A Stitch in Haste

The rather fierce political battle brewing in the U.K. over soaring property tax assessments, which I chronicled previously, has taken a very ugly turn for the worse:

Thousands of inspectors are being kitted out with cameras ready to put pictures of the inside of every home on the internet.

People’s bedrooms, bathrooms and gardens will be among those posted on the net under plans drawn up by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott.
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He is backed by Valuation Office Agency chief Paul Sanderson who is said to want “everything” affecting property value made public.
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Tories have attacked the scheme as a “snoopers charter” and an “instruction manual for burglars”.

It’s quite simple really. Exacting accuracy in property assessments is not worth more than the basic privacy rights that such a program would violate. The government has an interest, yes, in knowing “exactly” what you own so you can pay the appropriate tax on it. But that does not equate to justifying an Ahabian obsession with stalking the white whale of pinpoint accuracy. There’s a difference between “best efforts” and “obsessive-compulsive.”

And even if you go so far — I do not — as to argue that the need to reassess suggests in turn the need to allow regular inspections of homes (perhaps once a decade), that still does not even come close to justifying taking pictures at all, let alone putting them on the Internet for all to see. How could any mentally stable person suggest that the cost of universal lost privacy is outweighed by the (mere) potential to (maybe) quash (a few) complaints about assessments?

Oh, right, I forgot, these aren’t mentally stable persons — these are politicians and bureaucrats.