Also, I think the Georgist land-value tax offers a reasonable partial solution: No longer does it make sense for speculators to sit on property, waiting for values to increase; homeowners, we can hope, begin again to think of their properties as homes, rather than primarily as “investments”; and it starts to make a hell of a lot less sense for Wal*Mart to sit on thousands of empty stores (with attendant parking lots), leasing a few out, but leaving many vacant, because the company wants to consolidate two locations into one supercenter.

Is this an intrinsically good thing. You tacitly posit that it is, but I’m convinced neither by the following sentences nor by the peculiar conceptions about efficiency and “productivity” to which we collectively adhere.

Also, although E.D. is right to point out the IHS, he is far from complete in his painting of the picture. The favoritism shown to Wal*Mart (and other larger concerns) even by perfidious officials in our local governments — in the form of tax breaks, training-program grants, roadway improvements, et cetera — plus the extent to which employees of Wal*Mart (and their children) comprise sizable portions of state health insurance programs, inter alia: When we take all of this into consideration, those cheap Wally World prices that Mr. Cheeks enjoys and all of that convenience start to look a lost costlier, particularly when these easily ignored/swept-under-the-rug monetary costs are combined with serious environmental degradation and the loss of local cultural, political, and economic autonomy.

When we label things public goods, we open them for true abuse by individuals and “externalities.” When we made roads a public good, they become overcrowded, slow, and inefficient. When we claimed the state owns rivers, lakes, and streams, they become overused, polluted, and unsustainably abused. When the government claimed ownership of the EM spectrum it stagnated development into signal processing and opened up worlds of rent seeking behavior. AM and FM are 50 year old technologies and have had very little improvement since government usurped the spectrum.

The failures are there, and the list only gets longer as time goes on. I suspect the problem has much more to do with governments than markets.

As I argue in my previous post to have virtue in society “we have to tolerate limits on our individual freedoms”. This is just another way of also saying to have balance we have to recognize that Liberty is about Control not just in political matters as the Founding Fathers thought but also in economic matters. It is the issue of Control that makes it so important for our times to debate, understand and redefine the role of the State. The Sub-Prime Disaster has made clear to us that we can no longer afford to allow the capture of the State by self-centered elites. But we cannot go back to the small population and substantially property-less hunter-gatherer tribes that decided matters by consent. The Hippie communes of the Sixties were the failed experiments in that direction. These are some of the reasons I cannot be a Libertarian. I actually think Libertarians act as an impediment to having the necessary discussion on the role of the State and also stand in the way of rational discussion of what limits we should tolerate on our individual freedoms because they largely want no limits. Here to dramatically illustrate my point is an extreme example of the importance of society debating and enacting limits. Milton Friedman, a famous libertarian, wanted no limits on the sale of narcotic drugs. Today in Afghanistan opium addiction is a major problem. Babies are born addicted and mothers blow opium smoke in their faces to pacify them and give them their “fix”. Where is the virtue in this? A child surely is entitled to rights? If you believe they do then you have to also believe that Liberty must entail Control. That would mean that if you had lived in the nineteenth century you would believe that the British East India Company (the huge corporate conglomerate that caused the American Revolution) should be prevented by government imposed law from importing opium into China. British military power prevented the Chinese government from doing this so you would have to rely upon the British government doing this. However, since influential members of Parliament also held stock in the East India Company this made it difficult to pass such law. Lack of virtue continues in global trading to this day!

a. It already exists;
b. It’s incredibly popular;
c. It’s increased the productivity of Americans by staggering amounts.

What’s the first things that the western forces did upon conquering Afghanistan (the most recent version)? Start building roads. Connecting communities to each other is critical to ending rural isolation and (therefore) poverty.

Mind you, there are big chunks of this country, in the Dakotas, Montana and Alaska, that are miles upon miles from any good road. There is nothing to prevent a die-hard localist from relocating there. (Of course, the US Mail plus an internet connection will prevent too much hardship.)