Quote:
Originally posted by Say_hello_for_me
Along this rather simplistic line of thinking, I'm having trouble characterizing school kids.
|
That's the real rub. There are plenty of public goods that we could generally agree upon fall within that category. Such goods have, generally, the following attributes, per tradition:
1) Non-excludability-- one can't provide the good to some without providing it to others, at least at reasonable expense. The military easily meets this; roads sort of (e.g., turnpikes); see the parable of the lighthouse for a Friedman rebuttal to this concept.
2) non-comsumptability. Use of the resource by one person does not diminish (or diminish greatly) its availability to others. (military yes; roads, perhaps not so much, although yes to stop signs)
Note that these categories do not necessarily include things that are for the "public good," such as schooling, subsidized health care, welfare benefits generally. There is no reason, from an economics standpoint, that schooling needs to be provided by government to cure a market failure: people will pay for schools if the government did not provide them. The reason the government pays for schools is because of a moral judgment that we ought to or a social(ist) judgment that society is better off if everyone has free schooling available to them. But at that point you're beyond a limited form of government with no particular bounds to its expansion short of communism.
