oh right. https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/texas-business-report-...
Something that comes to mind are the bondholder holdouts that objected to Venezuela's debt restructuring. You may side with the people being bullied by the rich and powerful in any circumstance, but that doesn't uniformly lead to defending holdouts.
My point is, no, paying any price is not how things work in capitalist societies or anywhere, because it's not practical, regardless of how unfair this particular instance is.
Edit: Wow, fastest downvote ever. Wonder if it is automated somehow. I don't think the ability (and prevalence) of downvoting opinions you disagree with contributes to the professed goals of HN. I appreciate strict moderation for civility, but given the ability to downvote rather than engage with (or ignore) a polite comment, people tend to abuse it.
I just can't see how that is comparable to bondholder holdouts.
Coordination problems preventing people from making collective progress are real, and mechanisms for eminent domain exist to deal with those real problems, is all I'm saying.
That is independent of whether some holdouts are righteous or not in particular circumstances.
To repeat, please interpret my comments in the context of what I am responding to, not just the article link.
It's dressed up with fancy words and paperwork, but when the State has a better use for it than you having it, they will find a way.
I think there are times when eminent domain should be used, but building a stadium, or a mall, is not one of them.
"Last October I posted[1] on Eric Posner and Glen Weyl’s proposal to generalize self-assessed property taxes. For many items, such as land and buildings, you’d pay an annual tax that is a standard percentage of your self-set sale-offer price for the item. This would avoid administrative property valuations, discourage people from sitting on stuff they don’t use, and make it much easier to assemble property into large units. Eminent domain would no longer be needed. They have a new book, Radical Markets, coming out in a few weeks, that I will review soon.
Some libertarian types disapprove on the grounds that this weakens property rights. Which it can, relative to a simple absolute property right. But simple property and liability have long been two quite different, and extreme, solutions to legal problems. Neither one is always best. In this post I want to point out that this alternate approach can be used not only to change traditional property to be more like liability, it can also be used to change traditional liability to be more like property. It is an interesting intermediate form between traditional property and liability. One I expect libertarian types to look on more favorably when applied to liability."
[0] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/04/between-property-and-l...
[1] https://www.overcomingbias.com/2017/10/for-stability-rents.h...
And so the idea is that anyone can then buy the property from you at that price at anytime and you must sell? Or just the state?
Of course, capital is used to bend the rules, and that becomes unfair, but that’s a whole other topic...
There are places where there is no presumption of rules uniformly applied.
If Oakland were in China, for example, they might decide that East Oakland is a little shabby and has a crime problem, and so they’re just going to raze the whole area and build a new high density eco-city to provide housing for San Francisco offices.
Heck, they might do that to the Sunset!
But that’s not how America works. The people in East Oakland bought the rights to that land. They own it, and so long as they obey the statutes of the city it doesn’t matter how valuable the driving-out of those people might be, if it’s less than the buy-out cost it’s not legally feasible.
The entire system relies on this principle. If I can’t rely on my land being sold at a price I set then I can’t make complex plans based on land use and prices. I have to add in a “government force” slush factor to every calculation and many delicate plans become too risky to try.