For example, take ‘property rights’. As a category, this mixes together lots of liberal and illiberal things: houses, hammers, and taxi medallions are all ‘property’ but the first two are productive capital and the last one is a pretty different form of capital. I’d go so far as to say NIMBYism is mostly downstream of an expansive view of property rights—my ownership of my house is not just the volume and physical objects on it, but also more indirect things like the noises and smells that impinge on it and the view out from it.
I think the core problem for classical liberalism in the 2020s is something like “figuring out a modern theory of regulation”. That is, increased population density has increased the indirect costs of action (more people now see and are inconvenienced by your ugly building) and increased economic sophistication has increased a bunch of burdens (more complicated varieties of products require more complicated regulations) but the main answers for how to deal with this have come from anti-liberals. Like, consider Wolf Ladejinski, who helped influence land reform in Asia because he understood the popularity of communism came from (largely correct!) hatred of landlords, and free enterprise also does not like landlords strangling the economy. I think the returns to figuring out things like this are pretty high, and am moderately optimistic about ‘abundance’ types managing to do a similar thing, but I think there’s still lots of fertile ground here.
I think I have a somewhat different diagnosis.
For example, take ‘property rights’. As a category, this mixes together lots of liberal and illiberal things: houses, hammers, and taxi medallions are all ‘property’ but the first two are productive capital and the last one is a pretty different form of capital. I’d go so far as to say NIMBYism is mostly downstream of an expansive view of property rights—my ownership of my house is not just the volume and physical objects on it, but also more indirect things like the noises and smells that impinge on it and the view out from it.
I think the core problem for classical liberalism in the 2020s is something like “figuring out a modern theory of regulation”. That is, increased population density has increased the indirect costs of action (more people now see and are inconvenienced by your ugly building) and increased economic sophistication has increased a bunch of burdens (more complicated varieties of products require more complicated regulations) but the main answers for how to deal with this have come from anti-liberals. Like, consider Wolf Ladejinski, who helped influence land reform in Asia because he understood the popularity of communism came from (largely correct!) hatred of landlords, and free enterprise also does not like landlords strangling the economy. I think the returns to figuring out things like this are pretty high, and am moderately optimistic about ‘abundance’ types managing to do a similar thing, but I think there’s still lots of fertile ground here.