Social Contract, Free Ride

This book provides a novel account of the public goods dilemma. The author shows how the social contract, in its quest for fairness, actually helps to breed the parasitic “free riding” it is meant to suppress. He also shows how, in the absence of taxation, many public goods would be provided by spontaneous group cooperation. This would, however, imply some degree of free riding. Unwilling to tolerate such unfairness, cooperating groups would eventually drift from voluntary to compulsory solutions, heedless of the fact that this must bring back free riding with a vengeance. The author argues that the perverse incentives created by the attempt to render public provision assured and fair are a principal cause of the poor functioning of organized society.

Additional Testimonials

First published in 1989, this book by Hungarian-born libertarian philosopher and economist de Jasay aims to refute the existence of the classic public goods problem, which holds that contributions to shared benefits is collectively rational but individually irrational and that therefore a social contract must be fashioned with the power to coerce individual contributions to public goods. To the contrary, he argues, with simple contractual obligations there would be a self-selective set of people who would provide public goods as part of prudential calculation of the alternatives and there would be others taking the risk of the free ride in the acceptance that the prior group would be big enough. All the social contract does, then, is to transform these self-selecting groups into analogous, but coerced, groups of taxpayers and tax-beneficiaries.

Reference & Research Book News
August 2008


Does society truly need the government acting as a parental figure? The Collected Papers of Anthony de Jasay: Social Contract, Free Ride, A Study of the Public-Goods Problem presents several radical ideas for the reader to ponder. Arguing that through the social contract and morality inherent in Americans, voluntary contributions of the people would solve many of society's problems—because under the social system, everyone would feel urged to contribute if they had the ability to do so. The possibility that many would prefer to take the free ride is not discounted, however. Thoughtful and thought provoking throughout, The Collected Papers of Anthony de Jasay: Social Contract, Free Ride, A Study of the Public-Goods Problem is highly recommended for community library political collections.

The Midwest Book Review
July 2008

Source: Liberty Fund, Inc.