If a business overcharges a customer, beyond the listed price of an item, the customer expects a refund, and should one not be forthcoming, a local consumer protection agency’s liable to spring into action. That’s as it should be — the customer may seek recourse if she wishes (and a business’s greatest punishment comes from a bad reputation in the market).
What happens when a community, say, Dodgeville, Wisconsin, over-assesses the taxable value of a business like Lands’ End?
Local officials whine that Lands’ End is not being fair! The Sunday edition of the Wisconsin State Journal recounts a Dodgeville bureaucrat’s greed and sense of entitlement, in a story entitled, “Dodgeville Braces for Major Cuts to Pay Back Lands’ End“:
A Richland County Circuit Court judge ruled in May that the city over-assessed the apparel retailer’s 202-acre corporate headquarters.
That means the governmental units that receive tax money from the company will likely be forced to make cuts in order to refund the excess amount.
Lands’ End has asked for a refund of $524,000 from its 2005 payment and $734,000 from 2006. It also wants interest on the money and is challenging the assessments from 2007 and 2008.
“It comes as a blow,” said Diane Messer, superintendent of the Dodgeville School District. “It’s disconcerting but we have to keep in mind that Lands’ End as we knew it is not Lands’ End any longer. The Sears culture has had its impact.”
What’s Superintendent Messer’s implication? That if Lands’ End were still locally owned, then they’d not complain about being over-assessed!
Why should any business, locally owned or otherwise, be over-assessed to satisfy a politician’s or bureaucrat’s hunger for more tax money?
Messer implies that a local business would not complain, and in her implication one finds the shameless greed and sense of entitlement of municipalities, so desperate to tax and take from productive, private enterprises that they offer not apologies for over-assessments, but irritation that they might be compelled to offer a refund!
The State Journal story notes that “Lands’ End is a major supporter in the Iowa County community of just over 4,000 people. It provides thousands of jobs, has a farmers’ market at its corporate campus and sponsored the recent blues festival in downtown Dodgeville. Its annual five-day warehouse sale, this year scheduled for Aug. 5-9, draws thousands of people to Harris Park.”
Neither businesses nor ordinary homeowners should over-pay to fund the unrealistic ambitions of bureaucrats.
Not even those of oh-so-entitled bureaucrats in Dodgeville, Wisconsin.