Comments Elsewhere

Oscar,

I’m not sure I quite understand your example. Is the government in question selling sidewalks to a single bidder? Are they requiring bidders to pledge to enact the invasive “security” measures in order for them to bid? Are they requiring bidders to keep the sidewalk property that they buy, or can thos bidders transfer ownership to other people under different terms?

I ask, because depending on your answers to these questions I might find the government’s actions objectionable or unobjectionable; but in the cases where it would be objectionable, the reasons for the objections would have nothing essentially to do with limitations on private owners of any resource that could be said to serve a “public function”. They would, rather, have to do with the government’s decision to “privatize” resources in a way which was (1) unfair, and possibly (2) not effectively privatization at all, but rather franchsing out management of resources that the government retains effective control over.

In either case the issue would be an illegitimate transfer of property, not the obligations that legitimate private property owners do or do not have.

(To illustrate: imagine a case in which the goverment privatizes all the sidewalks in Manhattan by transferring them to associations of all the people who live or own a business on a particular block, with no strings attached other than the requirement that each person in the association get a number of transferrable shares of ownership. Suppose also that for some reason the association on a particular block of 112th street decides to impose the kind of onerous procedures you imagine. What are people going to do? Well, they’re going to walk a block around to 113th street or 111th street. That sucks, but it’s hardly a catastrophe and hardly seems any reason for the justice system to intervene. Now suppose that NYC sells all the sidewalks to a single bidder, ScumCo, based out of Hoboken, and only on the condition that ScumCo institute those kind of procedures, institute them everywhere, and not sell to anyone who won’t institute them. The latter case certainly does seem objectionable, but I think the reason that it does seem objectionable has much more to do with the kind of restrictions that the city government placed on who can own the sidewalks after privatization than it does with the prerogatives of private owners themselves.)