Upstate NY:

Can't imagine what kind of economic calculation will make it make sense.

Replace "economic" with "plunder" and it makes a lot of sense.

Keynesianism is intellectually hard, as evidenced by the inability of many trained economists to get it - Paul Krugman

It depends on the plot in question, and the specific circumstances. Most public land is public for excellent reasons - such as being beaches, forests, parks, historical sites or the location of public businesses. Some public land is public just because it used to be the site of a public business, that is no longer judged to be required to run a well-governed state.

Denmark, for instance, has a lot of public land that is public because far-sighted infrastructure planning 50 to 100 years ago left us with a number of rail and road corridors for future use. Usually a number of different routes are available to cover the same connection, so once a route is decided upon, it frees up public land that there is no longer any particularly compelling reason to hang on to (and private land is freed from codes prohibiting development, as well as the risk of having it seized for a transit corridor).

Selling public land or businesses just to sell - or to absorb private fiat currency savings - is silly, of course. Selling in order to release land that the public has no interesting use for... not so much.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.