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The best argument for the dark side?

On a message board, I recently encountered the following question, addressed to free market advocates such as myself:


"Of all the arguments against the libertarian or free market position, in your opinion, which one do you think is the most persuasive or simply the best."


Fair enough. I received some training in advocacy once upon a time. I should be able to argue against even my deepest convictions.


So I wrote this:


The most intuitively powerful arguments in favor of statism, planning, etc., all involve long thin and useful things. Roads, railroad lines, pipelines carrying anything from fresh water to human waste to natural gas, and electrical wires all share these properties: long, thin, useful.

We tend to think of real estate as rectangles, maybe even squares, of claims on the surface of the ground extending both up and down from there indeterminate distances. To satellite orbits? to the earth's core? Anyway, if we do think of RE in this way, then all those long thin objects will necessarily have to cross a lot of boundary lines, causing neighborly disputes and hold-out problems. Since a lot of these thin things are very useful, the fear arises that they won't get built or maintained unless some central authority can override the property interests of the holders of those neat rectangles and force the wise system into place.

That, as I say, is the common intuitive argument (which I am NOT endorsing). I think a more sophisticated understanding of what property rights, including RE rights, really entail is necessarily to deal with this.



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