(Untitled)
I noticed that a townhall meeting in Tinicum made it into the Philly Inquirer the other day, hosted by a group called Eco Bucks. The topic concerned a proposed 1,400 residences a developer wants to construct in the township. As of the 2000 census, Tinicum had a population of about 4,000. Sadly, this is nothing new for Bucks County
( Read more... )
I have a brief comment regarding your post about development in Bucks County. And I don't mean it as an attack on your ideology; the sharpness with which our competing worldviews conflict probably precludes the possibility of my converting you in a blog comment. I just have some food for your thought.
You conclude your post by saying that the land is worth preserving. And this may very well be true, I don't know. But consider this: If it is worth preserving then why doesn't someone buy it to preserve it?
This might seem a silly question but perhaps, if it doesn't turn you into a capitalist (of course it won't), it might give you something to ponder.
If you ask me, there is a reason nobody buys it to prevent developers from developing: It's actually NOT worth preserving. When a developer makes a million dollar bid for a slab of beautiful land, he's declaring exactly how much that land is worth to him. The wonderful thing about the free market (if you want to call the status quo a free-market), is that you can outbid that developer just to preserve it! If it is true that the land is worth preserving, then certainly someone would buy it to preserve it, right?
Well, I can already hear you're arguments against this. The problem, you're probably thinking to yourself, is that the free market only accounts for money. Dammit Justin! You're not factoring intrinsic natural beauty into the equation.
But here's the thing. The market doesn't ignore intrinsic natural beauty. The market really isn't about money, so much as it is about wants. It allocates resources to those who want them the most. If nobody is willing to outbid the developer, then that means that the developer wants it more than any preserver. Yes, he wants it for profits and you want it for beauty - but the market doesn't discriminate against personal subjective evaluations. And isn't this preferable?
Would it really be advisable to allow the government to selectively prohibit certain land purchases according to a certain (any) standard? If other people value nearby grocery stores more than they value natural beauty, shouldn't they be allowed to have the market reflect that? But I mean, even if every citizen agreed to the maxim "beauty is more important than profit", wouldn't it still be inadvisable to give this power to the government? We're then faced with the rather insurmountable difficulty of fairly determing "beauty". To me, the distributive function of the price mechanism seems the best conceivable method - resources go to those who will give the most for them.
I'm sure you could mobilize more arguments, and I hope you do. I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this.
Justin Murphy
http://astro.temple.edu/~tua04809/blog.html
Reply
Leave a comment