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Your desires, to have good, respectable, neighbors, to not live near disruptions etc. Are not only acceptable, they're completely expected. My objection to NIMBYism lies not in it's goals but in it's tactics which I believe frequently amount to using government action to appropriate the land value of other private actors for their own benefit. As a libertarian I see this as tantamount to communism.
Let me illustrate this with an example. There is a quiet neighborhood on the edge of town. Next to the neighborhood there is a field owned by a single farmer who grows corn. The neighborhood residents enjoy the quiet seclusion brought by being surrounded by corn and their homes values appreciate due to the relative scarcity of housing in their immediate vicinity. However as the area grows more populous the farmer realizes that his land would be more efficiently used for housing than for growing corn and he begins talking with a local developer to sell the land.
Now let's consider a few ways that the neighborhood residents might respond.
Scenario #1: the residents allow the field to be sold and new houses to be built and welcome their new neighbors
Scenario #2: the residents negotiate with the farmer and pay him a fixed sum of money in order for him to agree to put a restriction on his land that it will not be used except for agricultural purposes for the next 50 years
Scenario #3: the residents collectively buy the land from the farmer and turn it into a private park
Scenario #4: the residents use the fact that they outnumber the farmer to enact coercive government action to block any potential development of the land
In a sense all of 2,3 and 4 could be called NIMBY but my only objection is to #4. However #4 and analogous situations seem to make up the vast majority of NIMBY behavior so I consider myself an opponent of NIMBYism in general. My core belief is that you don't own your neighbors land and even if you have been recieving a benefit from how he has chosen to use that land for a number of years you are not in any way entitled to continue recieving that benefit and any use of government action to coerce your neighbor to use his land in a certain way is effectively theft.
Though this may be a type of efficiency, removing productive farmland from cultivation to site housing that does not require arable land does not seem an efficient form of land use.
Housing requires nearby jobs, land nearby jobs is relatively rare, sometimes the value from being nearby jobs vastly outweighs value from being arable. In any case, if we just built dense housing like apartment buildings with no parking lots, pretty little arable land would need to be built over; it's only suburbs or urban sprawl with massive highways that waste tons of arable land.
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The market is much better at finding efficient uses than your speculation.
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NMBYIsm is seldom used in this context. It's more about people who have no stake, not the contrived farmer example. The pro-NIMBY argument has to do with existing homeowners (stakeholders) suffering an externality with no just compensation.
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No, he didn't realize it would be more efficient, he realized it was worth more and wanted to cash in. People don't think in terms of efficiencies, they think in terms of values. Your example could have been from an economics textbook, which has a certain POV that is not relevant to the matter at hand, and does not reflect reality well enough to accept.
Taxation is theft. Theft is OK when enough people agree on it.
This is a distinction without a difference. The farmer might not be thinking in terms of efficiencies but the forces that make the land more efficiently used as housing are the same forces that make the price higher thus making it more attractive for the farmer to sell. You're also ignoring the primary point. It doesn't matter why the farmer wants to sell what matters is that it's his land not anyone else's so other people have no right to tell him how it can be used.
No it's not. The quality of life benefit that the gently-waving fields of corn provide to the local residents is real! It even gets priced in in the value of the neighbor's homes. It just doesn't get directly converted to the farmer's benefit unless he acts to cannibalize the benefit (by selling the cornfield to someone who will build something "worse" there). This is a problem with conflating increased price with higher efficiency/benefit - at least insofar as we want people to be incentivized to provide and/or do things that their neighbors like and/or enjoy.
I've accounted for this. If the current residents are enjoying so much benefit from the farmland that it's actually more efficient to leave it undeveloped then there will be a price at which scenario #2 can be cleared
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Our entire system is based on price = efficiency. That’s the American system. While the farmer might not be a trained economists it’s still the entire basis of our system higher price = higher efficient use
(For some good you could say higher marginal efficiency; oxygen is super important but the marginal oxygen is worthless type arguments).
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