>Property taxes are supposed to fund the services provided by the local government, not evict poor people for the benefit of the rich.
Not so from my observations.
But your taxing authority would like you to think so. They actually have always been rich too, and that's who they favor even if none of their people are individually paid that much.
Property taxes are directly based on "socage" and "quitrents" which provided a clear legal framework to formalize the right to evict poor people for the benefit of the rich.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/socage
OTOH inheritance or estate tax is based on the medieval concept of "relief" where the tenant's next-of-kin is supposedly giving relief to the landowner who would otherwise not know where his next Shilling was coming from once the previous tenant passed away. Or the landowner is giving relief to the surviving inheritors so they will not be evicted as long as they pay what amounts to a windfall bonus for the taxing authority who can then celebrate the death of a taxpayer in appropriate style. Whatever.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/relief-medieval-tax
US states originated as British colonies under this system and it has changed as little as possible with the continuous enforcement of your local constable.
There was also the effect which requires a tenant (owner or lessor) to produce enough from the land itself or remit in some other way, otherwise the parcel will be confiscated and someone else will be given a try.
The idea was to keep "all men are created equal" from coming true financially for the disadvantaged at a time when the King held ultimate title to all land. His local representatives would be today's county judge and tax assessor-collector, with the enforcer being the county sheriff and whatever his punishment at the time happened to be. No surprise that it seems so medieval to almost be unbelievable today, but that is the unbroken history.
Property taxes would not actually be necessary in a truly free country based on commerce, free enterprise and fairness.
Rather than perpetuating the differential between landowner and peasant as much as possible, untaxed land would tend toward flatter stewardship of the most desirable parcels allowing the maximum utilization of a limited resource when needed without the landowner requiring such a high income from the property itself to support all of today's effective "middlemen" just to retain title to it.
Interesting case study:
http://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...
>Why should the rich person's luck be rewarded by forcing the poor to give up their home and move somewhere worse?
Sometimes that's the only reward being seeked by those whose riches originated in similar ways, or through no productive effort of their own.
"Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why"__Hunter S. Thompson