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And so what? No one is obligated to get the short end of the deal to achieve Kaldor-Hicks optimality.
Again, obligation is irrelevant. Whether you are morally obligated or not is orthogonal to whether you should (from the point of view of your fellow citizens) be forced to do it, by your government.
Everything from taxes on up follows from there. If (and it is a big if!) the housing issue caused enough problems and if (again another huge if!) forcing boomers to sell would solve it, then their personal moral obligations don't matter a hoot.
Civilization is built on forcing people to make sup-optimal (for them personally) actions in service to the greater good. Personal moral obligations don't come into it. That's why not following the law has to have consequences, because we don't naturally choose to do so. Very few people would pay their tax burden fair and square if it were based on their personal moral obligations only. Throw the fear of the IRS into it however..
Thats why people need to care what their peers believe they should do even if they themselves believe they have no personal obligation to do so. Because we can and are forced to comply every day with laws we feel we have no personal obligation towards. Its the foundation of modern civilization.
You may not be obligated to get the short end of the stick, but that has no impact on whether you will or should (from a societal pov).
Society is not there ro ensure every single person gets the best possible personal outcome. It suceeds because on average people are better off, but that distribution is not likely or guaranteed to be fair. It just needs to be fair enough to be stable.
Yeah and as an additional factor, moral obligations and state actions are fundamentally different in kind because moral obligations are individual whereas state actions are collective. You have a moral obligation to save the drowning child even if you are surrounded on all sides by callous assholes; standing in a group of bystanders does not morally relieve you of failure to render aid. Conversely, if your society has decided on a tax rate that is erroneously, ruinously low, you do not have a moral or legal obligation to pay regardless, because in that situation we acknowledge that uneven enforcement is even more corrosive than wrong policy.
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This is basically a paen to "might makes right". But if we look at it that way, right now the people who own the houses have the upper hand in government, and the would-be pod-dwellers who want their space don't. So it turns out civilization favors the NIMBY, at least for now.
Exactly! And it does because Boomers vote and lobby and spend money to look out for their interests.
How they feel about their personal moral obligations has no impact, but what they do does. And the people opposing them need to learn that lesson if they hope to succeed. Being morally right does exactly nothing to advance their cause.
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