> To a lot of people it increasingly feels like a form of private authoritarianism over tiny fiefdoms for absolutely no benefit to a vast majority of people.
that is what it means to have property rights.
It prevents your interests from being usurped by someone else without first consulting you. Of course, like anything, it can be taken too far, but getting the balance right is important.
If it tips too far towards gov't authoritarianism, the people who are not connected tends to suffer silently (while the majority who gets told these "nation building" projects benefits them).
If it tips too far towards the private individual, then you get nimby-ism and such.
America's elevation of individuality and property rights above everything else, its inability to work together collectively to achieve a goal, and its citizen's infighting, distrust of and belligerence toward each other, are the main reasons it is incapable of doing big things anymore.
The minute we had a huge health emergency that should have united the population, it was immediately politicized such that half the country was trying to fix it, and the other half were trying to prolong it and grief the fixers.
We're done for if we can't stop pitting half the country against each other over literally every issue.
More and more I think the mistake is seeing it as a tradeoff between "property rights" and "government authoritarianism". First, because authoritarianism is not much better when it happens to be non-government authoritarianism (i.e., when corporations become more powerful than government). And second, because it treats "property rights" as a single fixed notion, rather than recognizing that we can have property rights that are not independent of the amount of property owned. Just because "property rights" means that Paul the Peon has absolute dominion over his hovel, there's no particular reason it also has to mean that Oliver the Oligarch has absolute dominion over his dozens of mansions, factories, private security forces, etc. We can have a system where your rights over property decrease the more of it you have, so that in the limit there is effectively a maximum on how much property can be owned or controlled by a single individual (and therefore by a group of individuals).