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> There's the obvious idea that governments shouldn't be involved in telling people what they can do on private property

The government literally tells people what to do on private property all the time. See zoning rules, smoking bans in restaurants, alcohol sales to minors, food safety laws, animal cruelty... the list is almost endless. I can't even fathom the kind of thinking that suggests that laws end on a property boundary.

> Are we going to have a whole system of definitions of what is billboard

Yes. It's not that hard. We encode complex things in regulations all the time.

> The government literally tells people what to do on private property all the time.

That doesn't mean it's automatically a good thing.

Never said it was. History was (and continues to be) littered with terrible law.

If you want to argue that government shouldn't regulate billboards, fine, that's a valid argument. But the general principle of governments setting rules over private property is pretty well established, I would have thought.

I come from a place that bans billboards. Arguably it’s fairly practical, no one seems upset about it and property owners seem to get by. Also there don’t seem to be issues of enforcement because everyone is more or less on the same page about it.

Hmm if it’s so unenforceable, why have some cities managed to get rid of the billboards?

> the obvious idea that governments shouldn't be involved in telling people what they can do on private property

Officially propagandised ideology is always the very "obvious" sea we swim in.

> This is the same class of stupid idea that makes no practical sense

Yet it happens, and it works, and it makes life better.

> on private property

The whole point of billboards is that they are not private. If people want to put up billboards in their houses, godspeed.

In São Paulo it works. Not many things work around here, so I guess it is pretty practical to regulate and enforce.

I'm not a total libertarian nor a total communist, but I don't know why an elected government is worse than an unelected corporation at deciding what gets done with private property.

I'm with you on this one. The less the government messes with freedom the better. I'd rather a bit of visual pollution over a loss of even a small amount of freedom.

I would agree with you, if - and only if - the government also refrains from messing with my freedom to deface those billboards, so they no longer pollute the commons.

Can I then deface your house as I don't like the color?

In this hypothetical world of maximal freedom, I suppose you could. I couldn't very well stop you, and the government obviously wouldn't be messing with your freedom to paint other people's houses.

The less the government messes with your freedom the better, eh? I suppose that if I didn't like the color, perhaps I'd repaint your house in retaliation. What a mess it'd all be.

Obviously total freedom is not possible or desirable. You'd need to be free to kill others.

My position is that visual pollution is not such a great concern that we should restrict how someone paints their building.

Well, okay: now we can have a reasonable discussion. It's not actually about freedom, it's about how big a deal it is to pollute the commons with advertising. This is a question on which reasonable people may have differing opinions. How are we to sort it out? A majority vote might be one mechanism. Selection of representatives who can research the issue and negotiate compromises might be another.

My uneducated theory on this is that the problem with government interferences is proportional to the distance between you and the bureaucrat making the decision.

For example, if a world government said we don't want anyone wearing yellow hats. That's a problem because over the globe there are going to be some odd folks that care very much about their yellow hats (insert hypothetical religion / cause here). But if you get together with your neighbours and say let’s create a pact to legally require that all people remove their yellow hats from our gated community, well fine if you love yellow hats, you probably don't like these yellow hat haters anyway, who cares if they don't let you into their street.

That same could be done in local areas. But I think central business districts or areas that have a huge number of commuters there are just too many people involved. You now must have a lot more of a justification for the freedoms that are lost.

That said if all the building owners want to put that restriction in I'm all for it.

There's a ton of freedom already taken from you for the benefit of society, like driving on one side of the road or stopping at intersections. I don't think you mind those?

Each case has it's own cost benefit. I think the road rules have benefits that outweigh the costs. I don't think the government should be able to dictate how people dress their building. Be that painting them bright green or putting up advertising. Just as they shouldn't tell me how to dress.

Governments do have rules about the look of buildings. There are zoning regulations about commercial vs residential properties. Many places around the world will require that your building conforms to the character of the local environment.

A precedent doesn't prove it's an optimal solution.

You can see from some of the comments the sort of nonsense that is standing in the way of just being left alone. I don't know when or how things got this bad, but i suspect HN comments are not very representative of reality, even amongst the readership here, just some vocal kids

I suspect we've had good times for so long people don't understand why it's so important to safe guard our freedoms.

How would you define being left alone? It is currently based on a very specific mixture of laws and customs that foster private property and other such concepts. You're also dependent on the safety and/or infrastructure in your local area. The wealth that makes this all possible in a developed country isn't attained by leaving people alone, either. I would contend that the idea of being conceptually separated from the community in a Randian sense IS the childlike fairytale in a way.

Besides, there is a perfectly libertarian or even ancap way of looking at the advertisement problem. Billboards affect the quality of a city, and most of the people it affects aren't getting paid proceeds. So they can gang up together to ask for a better deal. And if they can't then they are being restricted by some non-libertarian force.

> I suspect HN comments are not very representative of reality

You're correct about that, but not in the way you think. This site actually tends to lean more libertarian than most people in the real world.