a new revenue source of roughly $450 million a year, more than we were generating from property tax.” (This isn’t theoretical — a single long-term lease of a city-owned parcel that was achieved based on the work McAdams began is bringing in $500,000 a year.)” (Smith, 2023) (Detter, 2017) (Ships, 2024-05-10)

BUSINESS

  1. Promote government school alternatives. For example:

  2. Recruit / educate businesses on the upsides of consensual schooling: lower taxes, better educated workforce, lower cost housing, etc. Encourage businesses to fund pro-consensual apprenticeship programs, scholarships, lobbying.

  3. Expand the Free Trade Zone in Portsmouth, NH. Recruit pro-liberty international businesses to move there. (Portsmouth, 2024) Create educational materials on making use of New Hampshire’s Opportunity Zones. Encourage pro-liberty business to make use of them. (Opportunity Zones, 2024).

  4. Build/finance inexpensive apartment housing. Rent only to libertarians.

  5. Build libertarian-only retirement communities. Encourage retirement age libertarians to move . Retired libertarians will have few school age children under their care, so they will prioritize lowering taxes over government school funding.

  6. Set up community run non-profit daycare centers.

  7. Push for legislation that encourages the development of free private cities (Gebel, 2018) to be developed in NH:

    • Celebration, FL (Stringham, 2010)

    • @CiudadMorazan (Lutter, 2024)

    • @ProsperaGlobal (Erdös Associates, 2024)

    • California Forever (Sramek, 2024)

    • Gurgaon (Krainin, 2016)

    • Jialong, China (Tabarrok, 2021)

  8. Fund the development of software to issue and trade social policy bonds in a decentralized, P2P, private fashion. Issue social policy bonds that only pay out if the property tax in your city drops below your desired level. Think @bisq_network @HavenoDEX, but for social policy bonds. Give such bonds to politicians/community leaders who have the power to reduce or promote the reduction of property taxes. (Horesh, 2024)

  9. Recruit seasteading activists to establish seasteads in New Hampshire waters off of Portsmouth. Recruit pro-liberty folks from around the world to live and work on the seasteads. Use the anchorage fees to fund a) urban wealth funds and b) the social policy bonds for consensual schooling reform (see below). (Blueseed, 2012)

CULTURE

  1. Recruit writers/musicians/filmmakers/commercial producers to create pro-consensual schooling media: books, cartoons, songs, documentaries. Think Tuttle Twins, Schoolhouse Rock, etc. Fund the creation of open source educational materials, such as:

    • homeschool manuals

    • how to finance/run tool libraries

    • how to finance/run community hackerspaces

    • apprenticeship manuals

  2. Start a chapters for the “Alliance for the Separation of School and State” in cities across New Hampshire. Recruit a figure like @RealSpikeCohen or @DeAngelisCorey to lead it.

  3. Encourage religious organizations (Catholics, Orthodox Jews, etc. ) to offer more scholarships for their schools.

  4. Do surveys to identify the best teachers in government schools. Offer them scholarships to switch to private schools. The more students / teachers who exit government schools, the less of constituency there will be for government school taxes.

REFERENCES

  1. (Blueseed, 2012) @MakesMarty @dandv @DarioMRM @Seasteading https://web.archive.org/web/20191205034624/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueseed#cite_ref-AP_5-0

  2. (Beautiful Trouble, 2024) https://web.archive.org/web/20231229070631/https://beautifultrouble.org/toolbox/tactic

  3. (Brady, 2019) https://www.ntu.org/library/doclib/2019/10/Use-it-Or-Lose-It-Spending-Surge-Evident-in-Race-to-Award-Federal-Contract-Before-End-of-FY-2019.pdf

  4. (Detter, 2017) https://www.amazon.com/Public-Wealth-Cities-Unlock-Prosperity/dp/0815729987/ref=sr_1_1?sr=8-1

  5. (Erdös Associates, 2024) https://info.prospera.hn/downloads/Higher%20Ground%20Education%20Case%20Study.pdf

  6. (Fritz, 2024) https://web.archive.org/web/20231205091635/https://schoolandstate.com/?page_id=58

  7. (Gebel, 2018) @freecitiesfound https://www.amazon.com/Free-Private-Cities-Governments-Compete/dp/1724391380

  8. (Har, 2024) https://web.archive.org/web/20240117115432/https://apnews.com/article/new-california-city-tech-silicon-valley-4097f0872c4e18ca9d75776e2d8974d9

  9. (Horesh, 2024) https://socialgoals.com/overview,-600-words.html (Krainin, 2024) https://reason.com/video/2016/12/15/gurgaon-india-private-city/

  10. (Lutter, 2024) CCIdotCity https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/blog-posts/ciudad-morazan-a-libertarian-city-without-any-libertarians

  11. (Manchester, 20204) https://web.archive.org/web/20240131191903/https://www.manchesternh.gov/departments/finance/budget-info

  12. (McBain, 2021) @JulienMcBain https://x.com/archerships/status/1773118527089602951

  13. (McDermott, 2019) https://web.archive.org/web/20231108201757/https://www.npr.org/2019/04/25/717021558/new-hampshires-lawmakers-have-conflicts-of-interest

  14. (Norquist, 2024) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Tax_Reform#Taxpayer_Protection_Pledge

  15. (Opportunity Zones, 2024) https://www.nheconomy.com/grow/opportunity-zones

  16. (Portsmouth, 2024) https://www.cityofportsmouth.com/economic/international-business

  17. (Scafidi, 2014) https://www.edchoice.org/engage/an-employee-stock-ownership-plan-for-americas-public-schools/

  18. (Ships, 2024-04-18) https://archerships.substack.com/p/children-of-the-state

  19. (Ships, 2024-05-10) https://archerships.substack.com/p/james-holdeen-and-the-great-unitarian

  20. (Smith, 2023) https://www.governing.com/community/are-local-governments-leaving-billions-on-the-table

  21. (Sorens, 2001) @JasonSorens https://ncc-1776.org/archives/tle2001/libe131-20010723-03.html

  22. (Sramek, 2024) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Forever

  23. (Stringham, 2010) @edstringham https://jrap.scholasticahq.com/api/v1/articles/8818-internalizing-externalities-through-private-zoning-the-case-of-walt-disney-company-s-celebration-florida.pdf

  24. (Tabarrok, 2021) @ATabarrok https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/03/chinas-private-city.html

  25. (Vedder, 2015) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0181NIS9C