Friedman’s understanding of the ideal role of the state is
one with rigid constraints on government involvement; specifically, a
government may step in and modify the free market system for two reasons: to
promote, adjudicate, and enforce the rules of the game in order, for example,
to counter technical monopolies, or it may step in to overcome neighborhood
effects. It is upon this second category that I wish to focus in the context of
national parks. Friedman admits that pollution, for example, is an example of
an externality that requires government intervention, but suggests that
national parks should not receive this same categorization. Specifically,
Friedman advocates for the removal of government subsidies to national parks,
arguing “if the public wants this kind of an activity enough to pay for it,
private enterprise will have every incentive to provide such parks.” I would
like to explore more fully the implications of his argument for the removal of
governmental support. In 2010,
U.S. National Parks and Services had a budget of $3.14 billion. In addition to
this price, national parks collected approximately $ 251 million in recreation
fees, park concessions, and filming and photography. In total, national park
maintenance and administrative costs added up to around $3.4 billion. In this
same year, US’s 397 national parks, which consist of more than 84 million
acres, received 281,303,769 recreational visitors. Thus, if these visitors were expected to pay all the expenses
pertaining to national park maintenance and care, the price of entry may
roughly equal $12. I’ll admit that I was shocked by the reasonableness of this
price. Especially when considering that visitors collectively spend a total of
around 1.2 billion hours in the park, it is not difficult to imagine a
privatized park system where people were charged by the hour, bringing prices
to a little below $3 / hour.
Thus, perhaps the privatization of national parks will not,
as I initially feared and assumed, lead to the almost complete elimination of
these beautiful spaces. The $12 entrance fee, which would most likely vary
depending on popularity of park, does not seem to create a huge exclusionary
barrier (though survey and opinion analyses would be necessary to insure this).
However, as an avid park user and nature appreciator, I am instinctively
reluctant to remove national parks from the current nationalized system and
push their regulation into the private sphere. I believe my fear stems from a
disagreement with Freidman’s rejection that national parks create neighborhood
effects. At the risk of sounding like a paternalistic hippy, I believe there is
a positive correlation between interaction with nature and societal and
personal happiness. Nature seems to have intrinsic value that is independent of
how much people are willing to pay to appreciate it. Personally, I am willing
to pay (and perhaps “coerce” my fellow countrymen to pay as well) to insure
that this land and all those creatures that live within this habitat have a
future.
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