A widow was given ample notice before her $280,000 house was sold at a tax auction three years ago over $6.30 in unpaid interest, a Pennsylvania judge has ruled....Mercy is for the weak. It has no place in the law.
Battisti said her husband handled the paperwork for the property's taxes before he passed away in 2004.
"It's bad — she had some hard times, I guess her husband kind of took care of a lot of that stuff," [county solicitor] Askar said. "It seemed that she was having a hard time coping with the loss of her husband — that just made it set in a little more."
Death to Widows
Justice is done, according to our system's lights.
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16 comments:
Good lord. Read the comments too. Seems this is rather commonplace. Where is the media on stories like this? There are bureaucrats who ought to be run out on a rail.
None of these laws were designed to result in this kind of outcome, so it's misleading and inaccurate to claim this is by design, Grim.
Human systems are run by flawed people and mistakes happen. To suggest that human errors somehow invalidate the entire system is a bridge WAY too far.
It makes sense only if you're looking for reasons to overturn the system, and even then it requires you to ignore all the very good reasons we foreclosures exist in the first place.
Social authority and the law both demand obedience and compliance... or else.
Cribbed from AOSHQ this AM, Havel on the topic of "laws":
http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=eseje&val=2_aj_eseje.html&typ=HTML
Once is a mistake. If it happened numerous times the first year, before legislators could correct the problem, OK. After that, it is by design.
The system isn't designed to strip widows of their property, or to punish those in the throes of grief for failing to attend to every jot of paperwork the state sends their way. It just isn't at all designed to avoid doing those things; even after judicial review, it's enough that she owed six dollars and they sent her a letter about it, so they took her house.
The problem isn't that human beings are administering the system. The problem is that the system isn't designed for human beings. A humane system has flexibility for cases of grief or loss, because it is a fact about human nature that we encounter these things at times. A political system, of which a system of laws is a part, is supposed to be ordered to the human good. That's what it's for.
Piffle; of course the system is designed for human beings; what else could it have been designed for? Any system that's too loose will let people run wild and take advantage; one that's too rigid will let sick people enforce inflexible, ill-considered rules far beyond what a grownup should demand. We're always tinkering about between those two extremes, trying in vain to design something that's invulnerable to exploitation by sickos in a fallen world.
I used to run across something similar in homeowner association disputes: a grasping control-freak somewhere figures out that a sloppy statute can be interpreted by a lazy judge to permit foreclosure over a very petty sum. I saw documented evidence of a very large number of foreclosure actions that started out as disputes over minor fines resulting from ridiculous infractions. But this was not an example of a system that arrived out of nowhere without reference to human needs. In part the HOAs were trying to "clean up the neighborhood" by coming hard with a zero-tolerance approach to people with ratty houses, a process that gradually turned into jihads against socially unacceptable attitudes about the placements of mailboxes. Also in part, HOA law firms figured out that any dispute was a good excuse to run up legal fees; the foreclosure ended up being more about paying their fees than about fixing the oil-stsain on the driveway, or whatever other capital crime got the neighborhood nazi enforcer exercised in the first place.
The system was abused by people, as any system can be. Gradually the legislature stepped in to moderate the abuse. But many people still believe fervently in the need for a vigorous HOA that would patrol the neighborhood and keep people from running down property values. The system didn't spring up from nowhere; it addressed real anxieties about antisocial behavior.
Anyway, "systems" don't do things: individuals do. Individuals also are responsible for acquiescing in sick systems instead of improving them. A local government that's caught foreclosing on widows over trivial sums should be voted out of office. That's what voters are for. I used to spend a lot of time trying to rile up homeowners to take back control of their HOA boards. Very few responded to the call: they wanted a system that would run the neighborhood without their having to get involved. I sympathize, but there's no way to avoid being involved. There are no foolproof systems. Citizens are always going to have to intervene to point out that the institution was granted power only for the purpose of achieving some good ends, and if they're going to waste the power doing bad or stupid things instead, they'll have the power taken away.
Piffle; of course the system is designed for human beings; what else could it have been designed for?
...
Anyway, "systems" don't do things: individuals do.
I think that both of these sentiments are wrong. Systems are often designed for their own good, rather than for the good of (say) human beings. Here the issue is that the system of government requires uninterrupted tax revenue, which means that a system of taxation was designed to meet that need. That system is backed up by a system of laws that impose a system of punishments.
You can see it in the article. All the individuals are really sorry about this. They're all very understanding. Nevertheless, the rules of the system are clear, and they must be applied. Owe us six bucks, and we'll take your home and sell it for less than half what it's worth, charge you for our costs in doing so, and pay you whatever's left. So she lost her husband, plus now a very substantial part of what he and she saved together for this eventuality.
Your response to this seems to say that people should buck the system. Well, that's just what I'm advocating too. It's only the Federal government I want to dissolve; but local governments often need reform. To reform well, they need good principles for reform.
So here's one I suggest: the system should be designed around a concept of human good, rather than for its own internal goods.
It takes a good bit of anthropomorphizing to say that the system exists for the system. Systems can't do things. Individuals act according to systems, sometimes in stupid ways. If they say they're "doing it for the system," all they can possibly mean is that adherence to a rigid program has become more important to them than achieving any reasonable goal the system might have been created to promote. They're distracted by an internal psychological need to create security and predictability by following rigid rules. But that's still an individual making a mistake.
The people around them, meanwhile, may well have a duty to shake them out of their neurosis, or remove them from power, since they've demonstrated that their psyches are ill-suited to serving in responsible positions.
We can agree, of course, that a system should be designed around a concept of human good. I would argue that systems typically are designed for just that. The problems arise in three major ways:
(1) The design was incompetent; it does not achieve its ostensible purposes despite the good intentions of the designer.
(2) Someone else disagrees with the designer's notions of human good.
(2) Someone comes along to implement the system who misunderstands or ignores its original good purpose and gets hung up on irrelevant or injurious aspects of it instead. Other people involved in the system then fail to take corrective action.
Actually, systems are often designed for the good of a select group of humans within a particular society.
Also, Tex's argument is a good explanation of why I say we can never have a "nation of laws" - it's just impossible. We can only have a nation of humans (who make / interpret / enforce laws / and etc.)
It takes a good bit of anthropomorphizing to say that the system exists for the system.
It's not necessary to think of a system as being like a human being at all. One system exists for another. The governing system requires a tax system, so the tax system exists for the governing system. But the tax system requires an enforcement system, so the enforcement system exists for the tax system. And that requires another system, which is designed to serve the needs of the next higher system. None of these things are like people; they're like programs.
Computers can execute programs without anything like consciousness or feelings. Probably a computer did the computations of what was owed; perhaps it issued the letter, since that process can be automated. If not, it certainly pinged someone whose job was to print and send the letter. It's just executing rules, rules that were put in place to serve some end -- an end, at some point, so far removed from the human good that it no longer can recognize that it is violating the thing that was supposed to be guiding it.
Tom's right, too: sometimes systems just exist to serve the ends of a particular group. Here, though, nobody is really coming out on top (except the speculator who bought the house for less than half what it was worth). Nobody even wants to do this. It just has to be done: the rules say so, and to introduce mercy would be unfair, a violation of the rules for a special case. We can't have that.
Let me soften my position a little.
This wasn't by design, but it was negligence that these laws were not corrected.
It is also a case of people putting the law above humans. I would like to think that if I worked in the office that handled this case, I would have done something to prevent this. One letter may be the technical requirement, but why didn't someone realize it was crazy and send another? Or call the woman? Or slow-walk the paperwork and notify someone who could change things? Or lose the paperwork?
So I take back my accusation that it was by design, but this is the difference between murder and negligent manslaughter. It's still a serious matter. One difference is, the system is set up in a way that means this will keep happening; if the government does nothing to change it, it is like serial negligent manslaughter.
I'm just following orders, er, the law, isn't a good excuse.
That's what used to bother me so much about the HOAs. I'd talk to the people involved and ask, "Weren't these people your neighbors? It's not as though you were a credit card company with 10,000 customers, most of whom you'd never meet and barely knew how to contact, especially if they wouldn't answer the phone three states away. This widow lived two blocks from you. Couldn't anyone on the HOA board walk to her house and find out her circumstances? Maybe confirm that she'd gotten the notice of delinquency and understood what was going on? Nobody on the street could take up a collection to pay her back dues? You couldn't figure out a way either to tolerate the weeds in her front bed, or find a volunteer to pull them for her while she was bedridden? In short, are you all crazy? What the heck is the purpose of your HOA supposed to be, anyway?"
The usual answer was that they felt it was time somebody got tough about ensuring that everyone's house was up to real-estate broker standards, so they wouldn't hold home sales back. To a minor degree, I understand that, though it doesn't happen to be one of my preoccupations. Unfortunately, in far, far too many HOAs, it metastasizes into an endless series of demands for perfect conformity: lawns mowed every 7 days, paint kept up perfectly, paint color choice with the approved range, no flagpoles, no signs, no pink flamingoes, no cars on the driveway--in some neighborhoods, if you can believe it, even "no non-approved jungle jims in the backyard, if we can see them whiling driving by standing up in the back of a pickup truck." Because rules are rules, and allowing the breaking of a rule leads to CHAOS! It's a mental illness.
It disturbed me enormously that there were so many neighborhoods that let this sort of group take over, and didn't revolt. I witnessed only one completely successful grass-roots revolt.
Hooah, Tex.
Police state at work again.
When one's neighbors are the police, can we really separate ourselves from either the "police" or the "state" that easily?
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