Social Contract, Free Ride. Anthony de Jasay

from exchange to public provision, taking both in a wide sense, is by the same token a passage from contracts to commands, whether the latter are intended to force some to accept unpalatable sucker roles, or to suppress the free riding in which others would be tempted to indulge.

      Both these intentions are misconceived. It is part of the central thesis presented in this book that most of the commands of social choice are redundant to their ostensible purpose. They are not necessary for realizing the advantages of public provision by compelling people to contribute the required efforts and resources. Nor do they create a regime of fairness by suppressing free riding. What they accomplish is the replacement of what would be willingly adopted social roles—some accepting to act as suckers on a prudential calculation of the alternatives, and others taking the risk of free riding in the expectation that there will be enough suckers to carry them—by centrally assigned taxpayer and tax-beneficiary roles. Instead of self-selected subsets of free riders and suckers, they divide the public into “socially” designated subsets fulfilling analogous functions. The quest for fairness that inspires this substitution of the conscript for the volunteer may or may not be held to bring greater fairness, but it is certain to bring what it does by greater constraint and reduced autonomy. In retrospect, the bargain is hardly one reasonable men could not refuse.

      Nevertheless, they might easily have blundered into it by a series of perhaps avoidable, but certainly tempting, errors of foresight and judgment. Wanting firm assurances that “essential” public goods will be available (for, as Hobbes has it, the mere lack of certainty of peace is war), going for tidy certainties where probabilities would serve nearly as well in some ways and better in others, might be the original sin, the fruit of the tree of knowledge that is the social contract. Suspicion of the sin keeps raising its head in our probings into subjects as diverse as contract enforcement, civil peace in the state of nature, motives for contributing to public provision, and the selection of goods to be provided.

      Around the supposed public-goods dilemma there is a genuine, but altogether non-fatal, public-goods problem. In sorting out the purported from the practical, one goes to the heart of the antagonism of the great rival principles of liberalism and democracy. If, after the grotesque mid-Atlantic misuse the word has long been subjected to, liberalism still means anything, it means a broad presumption in favor of deciding individually any matter whose structure lends itself, with roughly comparable convenience, to both individual and collective choice. There are, to be sure, indivisible matters of common concern which no one can decide for himself without also deciding them for others, and which it would be arbitrary to entrust to any one individual’s will or subject to his veto. Fluoridation of water, noise at night, billboards, or speed limits are some of the more prosaic cases in point, public worship a more exalted one. Other matters are divisible. They can be equally well arranged so that each individual can decide them for himself without his decision greatly affecting others (as is the case, for example, when everybody in the office buys his own lunch), or so that a whole group of people is jointly concerned and should seek to deal with them collectively-(as would be the case if a free lunch with a set menu of dishes not all liked equally were served to all in the office cafeteria). How the latter sort of inherently divisible matter is in effect divided up into small bits or gathered into large lumps, being as a consequence assigned either to individuals or to groups for decision, is a question of social institutions. Liberal institutions tend to give rise to divisions where each individual is able to choose for himself, with the consequences of his choice accruing mostly to him and only minimally to others (unless the latter are willing to be compensated for effects that impinge on them).

      It is this distinction which, to my mind, is the best rationalization of the inarticulate (and contested) belief that privacy, private property, and freedom of contract are the essential determinants of the “liberalness” or otherwise of a society, in that they help set up alternatives for choice in properly subdivided structures suitable for individual decisions, and minimize occasions for collective ones. Contrary to likewise inarticulate beliefs, this does not suffice to make liberalism a good thing; more extensive support is needed for that judgment. But the defects of social choice provide something of a base for it.

      On the face of it, democracy is a characteristic that defines a class of collective decision rules (constitutions). As such, it seems irrelevant to the question of liberalism, which is logically prior to it, concerning as it does the drawing of the frontier between the individual and the collective domain. The individual domain, exempt from collective decisions, may be staked out generously ("liberally") or not. Within it, each individual agrees with himself and needs no decision rule, democratic or otherwise, to do it. It is only on the collective side of the frontier that decision rules can be democratic or not. In reality, however, there is no fixed frontier and no prior and posterior question. Democracy in the strict sense, as in “a democratic political system,” is an attribute of a procedure and not of the outcome reached by it. However, like other procedures, it is visibly predisposed to produce one kind of outcome, “democracy” in the loose sense, as in “a democratic society” and in “economic democracy.” Democratically reached collective decisions usually aim at eroding privilege, levelling out rewards, and making the more widely accepted notions of fairness prevail over less popular principles in the distribution of burdens and benefits. Under a democratic decision rule, all those who count count equally in the common decision, regardless of their different possessions, abilities, and concerns. Each can better his chances of attaining his preferred state of affairs by using collective decisions for committing the resources and energies of others to the uses he prefers; yet none can afford to let others do this to him without trying to do it to them.

      Whether the result is sheer inconclusive churning or whether a majority succeeds to bend collective outcomes in its own favor, the attempt by each either to reap free-rider gains or to protect himself from the like attempts of others acts to broaden the scope of collective resource allocation. A democratic social-choice rule consequently tends to produce decisions that enlarge its own domain, breaking down the domain restrictions that liberal institutions erect. Its bias is to reduce the relative role of exchange, where each gets what he pays for, and to increase that of public provision, where some can get more than they contribute. Beneath the many ad hoc reasons that apply to particular cases, this bias is a constant in each, helping to explain the works canteen serving a free lunch, state and communal schools providing free tuition, diverse entitlements unrelated to contributions, unfunded pension schemes, all manner of services sold at less than their cost, and, last but not least, endemic budget deficits. In each such case, the uncoupling of individual benefit from contribution creates de facto “public goods” as a matter of explicit or implicit social choice, transferring the relevant resource allocation decision from the private to the public domain.

      Contrary to the orthodox theory which sees the root causes of publicness in the intrinsic logistics of supplying particular goods (can a lighthouse be run for profit? can justice be bought and sold? can passers-by be charged for looking at the statue in the square? can the market hold up a “social safety net"?), we discover a more potent and extensive principle: it is the public that decides what shall be a public good. In doing so, it creates indivisibilities. It requires that contributions to a good and the benefits it can yield should come in critical-sized aggregate lumps fitting their relevant public. Large indivisible units come about even if there is no technical obstacle to divisibility, small doses, private exchange, and hence to the operation of liberal institutions.

      If it were true that there is a fatal public-goods dilemma such that voluntary contribution to shared benefits is irrational and self-interest is condemned to be self-defeating, little would be left to say. At best, we could restate, with some gain in conciseness, why a self-sustaining sequence with a steadily expanding role of public provision, marked by the advance of democracy and the retreat of liberalism, must be held to be the best, and ethically least objectionable path for social evolution to take. Political science and economics could each go its own increasingly dreary way, pursuing technicalities of dubious import, as few or no large questions would be worth asking.

      Since, however, strong arguments suggesting that the public-goods dilemma is false can be found, at the very least there is some hope for the revival of non-dreary political philosophy and political economy. Beyond that, there is the more sanguine hope that the future need be no drearier than the