People often use public goods as an argument for the state. There’s a number of reasons why this isn’t a great argument, public choice theory and knowledge problems for example look like fairly decisive objections, but for certain “big” public goods that will benefit lots of people if they’re provided I’m less convinced. Specifically, how might people in a free society voluntarily provide national defence, environmental protection and infrastructure? Wont the transaction costs be huge? Granted states do a poor job of these things but they do at least provide some level of them which I think puts the burden of proof on us.
Someone builds and maintains a road and you pay to use it. What’s so difficult about that?
Centralized armies are terrible at defense. I would feel much safer if every man and women had an M4A1, 1000 rounds, and the will to be without a ruler. This would be much cheaper also. And insurance agencies could keep some bigger weapons in stock just in case.
Environmental protection is the result of private property protection.
Solving bigness is the entire point of capitalism. People can pool their capital into corporations that are much bigger than any individual investor can be, for example.
It depends how costly an exclusion mechanism is though. Highways could obviously work but for urban streets it’s a little more difficult. Though admittedly this may not actually be a huge problem, I can see a number of ways of packaging streets with homes and businesses so it could probably work reasonably well.
Well yeah, the foreign policy aspect of it is usually quite dumb but I would have thought if the state could claim to do anything well it would be funding large armies.
The problem is there isn’t an obvious way to exclude non-payers or get enough co-operation to fund the good when the number of people benefitting from it is huge and the cost of production is as high as funding an army. An armed populace is a great start but if they can’t co-ordinate their activities in some way it’s just individuals attempting to fight off a proffessional military.
True but because pollution affects large numbers of people it could still present a public goods problem. Say a polluter caused £50 in property damage to a thousand people and it would cost each individual more than this to sue them. Then you might end up with a situation where the polluter can cause £50,000 in property damage but go completely unopposed unless there’s some kind of collective action on the part of the population affected. When you factor in the global effects of climate change this could turn out to be a serious problem.
Though the state’s approach to environmentalism hasn’t been particular inspiring either…
Yes, through the price system. Without a way of excluding non-payers though it can be hard to for this to function.
Have you even searched up on the countless of articles on the internet on privatization before asking your questions here?
In the real world pollution isn’t that abstract. All you need to know is whe there’s been free markets the environment has been getting better.
Climate change isn’t real. It’s by design a collective problem, something we need collectivism to fix. It’s a new reason to implement socialism, socialism for the earth.
OP, this should be relevant to your interest http://mises.org/journals/scholar/hoppe.pdf
You should watch fringeelements “anti-statism at lightspeed” series, it has the relevent videos:
http://www.youtube.com/user/fringeelements#p/c/5888B138B9A980DB