Letter: What is 'market value' if not the price paid?

"Arlington Park track's property tax bill cut by half" shows public officials already straining to deliver public subsidies to the Bears however they can. To override the Cook County assessor's valuation, the Board of Review and school districts didn't work very hard, but resorted to brute-force doublespeak: "The market value was perhaps overinflated because of the sale."

What is "market value" as a concept, if not the price someone has actually paid for an item? Can we so easily discard the intricate ideology lovingly crafted by Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman to assure us that pricing mechanisms are society's true God? Or did monstrously clever Churchill Downs hoodwink the naive Bears into paying more than twice the market value for the land?

Can the Bears sue to recover that value, and reduce the burden they will impose on Cook County taxpayers? Please, send someone to the University of Chicago's law and econ departments to find out which it is.

Evan Treborn

Chicago