On the counterfactual, it's actually not very smart, and a toxic and myopic view of society. There's an entire spectrum of coordinating collective human behavior that ranges from systems like feudalism to anarcho-syndicalism to mixed economies like those that exist in Scandinavia and much of Western Europe. Government's role is infinitely flexible as a result; it can choose to be as expansive or as minimal as possible. In the case of housing, which is an issue where there needs to be mass action to ensure additional housing supply, relying on either the free market or government exclusively is not going to fix the problem. One of the things that a lot of pseudo-intellectual YIMBYs in the Bay and elsewhere don't realize about the housing crisis is that it will require massive mobilization action by both public and private actors to solve. For instance, I rarely hear the YIMBY crowd sing the praises of public housing, a model that has been successful[1] in Singapore, Vienna, and many other cities across the globe.

I find the anti-government sentiments and libertarian beats on this website frequently tiring at best, gravely ill-conceived at worst.

[1]https://www.shareable.net/public-housing-works-lessons-from-...

Yet public housing is a terrible failure in essentially every city with housing cost issues in the US.