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Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

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Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#61
post #5

In the UK, during the purchase of our house we had to take a "chancel liability insurance", because our freehold once belonced to a rectory, so to protect ourselves from repair liability towards a chapel that has been here for centuries, we had to pay a one-off insurance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chancel_repair_liability Leftover laws are weird things. EDIT: PS: sadly, the legendary, obligatory archery practice…

> The word Butt is derived from the Anglo French word 'bouter' meaning to expel. Wow. I suppose that’s the same etymology for “butt” in the anatomological sense?

Wiktionary says: Pprobably from Old English buttuc (“end; end piece”; also, “short piece of land”).

I wonder how "to expel" ends up being "a short piece of land"...

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#62
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today's voters are capable of electing representatives who could repeal that amendment. It's not like voters are left without recourse.

It appears that elected officials have an extremely strong bias to adding/amending versus repealing/scaling back. I'm not sure the current approach is long-term viable.

> I'm not sure the current approach is long-term viable.

Can anyone of the downvoters say a few words? To me this seems both obvious and non-partisan. What we're doing is accruing ever more laws, creating a centuries-old legal code base without ever removing technical debt. This seems unwise.

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#63
post #5

In the UK, during the purchase of our house we had to take a "chancel liability insurance", because our freehold once belonced to a rectory, so to protect ourselves from repair liability towards a chapel that has been here for centuries, we had to pay a one-off insurance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chancel_repair_liability Leftover laws are weird things. EDIT: PS: sadly, the legendary, obligatory archery practice…

Yeah there are a lot of very obscure legal rules that most people aren't aware of or haven't been enforced in many years. Not from as far back but my house was built in the early 1980's and my house deeds include the stipulation that I must maintain a garage attached to the property (so I can't convert it to extra living space) because the local government retain the right to convert the space into a decontamination…

In Switzerland, the rule that every house must be constructed with an appropriate fallout shelter has only been relaxed 10 years ago.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-swiss-bunker-idUSTRE7B01R...

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#64
post #43
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears that elected officials have an extremely strong bias to adding/amending versus repealing/scaling back. I'm not sure the current approach is long-term viable.

> elected officials have an extremely strong bias to adding/amending versus repealing/scaling back I find this to be a crippling problem of how politics works in modern democracies. Taxes are a great example, because almost every country will increase it, but never decrease it. They’ll think of a 100 new ways to extract taxes, but never remove outdated ones.

Not necessarily. 50s / 60s US income tax is much, much higher than current rate. I just think the cycle of going up and down is extremely long.

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Historical_Margina...

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#65
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Leftover laws are weird things. Fun fact: just like this old tax that the Italian residents are unhappy with, every single person that was old enough to vote for their representatives who then voted to ratify the income tax amendment in the USA is now dead. There is no one alive in the USA that was in any way represented in the vote for income tax; conversely everyone that is alive in the US today and is subject to…

Income tax in the USA was meant to be a temporary measure to support a war effort. There are similar stories in other countries. There's nothing more permanent than a temporary government plan.

In modern monetary policy, income tax is used as a deflationary measure and our government is funded by the fed.

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. My point is that often the risk is not small, it's non-existent. When I bought my current house my solicitor suggested that the seller should pay for insurance cover for the fact that there was no planning paperwork for a small side extension. Of course I said OK and of course the seller also agreed. But that extension was even shown on the land registry plan and was obviously 20+ years old. Since planning brea…

So I've done the same when I bought my last house(conservatory built 20 years ago, seller couldn't produce the correct paperwork for it), but the issue wasn't the planning permissions per se, it was that the original builder of the house(Belway) hasn't given permission and they reserve the right to do so for 99 years after construction(even though the house is a freehold now, the entire estate is still Belway's lease…

Hence why I wrote 'often'. There are obviously cases where there is a real, if small, risk.

Another thing: You already say that you would be fine paying for the person you will buy the house in the future. However, many indemnity policies run in perpetuity so in principle will still apply and there will be no need to buy a new one.

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#67
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah there are a lot of very obscure legal rules that most people aren't aware of or haven't been enforced in many years. Not from as far back but my house was built in the early 1980's and my house deeds include the stipulation that I must maintain a garage attached to the property (so I can't convert it to extra living space) because the local government retain the right to convert the space into a decontamination…

In Switzerland, the rule that every house must be constructed with an appropriate fallout shelter has only been relaxed 10 years ago. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-swiss-bunker-idUSTRE7B01R...

Years ago, I was doing some C++ training for Texas Instruments in Bedford, England. I remarked to the woman running the course how brutalistically ugly their building was. She said it was to prevent damage from earthquakes. Bedford is not exactly famous for these events, and she explained that TI simply had one (possibly quake proof) building designed, and then built the same one all over the world. She may have been pulling my leg, of course.

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#68
post #7

Now wondering which European countries still have intact feudal law. Scotland abolished feudal tenure in 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_Feudal_Tenure_etc... ; most of the feu burdens were abolished or explicitly ported across. England&Wales still retains the feudal system in places and occasionally people are hit by "chancel repair liability" or somesuch. The chivalric court still exists: https://en…

I suspect that none of the European countries to the eastern side of the Iron Curtain retained feudal law, or much of the "legacy" law in general. That, I guess, is one of the few potential upsides of any revolution: an opportunity arises to just throw away a lot of pre-existing arrangements and re-draw them anew in (hopefully) more sensible way. Of course, the quality of the new design and/or its implementation is n…

And the rewrite process might include beheading, hanging or shooting some of the old API endpoints.

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#69
post #11

Note that in a common law system, this would be thrown out of court under either "acquiescence" (if you don't raise a fuss for a very long time when someone unknowingly infringes your rights, you can lose those rights), or "laches" (if you wait long enough to make a legal claim that the defendant is injured by e.g. having made economic decisions in ignorance of that claim). Not sure about the equivalent Italian law,…

The Roman law equivalent is Usucapione, still applicable in Italy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usucaption

Not only in Italy. I remember studying law for one semester at the University and our professor mentioned that this was still applicable in Romania, circa 2005.

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#70
post #28
post #5

In the UK, during the purchase of our house we had to take a "chancel liability insurance", because our freehold once belonced to a rectory, so to protect ourselves from repair liability towards a chapel that has been here for centuries, we had to pay a one-off insurance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chancel_repair_liability Leftover laws are weird things. EDIT: PS: sadly, the legendary, obligatory archery practice…

> Leftover laws are weird things. Fun fact: just like this old tax that the Italian residents are unhappy with, every single person that was old enough to vote for their representatives who then voted to ratify the income tax amendment in the USA is now dead. There is no one alive in the USA that was in any way represented in the vote for income tax; conversely everyone that is alive in the US today and is subject to…

There's also no-one now alive who voted for women's suffrage, or the banning of the international slave trade, or the right to bear arms.
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