How would one describe a market in which the value of the same commodity varied by more than 100 to one? “Hugely distorted” is the answer. Yet that is precisely the situation for land near England’s most prosperous urban centres. As I have recently argued, these anomalies are the product of the UK’s system of land planning, introduced by the postwar Labour government in 1947. Their effect is to make a mockery of the claim that the country has a competitive market economy. If it did, these discrepancies simply could not exist.
如果一個市場中的同類商品在價值上相差超過百倍,人們會如何形容這樣的市場呢?答案是“嚴重扭曲”。然而,英格蘭最繁華的城市中心附近的土地正是這種情況。正如我最近所講,這些反常現象是戰后英國工黨政府在1947年引入的土地規劃體制的產物。它們的效果卻是對英國宣稱擁有一個競爭性的市場經濟的諷刺。如果真有市場經濟,這些差異根本不可能存在。