The Economics of Freedom: What Your Professors Won't Tell You, Selected Works of Frederic Bastiat
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among policy options requires that choices be made from among actually available options. Both political choice and market choice are “imperfect” in all the ways specified above, so choice should be made on the basis of a comparison of real—not “perfect”—market processes and political processes.
Real markets generate a plethora of ways of providing information and generating mutually beneficial cooperation among market participants. Markets provide the framework for people to discover information, including forms of cooperation. Advertising, credit bureaus, reputation, commodity exchanges, stock exchanges, certification boards, and many other institutions arise within markets to serve the goal of facilitating mutually beneficial cooperation. Rather than discarding markets because they aren’t perfect, we should look for more ways to use the market to improve the imperfect state of human welfare.
Finally, competition is better understood, not as a state of the market, but as a process of rivalrous behavior. When entrepreneurs are free to enter the market to compete with others and customers are free to choose from among producers, the rivalry among producers for the custom of customers leads to behavior favorable to those customers.
6. Markets Cannot Possibly Produce Public (Collective) Goods
If I eat an apple, you can’t; consumption of an apple is purely rivalrous. If I show a movie and don’t want other people to see it, I have to spend money to build walls to keep out non-payers. Some goods, those for which consumption is non-rival and exclusion is costly, cannot be produced in markets, as everyone has an incentive to wait for others to produce them. If you produce a unit, I can just consume it, so I have no incentive to produce it. The same goes for you. The publicness of such goods requires state provision, as the only means to provide them. Such goods include not only defense and provision of a legal system, but also education, transportation, health care, and many other such goods. Markets can never be relied on to produce such goods, because non-payers would free-ride off of those who pay, and since everyone would want to be a free-rider, nobody would pay. Thus, only government can produce such goods.
The public goods justification for the state is one of the most commonly misapplied of economic arguments. Whether goods are rivalrous in consumption or not is often not an inherent feature of the good, but a feature of the size of the consuming group: a swimming pool may be non-rivalrous for two people, but quite rivalrous for two hundred people. And costs of exclusion are applicable to all goods, public or private: if I want to keep you from eating my apples, I may have to take some action to protect them, such as building a fence. Many goods that are non-rivalrous in consumption, such as a professional football game (if you see it, it doesn’t mean that I can’t see it, too), are produced only because entrepreneurs invest in means to exclude non-payers.
Besides not being an inherent feature of the goods per se, the alleged publicness of many goods is a feature of the political decision to make the goods available on a nonexclusive and even non-priced basis. If the state produces “freeways,” it’s hard to see how private enterprise could produce “freeways,” that is, zero-priced transportation, that could compete. But notice that the “freeway” isn’t really free, since it’s financed through taxes (which have a particularly harsh form of exclusion from enjoyment, known as jail), and also that the lack of pricing is the primary reason for inefficient use patterns, such as traffic jams, which reflect a lack of any mechanism to allocate scarce resources (space in traffic) to their most highly valued uses. Indeed, the trend around the world has been toward pricing of roads, which deeply undercuts the public goods argument for state provision of roads.
Many goods that are allegedly impossible to provide in markets have been, or are at present, provided through market mechanisms—from lighthouses to education to policing to transportation, which suggests that the common invocation of alleged publicness is unjustified, or at least overstated.
A common form of the argument that certain goods are allegedly only producible
through state action is that there are “externalities” that are not contracted for through the price mechanism. Thus, widespread education generates public benefits beyond the benefits to the persons who are educated, allegedly justifying state provision and financing through general tax revenues. But despite the benefits to others, which may be great or small, the benefits to the persons educated are so great for them that they induce sufficient investment in education. Public benefits don’t always generate the defection of free-riders. In fact, as a wealth of research is demonstrating today, when states monopolize education they often fail to produce it for the poorest of the poor, who nonetheless perceive the benefits to them of education and invest substantial percentages of their meager incomes to educate their children. Whatever externalities may be generated by their children’s education does not stop them from paying their own money to procure education for their children.
Finally, it should be remembered that virtually every argument alleging the impossibility of efficient production of public goods through the market applies at least equally strongly—and in many cases much more strongly—to the likelihood that the state will produce public goods. The existence and operation of a just and law-governed state is itself a public good, that is, the consumption of its benefits is non-rivalrous (at least among the citizenry) and it would be costly to exclude non-contributors to its maintenance (such as informed voters) from the enjoyment of its benefits. The incentives for politicians and voters to produce just and efficient government are not very impressive, certainly when placed next to the incentives that entrepreneurs and consumers have to procure public goods through cooperation in the marketplace. That does not mean that the state should never have any role in producing public goods, but it should make citizens less willing to cede to the state additional responsibilities for providing goods and services. In fact, the more responsibilities are given to the state, the less likely it is to be able to produce those public goods, such as defense of the rights of its citizens from aggression, at which it might enjoy special advantages.
7. Markets Don’t Work (or Are Inefficient) When There Are Negative or Positive
Externalities
Markets only work when all of the effects of action are born by those who make the decisions. If people receive benefits without contributing to their production, markets will fail to produce the right amount. Similarly, if people receive “negative benefits,” that is, if they are harmed and those costs are not taken into account in the decision to produce the goods, markets will benefit some at the expense of others, as the benefits of the action go to one set of parties and the costs are borne by another.
The mere existence of an externality is no argument for having the state take over some activity or displace private choices. Fashionable clothes and good grooming generate plenty of positive externalities, as others admire those who are well clothed or groomed, but that’s no reason to turn choice of or provision of clothing and grooming over to the state. Gardening, architecture, and many other activities generate positive externalities on others, but people undertake to beautify their gardens and their buildings just the same. In all those cases, the benefits to the producers alone—including the approbation of those on whom the positive externalities are showered—are sufficient to induce them to produce the goods. In other cases, such as the provision of television and radio broadcasts, the public good is “tied” to the provision of other goods, such as advertising for firms; the variety of mechanisms to produce public goods is as great as the ingenuity of the entrepreneurs who produce them.
More commonly, however, it’s the existence of negative externalities that leads people to question the efficacy or justice of market mechanisms. Pollution is the most commonly cited example. If a producer can produce products profitably because he imposes the costs of production on others who have not consented to be a part of the production process—say, by throwing huge amounts of smoke into the air or chemicals into a river—he will probabl
y do so. Those who breathe the polluted air or drink the toxic water will bear the costs of producing the product, while the producer will get the benefits from the sale of the product. The problem in such cases, however, is not that markets have failed, but that they are absent. Markets rest on property and cannot function when property rights are not defined or enforced. Cases of pollution are precisely cases, not of market failure, but of government failure to define and defend the property rights of others, such as those who breathe polluted air or drink polluted water.
When people downwind or downstream have the right to defend their rights, they can assert their rights and stop the polluters from polluting. The producer can install at his own expense equipment or technology to eliminate the pollution (or reduce it to tolerable and non-harmful levels), or offer to pay the people downwind or downstream for the rights to use their resources (perhaps offering them a better place to live), or he must stop producing the product, because he is harming the rights of others who will not accept his offers, showing that the total costs exceed the