Social contract, free ride : a study of the public-goods problem
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Social contract, free ride : a study of the public-goods problem
Liberty Fund, [2008]
- : hbk
- : pbk
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Note
Originally published: Oxford [England] : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1989
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This book provides a novel account of the public goods dilemma. The author shows how the social contract, in its quest for fairness, actually helps to breed the parasitic 'free riding' it is meant to suppress. He also shows how, in the absence of taxation, many public goods would be provided by spontaneous group co-operation. This would, however, imply some degree of free riding. Unwilling to tolerate such unfairness, co-operating groups would eventually drift from voluntary to compulsory solutions, heedless of the fact that this must bring back free riding with a vengeance. The author argues that the perverse incentives created by the attempt to render public provision assured and fair are a principal cause of the poor functioning of organised society.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Commitment to Co-operation Custom
- Promise, Performance, and Enforcement Defaults
- State-of-Nature Co-ordination
- Social Contract
- Social Choice
- The Foundations of Voluntariness
- Constructive Risk
- An Ethics Turnpike
- The Unfairness of Anarchy
- The Return of the Free Rider
- Index.
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