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Comment by robinjhuang | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a question worth asking. Should we let a small number of people hold hostage over public projects?

This is a good question. Where do we draw the line at human rights? Should land ownership be a protected right? It would cost a lot less if the government just took the land instead of paying fair market value.

It would also cost a lot less if we forced all criminals to work for free (though right now, they practically work for free). The problem is that we would quickly run out of criminals since there are so many projects that needs work. We could just randomly enslave people to do work for free.

Enslaving citizens wouldn't be fair or popular with the citizens of our country. Another option is to use our military might to subjugate other countries and bring them over to work, say to work on our farms. That would allow for very high gdp growth.

So where do we draw the line and who gets to draw that line?

We draw the line where there's an obvious problem. For every reductio ad absurdum looking at slavery and trying to put down another country's citizens at the benefit of our own, there is a counterexample looking at how ridiculous it is we have ultra-rich deciding their little game of looking at numbers going up and people living in McMansions just to show off being more important than a giant middle class unable to afford housing where their grandfathers and grandmothers could living a lower class lifestyle.

Surely somewhere we can accept that a bunch of wealthy playing the investment game on very limited resources instead of the realm of producing solutions or improvements isn't the way to further society as a whole. We don't have to put down those already in the ditches further, we got a swat of people above to look at.

I think we both agree that we shouldn't be protecting the wealthy. I just think we should do it another way. IMO, high housing prices exist because of the lack of supply. I think it's possible for the government to increase housing stock and have reasonable property rights.

There is a balance between letting a single individual stall progress for all of society, and respecting human rights. A single individual certainly should not be able to block the construction of a public transit system that will bring jobs and improve the livelihood of millions. At the same time, the government can provide reasonable alternative accommodations or pay market value (not decided by the individual in question.)

Eliminating NIMBYism and individuals' selfish obstinacy does not need to lead to a global hegemony enslaving billions.

"Property rights" are not human rights, stop conflating the 2.

And the absurd examples you tried to come up with are literally things the US is doing today, you're just being sinophobic.

Maybe you should be a sane human being and tax the privileges that land ownership provides.

Bringing up Henry George is easy mode in these threads

Do you say that applies to pipeline projects too?

Oil gas pipelines? Sure. The reason I say this is because it seems to me that democracy is a system designed to favor the majority over the minority. So why not for public projects?

That depends on how you're defining "small number of people". If a big fraction of the people in the way of a segment object, then that's probably not small. If a couple family farms object, then that's not very important.

Offer to pay them what they want.

That's an awful solution. Some small fraction of people in the way shouldn't get an enormous multiplier over market value, in some kind of giant prisoner's dilemma auction.

If you offer the group a certain percentage of market value, that could work out well. But unanimous consensus is not a reasonable way to get land for big public projects.

> an enormous multiplier over market value

“Market value” requires willing participants. If a seller doesn’t want to sell at a particular price and the good isn’t fungible (which housing is not), they aren’t getting market value by being forced to sell at a price determined solely by the buyer.

Do you want me to say "taxable value*" instead?

If you think it's impossible to assess the value of a property, the whole legal world disagrees with you.

And yeah, the point of eminent domain is to force the sale on unwilling participants. If used sparingly and without discrimination, it's a good power, and part of living in a community that will undertake community projects.

* the underlying assessed value, excluding artificial caps like prop 13

It seems difficult to asses land value when it seems to have inflated 100% in 10 years.

Sure, go with “taxable value”, but let’s not pretend it’s market value any more than the market value of a human life is what an insurance company values it at.

Well market value plus some premium for inconvenience of not being able to choose sounds fair, perhaps FMV + 20% or perhaps up to 30%. These are large amounts of money so perhaps the premium should be an absolute not percentage value.

FMV +10% for tolerance of estimate of FMV + 6 months average salary in the area would be generous enough to recompense the hassles of relocating.

Remember surrounding society, that is hundreds of thousands of other people, benefit from the infrastructure being developed.

Market value requires willing participants, so that's whatever value they want.

> Should we let a small number of people hold hostage over public projects?

I think by phrasing the holdouts as "hold hostage over public projects" is misguided if not disingenuous. This is a common propaganda used by authoritarian regimes to paint anyone they don't like in a bad light: surely they're not victims of government brutality if they're "enemies of the common good."

But if we accept we can discard one individual's (or a small group of individuals') rights, then it's not long before everyone's rights become disposable. That's how people like Putin and Xi justifies their aggression (surely I can kill millions of people in Taiwan if it stands in the way of "progress" of 1.3 billion mainlanders!)

P.S. As someone as pointed out, this is not a China/US or eastern/western issue. The U.S. has its own fair share of blatant violation of private rights too.

But my point is that it's wrong when U.S. does it, it's wrong when China does it, it's wrong when anyone does it and it shouldn't be something we aspire to.

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