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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33491 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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That's not a transfer of wealth, that's just the existence of wealth. Your take here is just reversing causality; NIMBYs want the status quo, YIMBYs are the ones who want a transfer of wealth (to themselves).

NIMBY policies allow the people who happened to live in an area extract massive economic rent--pretty much unbounded rent, in fact, for doing absolutely nothing. Actually, it's worse than that. It's even worse than merely speculating on land you bought, because at least a pure land speculator doesn't actively screw over all of the economic development on surrounding land for their own benefit.

Property rights are literally the basis of NIMBY arguments.

What conception of property rights means that your neighbors have arbitrary authority to determine what you can build on your land? That's the opposite of property rights.

And note how you acknowledge that point about the status quo versus change?

What does the status quo matter here? Are you confusing it with property rights? Are we supposed to assume that the current state is just always good or something equally nonsensical?

You don't get to just assume that the change you want is a good thing, and you don't get to just handwave away the costs you dump onto others in the process. Maybe it is! Maybe the utilitarian calculation comes down on the YIMBY side! But don't act like this is altruism instead of competing interest groups fighting over their own benefits.

I gave a bunch of reasons why YIMBYism is beneficial, and is beneficial to many people who are not involved in these political fights.

Do you know what property rights are?

Yes, but apparently you don't, since you think owning property actually means everyone else can ban you from building a second house on it or whatever.

See, this is the kind of absurd rhetoric that makes it clear you're not even trying to reason, just doing a tribalism. NIMBYs are the people who are already there, dude. They're the ones who made the area desirable and full of positive externalities. YIMBYs are the ones who want to eat that for their own benefit.

Interesting attempting at projection, but no, merely living in a place does not mean you contributed to making it desirable. Places like the Bay Area generate a tremendous amount of wealth because of the efforts of tech workers, founders, and funders, not random suburbanites who happened to move there in the 1960s. And even with pro-development policies, those people would still see substantial returns on merely owning a house, which is not actually normal. It just wouldn't be the case that they can capture huge amounts of it.

Cars are incredibly useful

So are apartment buildings, they just don't kill 30,000 people a year (40,000 during covid). But thank you for making it clear that you are just in it for naked self-interest, with 0 regard for anyone else, which is why you are forced to resort to shitty projection to make everyone else seem as narcissistic as you and justify controlling what other people do with their own land.

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