It will be interesting to see what happens in this story, from this morning’s Post-Dispatch. The basics:
- A church has a 200 year old tree on their property.
- They want to cut the tree down to build a parking lot.
- Other residents, including the Garden Club and members of City Council, object.
- The preacher has given them 30 days to come up with the $75,000 they would need to instead buy an adjacent lot and build parking there, effectively allowing them to buy a right to view the tree.
- Sanity reigns toward the end of the article: the city and other residents realize that they cannot legally prevent the church from cutting the tree down. It’s their land and their tree, and they are free to dispose of it as they please.
Again, it will be interesting to see how this turns out. Mainstream theory says that even if the town values the tree more highly than the church, they won’t be able to coordinate their efforts because of collective action problems. Hans-Hermann Hoppe discusses the theory of public goods here.
