“Free riders and government failures”

“Free riders and government failures”

To talk about the government as an alternative to the market is an illusion.

If there is such a thing as a free rider problem at all, then we should quickly get rid of the welfare state. In the welfare state some people are net payers and some are net beneficiaries and, therefore, free riders. The people who are supposed to solve this so called problem are themselves free riders i.e. people working for the government and in the state apparatus.

People working in the government apparatus are not in an efficient way providing services for bettering the market system. People in the government apparatus are only blind when it comes to efficiency and they are only following and fulfilling randomly chosen values without knowing if there are any market values at all in the supposed services which they are delivering. When the political machinery intervenes in the market to a greater extent as in the former Soviet Union, the destructiveness is revealed. The very function of the state apparatus is anti market.

If the market worked in the same manner as the state does and its participants would receive their incomes, therefore, through violating people rights and this also would be a natural way for the market to function; we would not even consider free enterprise as an alternative way of making society wealthy and prosperous. In other words, we would not worry about if the free enterprise system was based on some “market failures” or not, as the system would considered to be a “totally failure” and, therefore, not to be considered at all.

Some people are wealthy in a free market system because people through the market process have voted, voluntarily, for their productive efforts.

In a pure free market; rich, poor, black, white people etc have rights.
If a poor man has not bought any protection services from a protection agency, he still got his rights. If someone would violate his rights, a protection agency might very well protect him anyway, as it could reap its incomes from the violator i.e. if necessary, through forced labour.

Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden