You do not own your land in New Jersey. That is the simple truth of it. You hold a piece of paper that says you do, you pay the mortgage, you cut the grass, and you pay the taxes every year, but the state is still the real landlord and you are the tenant. Stop paying the rent and they take the house. That is not ownership. That is tenancy under a government that never gave up its superior claim.
Libertarians start from a different place. Property rights are not a grant from the state. They come from self-ownership. You own yourself, therefore you own your labor, and therefore you own what you produce or peacefully acquire. When you buy a piece of land or improve it, that land is yours in the same way your tools or the food you grow are yours. No one else has a superior claim. The only legitimate limit is the equal right of others to their own property. Taxation that conditions your continued possession of the land on annual payments to the government is a rejection of that principle. It treats the land as something the state allows you to use rather than something you own.
This arrangement did not start with modern New Jersey. It comes straight out of the old English system where the king owned everything and everyone else held land from him. When the Duke of York handed New Jersey to Carteret and Berkeley back in the 1600s, they set it up the same way. Settlers got land, but they owed quit-rents to the proprietors. After the Revolution the state just stepped into the king’s place. They passed a law saying the grants were “allodial” and free of the old feudal services, but that only killed the personal duties and the quit-rents. It did not kill the state’s power to tax the land or take it when the tax is not paid. The residual claim stayed right where it was.
What you actually have is called fee simple absolute. That is the strongest private interest the law recognizes. You can live on it, sell it, mortgage it, and leave it to your kids. But it is still subject to the state’s power to tax it, to take it for public use, to regulate what you do with it, and to claim it if you die without heirs. True allodial title, the kind where no one stands above you and no annual payment is required to keep the land, does not exist for private people in New Jersey. Filings and land patents that claim otherwise do not stop the tax collector or the foreclosure. From a libertarian view this is the core problem: the law never recognized the full right that follows from self-ownership and peaceful acquisition.
The property tax is the rent. New Jersey runs some of the highest property taxes in the country because local government and the schools are funded that way and there are hundreds of separate taxing bodies. When the bill is not paid the municipality sells a tax-sale certificate. That certificate is a lien. You still have title for a while and you can still redeem by paying what is owed plus interest. After the waiting period the certificate holder files in court to cut off your right to redeem. If you do not pay by the deadline the court transfers the property. You are done. Recent changes made it a little harder for the buyer to keep all the equity above the tax debt, but the basic power never changed. Non-payment of the annual tax is enough for the state or its assignee to take the land.
That is the entire arrangement. You occupy the property only so long as you keep paying the rent the government sets. The moment you stop, the landlord’s claim is enforced. No other wrongdoing is required. In any ordinary sense of the word you never truly own the land in New Jersey. You hold it at the pleasure of a superior that collects annual rent and retains the power of eviction. Libertarians reject this because it treats property as a privilege instead of a right. It is inconsistent with the idea that a person owns what he has bought or built through his own labor and voluntary exchange. In this state that privilege is never turned into real ownership.
References
- N.J.S.A. 46:3-6 (gifts, grants, and conveyances by the state declared allodial and free of feudal tenures).
- New Jersey Tax Sale Law, N.J.S.A. 54:5-1 et seq. (tax-sale certificates, redemption periods, and foreclosure of the right of redemption).
- William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book II (all lands in England held of the king; absence of allodial title in the subject).
- Historical accounts of the proprietary colony of East and West Jersey, the Quintipartite Deed of 1676, and the system of quit-rents collected by the proprietors (1664–early 1700s).
- Tyler v. Hennepin County, 598 U.S. 631 (2023) (limits on retention of surplus equity in tax foreclosure).
- New Jersey Division of Taxation and U.S. Census American Community Survey data (New Jersey’s consistently highest or near-highest effective property-tax rates and median bills).
- New Jersey Superior Court practice under the Tax Sale Law (judicial foreclosure of tax-sale certificates and transfer of title upon failure to redeem).
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