What about cultural institutions and assets? If all land belongs to everyone (through rents), what’s to stop someone deciding that the land currently beneath the colosseum in Rome would be better used as the foundations of a supermarket? They outbid a heritage organization, demolish the building and start their supermarket? Is this a loss? Maybe not…
Currently we have the opposite problem. For example I went to a school in a random suburb in not particularly exciting buildings a couple of hundred years old. They were marked as cultural heritage and so it was forbidden to knock them down and rebuild even though the school desperately needed more space. So some random people can prevent an extremely successful school from expanding because they’ve decided they like the building.
Under this proposal they would have to pay to stop that happening, and you’d suddenly discover they value the cultural heritage of the building far less than they claimed.
1. How much money do they have is somewhat relevant though.
2. The cost of preserving it indefinitely isn’t finite. So...maybe they wouldn’t be willing to pay a cost like that because the good they want isn’t for sale.
3. In order to afford to keep the Colosseum open it’s going to have to be in use. Do you, really want that?
This isn’t a great way of thinking about intangible value, since most people are far less liquid than the value of the things in their lives. If your mom needs life-saving treatment for $10,000 and you can’t afford to pay it, does that mean your mom is really worth less than $10,000 to you? No—her existence might contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars of devotion, emotional support, and sage advice to you. It’s just that nobody will accept those things as collateral for a loan.
The Colosseum doesn’t have as stark a value proposition going for it, but by a similar argument it’s easy to imagine the public benefit of some building being greater than the amount of money that can be raised to support it. Personally, I think the Colosseum is mostly only valuable to the Italian state for the legitimacy that it buys it, a little self-justifying scheme of wasting taxpayer money to manufacture taxpayer assent.
What about cultural institutions and assets? If all land belongs to everyone (through rents), what’s to stop someone deciding that the land currently beneath the colosseum in Rome would be better used as the foundations of a supermarket? They outbid a heritage organization, demolish the building and start their supermarket? Is this a loss? Maybe not…
Currently we have the opposite problem. For example I went to a school in a random suburb in not particularly exciting buildings a couple of hundred years old. They were marked as cultural heritage and so it was forbidden to knock them down and rebuild even though the school desperately needed more space. So some random people can prevent an extremely successful school from expanding because they’ve decided they like the building.
Under this proposal they would have to pay to stop that happening, and you’d suddenly discover they value the cultural heritage of the building far less than they claimed.
I would argue that if people across the world are not willing to pool enough money together to save the Colosseum, then for all their claims that culture is important to them, it clearly just really isn’t. I’m reminded of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/21/the-economics-of-art-and-the-art-of-economics/
1. How much money do they have is somewhat relevant though.
2. The cost of preserving it indefinitely isn’t finite. So...maybe they wouldn’t be willing to pay a cost like that because the good they want isn’t for sale.
3. In order to afford to keep the Colosseum open it’s going to have to be in use. Do you, really want that?
This isn’t a great way of thinking about intangible value, since most people are far less liquid than the value of the things in their lives. If your mom needs life-saving treatment for $10,000 and you can’t afford to pay it, does that mean your mom is really worth less than $10,000 to you? No—her existence might contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars of devotion, emotional support, and sage advice to you. It’s just that nobody will accept those things as collateral for a loan.
The Colosseum doesn’t have as stark a value proposition going for it, but by a similar argument it’s easy to imagine the public benefit of some building being greater than the amount of money that can be raised to support it. Personally, I think the Colosseum is mostly only valuable to the Italian state for the legitimacy that it buys it, a little self-justifying scheme of wasting taxpayer money to manufacture taxpayer assent.