Leaking Sovereignty: Racketeering by Government and Corporations

There's a pretty common tax, fee, and fine farming setup around the United States. A local government will make a contract with a corporation to collect taxes and fines or fees. The corporation might have some official sounding name, but will in fact be a privately owned entity that skims a sizable portion of the tax and fee revenue from the deal.

A story that went viral last year about Dunedin, Florida got me thinking about how individuals get screwed by entities  that enter into such deals on their behalf. That city green lights a racketeering operation that fines citizens for petty ordinance violations, like uncut lawns, that in some cases totaled $10,000+. It creates ordinances to favor the company and to extract money from the citizens it is supposed to represent.

The examples like Dunedin, or local tax "collection" agencies with official sounding names are just the most recent versions of the deals that destroyed native american tribes. It's probably trivially easy for a corporation to hijack some jurisdiction and operate these scams at full blast.