>>Guardianship, which provides essential protection to many frail or incapacitated people, has also been criticized as overly intrusive, and its legal processes as secretive. Claude Pepper, the former chairman of the House Select Committee on Aging, once called it “the most punitive civil penalty that can be levied against an American citizen, with the exception, of course, of the death penalty.”<<
This is true. Here is an article about it (The New Yorker, October 2, 2017):
How The Elderly Lose Their Rights
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/09/how-the-elderl...
There are many examples of abuse of the elderly, such as this case, "a 90-year-old woman almost lost her house for failing to pay $0.06, six cents, in property taxes, thus making a slogan of the Libertarian Party empirically true, “taxation is theft.”
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nj-homeowner-nearly-lo...
And cities taking away people's rights and their property are the main culprits, as in these cases:
Left With Nothing (The Washington Post, September 8, 2013)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2013/09/08/l...
A Property Tax Money Machine Crushes Families (Bloomberg, December 20, 2021)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-12-20/minority-...
I wrote about it in a post titled, "When A House Is A Tragic Character" because I feel, like Claude Pepper did, that this theft is so punitive, abusive, and unethical, yet it keeps happening and nobody in government is doing anything to prevent it, and not enough people know that it could happen to them.
