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 ...
