Always an Angle

Today, I watched a program on a former prison farm in Shelby County, Tennessee that has been converted into a major park complex. In the 1970s, a developer hoped to purchase the land to construct a model city but at the last moment, his plan was rebuffed largely thanks to the opposition of other property developers. To cover that angle, one must recognize that the less land there is in private hands, the more valuable the privately-held property becomes due to the immutable law of supply and demand. The rival developers did not act because they so loved the public and wanted to grant them more access to parks or out of any other sense of altruism but resisted to feather their own nests and enhance the value of what they already controlled. The same may be said of the vast tracts of land that the Federal government has turned into National Parks. Those with previously existing mineral rights were all too happy to have resource-rich land taken off the table and kept out of production because their already harvested minerals that they maintain access to, and the resources and the right to mine more would become all that much more dear. When a government arrogates land unto itself, the citizen pays for it many times over and in ways not always readily seen. The higher cost at the gas pump that the public absorbs every time an area is deemed off-limits to oil exploration is just one of them. A few profit from environmental and seemingly charitable impulses but to the vast majority, parks create a hidden cost that we must bear.