The Most Vicious Organs Of The Omnipotent State...

...are the ones concerned with taxation:

A New Jersey mother was arrested and told to turn over her guns after reading the Constitution and peacefully protesting at a tax dispute forum, she says.

Eileen Hart was with her husband Keith and her 7-year-old daughter on Saturday at the Gloucester Community Center to dispute a mandatory home re-evaluation that would roughly double her property value (and therefore dramatically increase her rates), objecting on multiple grounds. As an Orthodox Jew, she refused to have the inspectors in her home when her husband was away at work. As an American citizen, she objected to the seemingly arbitrary reappraisal, noting that she is not planning on selling her home and hasn’t renovated her kitchen in 30 years.

But at the forum, Hart was allegedly told that since she didn’t let the inspectors into her home, they had a right to “assume” its value under the New Jersey state constitution.

"How could they assume that my value had doubled when there is absolutely no housing market?” she asked TheBlaze rhetorically over the phone. “There is basically no GDP growth.”

After Hart started citing the Constitution, a representative of Appraisal Systems, Inc.– the company contracted by the state to conduct appraisals– started “freaking out,” she said, and called for Gloucester County tax assessor Robyn Glocker-Hammond.

“Sit down and shut up,” Hart said Glocker-Hammond told her, adding that she (Glocker-Hammond) was there to “enforce the law.”

Please, please read the rest at the link.

It's appropriate that such a tale should originate in New Jersey, the only state in the Union run entirely by gangsters. If there's an honest man working anywhere in any of New Jersey's state, county, or municipal offices, the finest scientific instruments available have failed to detect him. But to subcontract state ruthlessness and venality to a private firm is a major innovation, the sort that the other 49 states are likely to admire...and emulate.

After all, you know how much more efficient private enterprise is than public bureaucracy. And when a private firm is allowed the defining perquisite of the State -- the power to compel, prohibit, and expropriate under threat of punishment -- you just know it will use it to the hilt.

Someone should contact Appraisal Systems, Inc. and ask if they're being paid by the hour, or whether they get a percent of the total of the appraisals. The answer would tell us a lot.

There's a reason, sports fans, for the following joke:

Q: How many New Jersey-ites does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Three:

• One to change the bulb,
• One to witness the act,
• And one to shoot the witness.