You have reached iGreens.org.uk. In December 2006 we moved to iGreens.org with faster servers and discussion boards. Click here to follow us.
|
You have reached iGreens.org.uk. In December 2006 we moved to iGreens.org with faster servers and discussion boards. Click here to follow us. |
|
Mark Pennington. Liberating the Land. Institute of Economic Affairs. 2 Lord North Street. 2002 £10.00. ISBN 0 255 36508 X Book review
In England nearly all land use changes are closely
regulated by an array of national and local government organisations.
These make detailed decisions about individual planning applications
rather than using market based incentives. Mark Pennington argues in this refreshing but scholarly
little book that this “command and control” approach is inefficient
bureaucratic and slow. He has
two fundamental objections to centralised planning, the lack of a Hayekian
discovery process, and the harmful consequences of “public choices” by
bureaucrats. Hayek argued that even perfectly public-spirited planners
could never make decisions as well as dispersed agents in free markets, because
they could never know enough. The
information planners need is dispersed in the heads of all the people who might
use the land. Surveys,
elections and public meetings cannot extract it because the holders do not even
know it consciously themselves. They
can only reveal it in usable form when they are allowed to participate in a
market. Public choice theory suggests that things are even worse
than that. Rational
self-interest leads most people, those without a major current interest in a
planning decision, to remain ignorant, while a few special interests to capture
the decision making bodies. Pennington identifies three groups that benefit from
current regulation, although here must be more. NIMBY homeowners in
protected rural villages. Large corporate builders who encourage the
system to release the occasional large site which smaller developers cannot
afford. Established retail chains who keep out new competitors such as Wal
Mart by opposing new developments. People
living in “rabbit hutches on postage stamps” in the limited space that
planners release, smaller house builders, and all of us who pay higher retail
prices are victims. Pennington’s solution is private property rights in land
use control. Things like restrictive covenants, which can be brought and
sold both by developers and by development opponents.
Groups of people in a village or town can club together to share packages
of covenants, and can agree rules for choosing when to sell them.
If you don’t like a particular package you can buy a house elsewhere. I think Pennington makes his case well.
However, in the book’s foreword Harry Richardson criticises such common
property regimes as tyrannical, and cites housing associations that stopped
displays of the American flag in the aftermath of Sept 11 on the grounds that it
was a “prohibited garden ornament”! Unusually for an IEA book, Pennington has not been given
the opportunity to reply, so I will on his behalf. Richardson should have looked at the regulations more
closely before he bought his house. Perhaps
some people regard avoiding garden ornaments as worth not displaying a flag.
Insofar as people like Richardson regard flag prohibitions as a burden
house prices within such homeowner associations will fall.
That will soon get the attention of the residents who may well vote an
exemption for flags. A market
in regulation. This is a lovely little book. Email for a copy here,
or better still subscribe to the IEA publication series here.
|
|
You have reached iGreens.org.uk. In December 2006 we moved to iGreens.org with faster servers and discussion boards. Click here to follow us.
Send mail to enquiries@igreens.org.uk
with
questions or comments about this web site.
|