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In the nicest possible way, I think that's the most eloquent and convincing argument for common law land rights I've ever heard. I get that it causes problems but gosh, the alternative sounds pretty bad.
I mean, the Texas high speed rail is delayed more or less indefinitely because a bunch of ranchers on the route didn’t get the appropriate concessions to acquiesce to eminent domain, so they convinced the Texas nationalists it was a George Soros WEF plot to bring in a UN occupation to provide political cover to their lawfare.
Now obviously the Texas high speed rail could have bargained with the farmers(they wanted more stops to provide local employment and a few concessions on cattle-crossing logistics and were willing to waive their compensation rights if those conditions were granted, both of which seem like they could have come to a reasonable agreement on), but still.
And of course on the third hand the project may well be more an exercise in green fetishism rather than a practical idea; the Dallas-Houston route is well served by commuter flights and luxury buses which puts an upper floor on the price tag for rail tickets.
I've long been wondering whether a better application of HSR wouldn't be to urban centers directly, but to major airports. Ideally, the airport already has transit options into the city available, are generally on the outskirts of town where routing rail travel would be easier, and, while airlines might be unhappy about losing short flights, there are lots of short connections to hubs that could probably be faster by train than an extra connecting flight. Austin and San Antonio to Dallas or Houston, Chicago to Milwaukee, Oklahoma City to Dallas, Phoenix to Tuscon. All these flights are about an hour, and fly more than half a dozen flights daily each way, many of which are, I assume, to take a much longer flight from the larger airport, because driving would take a similar amount of time and solve getting around at the destination.
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Well, it depends. I don’t think the question of whether some random farmer should be able to block a $100bn infrastructure project that has the potential to improve millions of people’s lives and contribute to higher economic growth and prosperity for many people because of the principle of private property is absolute is an easy one.
Agreed, and I don’t want to suggest it is. Only that (to paraphrase) “the state can take your home without telling you why, there’s nothing you can do, and even if you argue on good legal grounds they’ll ignore you and take it anyway” sounds pretty grim and also open to abuse.
A part of the problem is that, as urbanisation increases, these projects aren’t designed to benefit flyover locals and everyone knows it. Ideally people would be happily giving up their land so that their area can join in the new wave of prosperity from the 100bn project, as (I think?) was the case with the original train system. But instead projects like HS2 mostly exist explicitly for elite urban traffic to bypass you.
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