Not Bruce Benson. He argues that those who want to build roads, pipelines, and so on don’t need it either. In an interesting Independent Review article he tackles the “holdout problem” and other justifications for grabbing land. Here’s the abstract:
According to the conventional wisdom, road transportation would be highly inefficient without the government’s power of eminent domain, because property owners could refuse to sell their property at the government’s asking price. In reality, there are strong grounds for thinking that private, for-profit road companies would have fewer problems with holdouts and few problems as severe as that of government failure in road transportation.
Read the whole thing here.