The City Comforts Blog links back to my observations about conservative/libertarian urban planning. Unfortunately, there's a little gotcha in his response. He writes "I would be delighted to hear practical, conservative alternatives which do not deny the goal of humane urban form as a way of achieving it". The problem is that a pro-freedom solution to the problem will always deny an end result as the only possible solution to a problem. That's the very definition of freedom, the ability to choose to pick the optimal solution or not without outside forces coercing you. So a libertarian solution, even if it creates a great deal of net social benefit over all other solutions and greatly improves the present state of land use planning, is ultimately always going to be less efficient in creating new urbanist paradises then an imposed solution because a libertarian solution would always seek to minimize coercion and coercion, taken in isolation, is very efficient.
Posted by TMLutas at August 24, 2003 05:33 PM