Citizens Literally Disband Town To Get Relief from Oppressive Taxes
As Benjamin Franklin, the oldest and arguably wisest Founding Father, once said, “In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.”
According to WCPO-TV in Cincinnati, however, the people of Amelia, Ohio, believing local tax policy and leadership had begun to verge on tyrannical in recent years, took drastic action last month to evade the excessive burden of Franklin’s second unavoidable reality of life.
Disgusted with “cover-ups” by town officials regarding misuses of public funds and infuriated by an income tax increase passed by the city council in an unannounced 2018 vote, residents banded together with a common goal: to trim away layers of government waste.
On Nov. 5, the people of Amelia did the unimaginable to make that happen — voting 843-479 to entirely dissolve the 117-year-old village and its government.
Facing an unpopular new tax, voters in the 119-year-old village of Amelia, Ohio went to the polls and just… abolished their local government. https://t.co/9CzW5YaCuS
— Tax Foundation (@taxfoundation) December 2, 2019
Just under three weeks later, the unincorporated community of less than 5,000 had officially dissolved, preparing to be absorbed into neighboring townships Pierce and Batavia.
A largely upper-middle-class town, according to The New York Times, somehow watching their taxes raised year after year despite a massive influx in population, the citizens were beginning to wonder where their money was going.
Most recently, hundreds of thousands of dollars reportedly had been poured into renovating the town’s governmental offices into “a Victorian-style building, with a lion door-knocker, chandeliers on the ceiling and a gazebo in the backyard.”
“I would think every American would say, ‘What am I getting?'” said former council member Renee Gerber, who was arrested while protesting during a meeting last year. “We don’t want our hard-working dollars to be misspent.”
Ed McCoy, a 53-year-old salesman and Amelia native, told The Times that there were “just too many layers of [government] fat.”
“The best way to get rid of that fat,” he told the outlet, was “to start at the bottom.”
Apparently, the residents of Amelia were schooled in the wisdom of the Declaration of Independence.
A wisdom that suggests, “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of [its obligation to the People], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.”
Now, one would be foolish to suggest that the taking of such revolutionary measures should ever be the American people’s first reflex.
Such measures are reserved only for the most pressing of circumstances.
To take a lead from the Founding Fathers, one must also recognize the degree to which they had been pushed — the degree to which the monarchical regime under the which they lived dismissed the fundamental philosophical truth that government can only truly operate with the consent of the governed.
From time to time, governments and institutions do overstep such boundaries.
From time to time, they require such a stark reminder of that fundamental truth.
That is the essence of the American experiment in self-governance — and such actions should, where they have been taken with great consideration and respect, be celebrated.
And seeing as we aren’t receiving any reports suggesting Amelia, Ohio, is in utter disarray without a government to provide oversight to its residents, it would be tough to argue this wasn’t simply a case of a reasonable people holding government accountable.
Bravo.
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