Social Contract, Free Ride
This book is published by Liberty Fund, Inc., a foundation established to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.
The cuneiform inscription that serves as our logo and as a design element in Liberty Fund books is the earliest-known written appearance of the word “freedom” (amagi), or “liberty.” It is taken from a clay document written about 2300 B.C. in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash.
© 1989 by Liberty Fund, Inc. Originally published in 1989 by Oxford University Press. Published in 2008 by Liberty Fund, Inc.
This eBook edition published in 2012.
eBook ISBN: E-PUB 978-1-61487-218-4
Contents
PART ONE — THE SURRENDER OF AUTONOMY
Avoiding Freedom-Talk and Rights-Talk
2. Promise, Performance, and Enforcement
3. State-of-Nature Co-ordination
Co-ordination, Pure and Non-pure
Pure Co-ordination by Contract
State-of-Nature Public Goods: The Standard Approach
Reliance on Enforcement
4. Social Contract
Institutional Darwinism
Reconciliation
Restricted Domain: The Hobbesian Asymmetry
Restricted Domain: The Minimal State
5. Social Choice
Unrestricted Domain
Enforcement of Domain-Restriction
Non-fatuousness
Predisposed Rules
Agility and Sluggishness
Equiprobability I
Accepting Command where Contract Fails
Appendix: Redistribution
PART TWO — PUBLICNESS: SOLUTION AND RESULT
6. The Foundations of Voluntariness
Exclusion
Free Riders or Suckers All
Stacked, Interlocking, and Straddle Rankings
No Free Riders, No Suckers
The Straddle Ranking: A Necessary Condition
The Straddle Ranking: A Sufficient Condition
Equiprobability II
7. Constructive Risk
All or None
“Uncertainty”
A Spontaneous Solution through Risk
All Cretans Are Not Liars
Inconsistent Expectations
Appendix: Straddle or Chicken
8. An Ethics Turnpike
Homo Oeconomicus
Three Grades of Rationality
Public-Goods Forks
9. The Unfairness of Anarchy
Abuse, Outrage, Envy
The End of Anarchy
10. The Return of the Free Rider
Reverse Contribution
Pooling
The Game of “Ask”
The Game of “Deficit”
Free Riding on Fairness
Works Cited
Index
Social Contract, Free Ride
“You get what you pay for.” As often as not, however, you do not. If you did, the world would be a simpler place. It would be wholly ruled by exchange relations. All would bear the full consequences of their actions and nobody would suffer or profit from “spillovers” he1 did not cause. Politics would be a redundant activity, and as a subject of study it would be swallowed up by economics. All social co-operation would be regulated by contracts, none by commands. Individuals would be sovereign, each deciding all matters for himself.
Yet it is of the essence of social coexistence that a person can get more than he pays for, and also that he can be made to pay for more than he gets. When this is the case, the advantage of mutually agreeable