Did you know red kidney beans, cassava, elderberries and even some wild Andean potatoes are toxic if not prepared properly? Thorough cooking is needed to destroy an enzyme that otherwise produces the poison cyanide.

It turns out the same is true for “half-baked” tax repeals; poisonous to the very conservative politicians who promise them. We see this firsthand this year, where Republicans are asked to defend a platform promising to repeal Idaho’s property tax.

How the Party first committed to lifting the sales tax off food (an excellent idea if done right), and then abandoned it to jump on one Senator’s desperate re-election promise, is a story for another column. In fact, that column already exists, in the Sandpoint Reader, entitled “The property tax promise that’s built to fail.”

In that article, author Greg Graf explains how the whole idea emerged as a kind of “Hail Mary” pass, designed to fundraise and catch attention in a desperate race to win Sandpoint’s voice in the Idaho Senate. Google it. It details “how” this debacle came about.

But let’s examine the “why?” Because property tax is truly awful. For conservatives, there could not exist a goal more noble than to someday eliminate this perverse tax that forces so many destructive and economically self-defeating decisions.

Disdain for “property” tax goes all the way back to Adam Smith, the Scottish political economist whose book, The Wealth of Nations, published 250 years ago this year in 1776, heavily influenced the founding of America. Smith proposed that nations should only tax “that which you wish to discourage.”

In an “ownership society,” one where each individual owns their own home, their own trade tools, their own farm, or their own small business, ownership is the last thing to discourage.

Consider this reality: You work and earn a few dollars beyond your weekly food and rent. On every penny of that, you pay an income tax. You then buy hedge trimmers, a lawn mower, some paint and a vacuum, reaching for that most American of dreams, home ownership. On every purchase (with already-taxed income) you pay an additional “sales” tax.

You finally swap your monthly rent for a mortgage, and spend the next three to four decades purchasing, maintaining, repairing and maybe even improving your home. If that all works out, and devastatingly so if it turns out to have been a “good” investment, you must now pay heavily to keep that home, year after year, until you die or fail to make the payment.

Economists cite three flaws in property taxes: (1) the tax relies on a valuation in which taxpayers have little or no control, (2) it is notoriously regressive, hitting the “cash-poor” hardest, prompting “homeowners exemptions” and “circuit breakers” that ultimately fail as a home inflates in value, and (3) the penalty for “non-payment” is to confiscate the asset into which most citizens have poured the entirety of their life’s savings.

National Public Radio’s Kai Ryssdal asked author and historian John Steele Gordon his opinion on property tax reform. Gordon replied: “Forget about reforming the property tax. It’s a relic of the colonial past and should be abolished. Instead, send it to the Smithsonian and display it along with other relics like chamber pots and clay pipes.”

So why, in conservative Idaho, do we still have hefty property taxes? Because it is efficiently collected, relatively stable, and is the only way to tax out-of-state billionaires who own Idaho’s most valuable real estate. It’s also Idaho’s moral high ground for demanding the Feds pay our counties $50 million in “payments in lieu of taxes” or PILT.

For these reasons, Idaho uses property tax for what needs consistent year-to-year funding: local government (sewer, water, garbage), schools, and infrastructure (roads and bridges). Income and sales taxes fluctuate vastly from year to year. Local water treatment plants and elementary schools don’t operate on revenue that’s here one year, but maybe not the next.

Saying “repeal this bad tax” is easy. It’s a cop-out when no thought addresses why it exists. Figure out alternatives, propose solutions, and when property tax is no longer vital: repeal it.

But until then, for many conservatives up for election, this half-baked idea will be hard to stomach.