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It's definitely designed to take from enemies, but I think the primary goal remains to prevent people from escaping inflation by buying assets.
The government has liabilities to pay for and it will use its powers for financial repression if it has to. Anyone who has value anywhere is at risk.
"Taxing unrealized gains" is quite literally just confiscation. They just decide you owe them some money based on some fictitious number to pay for some value they think they can extract from you.
Now if someone whom the mafia already doesn't like happens to have things that can be stolen, that's even better. But it's not that complicated why they do it. It's the money.
Home property tax is not actually tied to home value, except in a relative way within a jurisdiction -- property tax paid depends most directly on municipal budgets, which is something property owners can influence.
This is a big difference.
California is unrepresentative when it comes to property taxes, thanks to Proposition 13. Elsewhere, @jkf is right. Property tax is a derived value, generally set by fixing a municipal budget, then dividing by assessed value of total ratables. If all houses double in price, nothing happens because assessed value doesn't change. If there's a re-assessment which captures the doubling, nominal tax rate falls because it's an output.
All you've shown is that Portland, Oregon has increased taxes, which should not be at all surprising. You have not shown that increasing home values cause higher taxes; it appears they do not in Oregon. The taxes are set as I said -- they start with the budget and set rates accordingly. Oregon's even weirder because of a bunch of initiatives which attempt (unsuccessfully, so far as I can tell) to limit tax increases.
I do not mean it in this loose way. I mean it in a direct way; the government starts with a budget (probably based largely off last year's budget) and then derives, mathematically, the tax rates from it.
Taxes do indeed tend to go up; this is not the result of higher assessments, but because local governments love spending as much as any other government.
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