Privatize the WTC Site

A New York Times op-ed I encountered today starts out like this ...

The effort to rebuild the World Trade Center site continues to go nowhere. The planned memorial lacks start-up money and faces public indifference. Those behind the proposed museum have not shown that they have any clear idea how to represent the memory of a day of murder, pain and loss. And most important, there is no real government-business-real estate coalition supporting the commercial plans of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the developer Larry Silverstein, who holds the lease.

We've reached a stage where the state and local government, so often the causes of delay, are the only players with the ability to move things forward. It is time for them to invoke their trump card: the takings clause of the United States Constitution. [bold added]

Needless to say, my immediate reaction was: "The hell we should use the takings clause!"

The op-ed continues meandering drunkenly through the mixed-economy quagmire that is the debate over what to do with the World Trade Center site, now vacant going on five years. Until, that is, the end, when it names, without knowing it, one of the major causes of the inordinate delay.

Four decades ago, the 12 blocks that form the trade center site were taken through eminent domain from a group of electronics merchants and other small-business owners. That was David Rockefeller's idea, and his brother Gov. Nelson Rockefeller made it happen. Now it is up to Governor Pataki to give Mr. Bloomberg a similar opportunity. Ground zero does not belong to the Port Authority or the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation or Larry Silverstein. It is our property. We should get it back. [bold added]

A query at Jeeves reveals that the current "owner" of the site is the Port Authority, and that Larry Silverstein holds a 99-year lease on the land worth $3.2 billion.

No wonder things are such a mess! And since it's public property, every Tom, Dick, and Harry -- meaning every special interest group with lots of cash and every busybody with too much time on his hands -- gets to have a say in what happens at the WTC site. This is how a multiculturalist tribute to our enemies nearly got built -- by people with no stake in the property -- on the grave site of our countrymen in the first place! And this is, in part, why office space at least equal to what was lost isn't already under construction now.

The other part of why the towers haven't been built back taller than ever is because of the uncertainty caused by our President's halting and tentative prosecution of the current war. Are we safe enough to rebuild yet? It is the task of our government to protect the lives and rights of American citizens. It will not do this by not fighting the Islamists, or by paying to rebuild the site with confiscated money (which would be better spent on our defense), or by continuing to hold the land.

The solution to this dilemma involves no "government-business-real estate coalition". It involves our government doing what it is supposed to do and butting out of what it isn't supposed to do. You, Uncle Sam, guard the perimeter, and let the Larry Silversteins and Donald Trumps decide what to do with the billion-dollar commercial real estate. They want to make money, so I'm sure that things won't be stalled for long. Just get out of their way.

Rather than being seized by the government -- again -- the World Trade Center site should be auctioned off to the highest bidder. It should become private property whose owner can do with it as he sees fit. If George Soros buys it, let him try to lease out whatever office space he builds there after desecrating the site with whatever "culture complex" he decides to build. (He would make it clear once and for all where the left stands in the war, inadvertently doing us patriots a great service. And there would be no lasting damage because the site would still be private property when he sells or dies.) If someone decent wins the auction, he won't have to listen to all the multiculturalists and other Islamofascist sympathizers before he rebuilds. And he would have every incentive to build goodwill by accepting input from the families of the victims for a proper memorial.

I fully agree with Michael Hurd when he, too calls for privatization of the site in a very good article at Capitalism Magazine.

[L]eave it to the private sector to rebuild, and keep the government (and advocates of public ownership ...) out of it. The people who died in the Towers were engaged in productive work -- not for any particular cause other than the advancement of their own lives. Whatever their ideological views might have been, they were capitalists in practice.

And I fully agree with Diane Duarte that the proper way to memorialize the dead would be for life to return to the site in the form of commercial development.

A monument to productive ability would celebrate the lives these people lived, not the way they died. It would be a tribute to them, not to the despicable thugs who killed them.

What would be the form of a memorial to productive ability? Certainly not chunks of stone, a hole in the ground, or a pile of dirt. The most likely form would be a sculpture incorporating one or more human figures, and the only appropriate setting for such a sculpture would be within a new business complex.

The quickest way to achieve this end is not, as Dennis Smith proposes, the same mixed-economy shenanigans as usual -- you know, that got us into this predicament in the first place. It is a return to the much freer America we used to be.

It is not a plot of land we need to "take back", but our respect for life, liberty, and property. When we do that, the rebuilding will take care of itself.

-- CAV