Florida governor Ron DeSantis has attacked the very concept of property taxes. In a speech last year, he portrayed them as unfair. “You buy a home, you pay off the mortgage, and yet, you still have to write a check to the government every year—just for the privilege of living on your own private property. Is the property yours, or are you just renting it from the government?” DeSantis is trying to push through a “reform” to Florida’s property tax system that would eventually exempt the first $250,000 of a person’s home value from being taxed, promising that eventually 60 percent of homeowners would pay no property tax at all. Proposals to eliminate or heavily limit property tax are under consideration in other states, too. The Idaho Republican Party has called for the wholesale elimination of property tax, describing it as “an inherently unjust tax that converts privately owned property into government collateral and threatens homeownership.”

Anyone who has had to fork over property taxes probably finds DeSantis’ argument at least somewhat appealing. After all, you already bought your house. Now you’re being taxed every single year on its value, even though you’re not selling it? It’s not like the house is magically generating income. You’re just living in it. It can definitely feel as if you’re “renting your own house from the government,” who you are paying for the privilege of keeping something you already own.

But this stance, while understandable on an emotional level, overlooks a crucial fact about the way private property works in the first place. You only have private property because the government is willing to enforce your claim on something. If something is your property, that means that if someone else comes and takes it, or breaks into it, or burns it down, the government will spend money punishing the person who damaged your property. If I come home and find a squatter in my house, who claims it is their property now, I am allowed to have them removed. If my neighbor starts tearing up my garden, claiming it is his garden, I can go to court and sue him for damages, and the government will pay the judge to decide the case and the police to enforce my rights. Property rights are therefore not free, and cannot be free. For a right to mean anything, it has to be enforced. If you want to keep your house, you need to pay the government at least something, because it’s law that keeps your claim to your house safe.

So the idea that property taxes are inherently illegitimate is wrong. It assumes that maintaining your property rights is costless to the state. It isn’t. “But,” you might say, “that only justifies taxing property at whatever level is necessary for police and courts. What about the rest of my property taxes?” Well, I’ve got bad news: taxing your property for other reasons is also legitimate. Do you know what a fire department is, for instance? The government pays people who will (at great risk to themselves) come to your house and save your life and try to salvage your property even if you accidentally set it on fire by smoking in bed. You think that’s free? The government also paves and maintains the streets that allow you to get to your property in the first place. It builds the parks and schools that make your town an attractive place to live and keep your property values high. The government even pays someone to come and pick up your most disgusting garbage. The state you think is robbing you is literally sending workers to come and collect your dirty diapers and rotten bananas. Where’s the gratitude?

Personally, every time I think about property taxes, I think about IV Waste. I live in the French Quarter of New Orleans, and IV Waste is a company paid by the city to come pick up refuse. They do an amazing job. They have a truck that says LEMON FRESH on the side that goes up and down the street all day making the streets smell lemony. The last time my dad put a bag of garbage on the street they picked it up within thirteen seconds. They pressure-wash the sidewalks and the garbage bins to make sure nothing stinks. I’ve seen IV Waste workers picking cigarette butts out of sidewalk cracks and coming by in the middle of the night to see if there’s any garbage they didn’t get during the day. They’re so popular that when the contract was going to be given to a different company, a huge local campaign began to save their contract with the city. It’s pretty impressive for a municipal garbage contractor to attract that kind of grassroots support.

So when I pay a tax of any kind, instead of just grumbling, I remember the services they buy. I also, of course, resent the things bought with my tax dollars that I don’t want the government to buy—endless new prisons, fancy hotels and flights for the mayor, weapons for Israel. I actually think progressives need to do a better job of embracing and explaining taxation and its benefits. There is a tendency for progressive politicians to emphasize taxing the rich, and promise tax cuts for everyone else. And when something like Medicare For All is proposed, the standard argument against it is: it will raise your taxes.

But instead of promising to beat the right in cutting taxes, we need to instead explain that taxes are good, but only if they actually get you a good deal. Medicare For All is a great deal. Your taxes go up but your premiums and deductibles disappear, so you end up with more money than under the private health insurance system. When the government fritters away money on nuclear weapons and contracts for cronies, well, that’s a bad deal. And it’s also a bad deal when the super-rich escape taxes and people who work hard pay through the nose. I resent my annual tax bill not because I mind paying for government services, but because I think the state should go to the billionaires and trillionaires long before it comes to me. Let me be clear: the fact that taxation in general is good and necessary does not mean that all taxes are good and necessary.

But tax itself is not a dirty word, and it’s a worrying sign of the permeation of “neoliberal ideology” that anti-tax rhetoric is so bipartisan. You get things for your taxes, and the things you get are things you should want. This can be a tough case to make, because it’s inherently easier to see the money going out of your bank account than it is to see the more diffuse benefits—and some of the benefits even look like burdens, as when road workers are tearing up the street for a project you don’t even understand the purpose of.

Interestingly, even Ron DeSantis seems to understand this on some level. He said at a press conference that Palm Beach County was “sitting on a gold mine,” because “people live “there three months of the year, and they buy $25 million homes. So that should be your tax base.” This sounds like an admission that there does in fact need to be a tax base, and that it’s legitimate to charge people money just for owning something. Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal has actually attacked DeSantis’s property tax plan precisely because they think it’s too “progressive” and shifts more of the tax burden onto owners of commercial real estate.

Right-wing politicians love to get people riled up about taxes, but at the end of the day, unless you want to be a “sovereign citizen” who lives in the woods in a Ted Kaczynski-style cabin, you need your town to have stoplights, garbage collectors, schools, social services, well-maintained public spaces, public bathrooms, public transit, fire services, animal control, coroners, road maintenance, water treatment, libraries, street sweeping, playgrounds, museums, and about fifty other things cities have to pay for. (The extent to which you need cops is another question.) The argument that “you own it, therefore you shouldn’t have to pay taxes” sounds appealing, if you’re not really thinking, and the extent of your inquiry into the issue is “Grr, I don’t see why I have to pay all this damn money.” But if you’re feeling shirty about your property taxes, next time you take a walk around, play a fun game of figuring out everything that city government has to sort out, from laying water mains to clearing up after storms to inspecting buildings to putting out fires. It might seem less like a parasitic government is making you pay rent, and more like you’re getting something of a bargain, considering everything we task the public sector with carrying out for us.