The analysis is reasonable overall, but trying to distinguish between "good" and "bad" NIMBYs is a pretty serious flaw. You have to put halfway houses and power plants somewhere. Those NIMBYs are still stealing from other people, they're just stealing from the residents of some other place whose residents have less free time or political capital to prevent something that lowers property values from being constructed in their neighborhood. Or they're again stealing from society at large if they prevent such things from being built at all. In either case they create a societal cost by adding the cost of the fight to the cost of building necessary things.
The OP and your post have the word 'stealing' in. It's an incorrect use of the word.
It's not hard to find respectactable nimby cases. What if someone wanted to pub a pub at the end of your street? You are not a drinker, and you object to the prospect of people stumbling down your street shouting at strange hours, leaving mess on your property and more chance of intoxicated drivers.
Neighborhood pubs/bars of the sort that are attended primarily by people in the neighborhood are actually beneficial to neighborhood security and quality of life.
Anything that gets the people who actually live there out on the street, particularly in the nighttime hours, increases security.
Our modern, sterile "city planning" where everything is separated and zoned off into their own areas is a huge factor in the decline of our quality of life.
For an extensive treatment of this thesis, see the work of Jane Jacobs.
>The OP and your post have the word 'stealing' in. It's an incorrect use of the word.
I'm not interested in the "is copyright infringement theft" debate. Words mean what people understand them to mean. "Stealing" encodes a moral condemnation of the activity, which can be objectionable when it is used to frame the debate. But it's also a lot easier to say than "acquiring a relative net benefit" or the like. Moreover, I'm just using the author's terms. All I mean to say is that constructing traffic obstructions and obstructing the construction of power plants are either both stealing or neither are, and in any event they're both socially expensive.
>It's not hard to find respectactable nimby cases. What if someone wanted to pub a pub at the end of your street? You are not a drinker, and you object to the prospect of people stumbling down your street shouting at strange hours, leaving mess on your property and more chance of intoxicated drivers.
It's still the same thing. You're either arguing that we shouldn't have pubs at all or you're arguing that we shouldn't have them in your neighborhood. If you're arguing the second, you're still a "bad NIMBY" because the pub then has to go in someone else's neighborhood and you're just foisting the cost of the drunkards onto those people.
And if you're arguing the first, we tried that already (see: prohibition) and it was a disaster. In the general case, there will be some things that are always net undesirable, but the people qualified to make that determination are scientists and statisticians, not the self-interested local residents in whatever place they propose to construct a potentially beneficial thing with known local negative externalities.
