Free Lunch by David Cay Johnston Page A

Disneyland. Most
had seen images of the Magic Kingdom on television, yet had no idea it was within an hour’s drive. In the parks where fee money
was abundant, however, everyone seemed to have a story about one of their visits to Disneyland, some from trips organized at
their neighborhood park recreation center.
    Among the youngsters at the dead parks, hardly
any had actually seen the Pacific Ocean beaches, even though they lived within a few miles of the shore. Not one child asked how
he or she might get to the beach or pursued the stranger’s suggestion that, since the beaches were free, they could play on the
sand and in the waves all day if their parents took them. Many said they had seen the beaches on television, but that was their only
connection to what most Southern California youths treat as a birthright, the beach culture of sun, surf, and fun music. In park after
park, their answers were a depressing indication of the tight boundaries that life had already imposed on their expectations for
their futures.
    The proponents of markets as the solution to all problems want to eliminate
public parks. Some of them attack parks on moral grounds, while others say they are economically inefficient or demonstrate how
socialism pervades American society, threatening freedom.
    The Cato Institute, the nation’s
leading promoter of libertarian ideals, laid out the case for eliminating public parks in 1981. The second issue of the Cato Journal called for “the outright abolition of public ownership and the transfer of the
parks to private parties” because financing parks through tax dollars means “coercion.” Instead, Cato argued, “existing public
parks could either be given away or sold to the highest bidder.”
    A key assertion was that
because visitors are not charged, parks are overused. That is the exact reverse of what happened in Los Angeles. Park use was
heaviest where people were affluent enough to pay fees. In poor and working-class neighborhoods, cuts in government spending
and a lack of private resources to replace public funding resulted in woefully underused parks.
    Milton Friedman, the intellectual godfather of market-solution prophets, urged the elimination of national
parks when he was Barry Goldwater’s economic adviser in the 1964 presidential election. As for city parks, Friedman wrote that
putting up tollbooths to charge everyone entering would be too complicated given the small size and multiple entry points of most
parks. This was presented as a matter of reluctant practicality, not principle.
    Ranking not far
below Friedman in the pantheon of market-solution prophets are F. A. Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises, who was Hayek’s mentor.
Hayek won a Nobel in economics and his book The Road to Serfdom is a key part of
the free market economic gospel.
    The Ludwig von Mises Institute denounced public parks in
2007 as “nature socialism.” The institute declared that “the formation of state and national parks must, at some point, use
aggression” because even when parkland is donated to government “from that point on its maintenance and management would
require victimization through further taxation.” Any land owned by the government involves “the violation of rights,” the von Mises
Institute concluded.
    Such arguments may seem extreme because they have received little
news coverage. The nutty idea that parks pose a danger to freedom is widely discussed, however, among those who have been
making government economic policy for much of the past three decades. And these ideas, and the journals in which they are
presented, are basic source documents for the influential editorial page of The Wall Street
Journal , which champions policies that make the rich richer.
    Under even
sharper assault are special-purpose public parks, notably municipal golf courses. In North Carolina, the San Francisco Bay Area,
and