I think this framing quietly smuggles in a category error.
This isn’t about what feels compelling to you or me, nor is it a clean split between “near-universal moral prohibitions” and “petty micromanagement.” There’s a massive middle ground you’re flattening. Scale matters. Irreversibility matters. Civilization-level consequences matter.
Banning murder preserves a baseline condition for freedom. Large infrastructure projects don’t just “nudge” behavior or marginally increase traffic. They reshape cities, labor markets, land values, energy use, migration patterns, and political power for decades or centuries. They bind future generations who never consented and cannot meaningfully opt out. Calling that “petty” is just wrong descriptively, regardless of whether you support the project.
Once you acknowledge that, the question stops being “should the state only prevent violence?” and becomes “what kinds of collective decisions are legitimate when their effects are vast, asymmetric, and effectively permanent?” That’s not micromanagement. That’s the core problem of modern governance.
So no, the objection isn’t to the government punishing murder instead of being anarchic. It’s to pretending that civilization-shaping actions belong in the same moral bucket as minor regulatory nuisances. You can argue that such projects are worth the tradeoff. You can argue they should override individual objections. But dismissing them as trivial violations is an easy rhetorical move that avoids grappling with why people resist them in the first place.
This isn’t about what feels compelling to you or me, nor is it a clean split between “near-universal moral prohibitions” and “petty micromanagement.” There’s a massive middle ground you’re flattening. Scale matters. Irreversibility matters. Civilization-level consequences matter.
Banning murder preserves a baseline condition for freedom. Large infrastructure projects don’t just “nudge” behavior or marginally increase traffic. They reshape cities, labor markets, land values, energy use, migration patterns, and political power for decades or centuries. They bind future generations who never consented and cannot meaningfully opt out. Calling that “petty” is just wrong descriptively, regardless of whether you support the project.
Once you acknowledge that, the question stops being “should the state only prevent violence?” and becomes “what kinds of collective decisions are legitimate when their effects are vast, asymmetric, and effectively permanent?” That’s not micromanagement. That’s the core problem of modern governance.
So no, the objection isn’t to the government punishing murder instead of being anarchic. It’s to pretending that civilization-shaping actions belong in the same moral bucket as minor regulatory nuisances. You can argue that such projects are worth the tradeoff. You can argue they should override individual objections. But dismissing them as trivial violations is an easy rhetorical move that avoids grappling with why people resist them in the first place.