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| Title: | Social Contract, Free Ride
: A Study of the Public-Goods Problem |
| Author: | Anthony de Jasay |
| ISBN: | 0865977372 : 9780865977372 |
| Illustrations: | illus |
| Format: | Hardback |
| Size: | 155x230mm |
| Pages: | 276 |
| Weight: | .624 Kg. |
| Published: | Liberty Fund - April 2008 |
| List Price: | 13.95 Pounds Sterling |
| Availability: | In Print |
| Subjects: | ECONOMICS |
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.
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.
