The economic concept of public goods is the singular justification for government’s existence in the American “republican” political tradition. But what is this category actually? Many libertarian thinkers have deconstructed many ostensible public goods and demonstrated why they don’t necessarily belonging to this category. Roads, utilities, the environment, even law can all be managed privately through voluntary interaction in the civil society – at least in theory. These goods don’t necessarily belong to the public goods category.
I was thinking about the sheep on the commons, and the enclosures which ended the “tragedy of the commons”. Was the commons really a public good? Or was it a by-product of a society previously held in a artificial serfdom? Perhaps something appears as a public good because of historical relationships between former rent-seeking behavior by political tyrants, and the enduring cultural norms that develop around this behavior. The legacy of this rent-seeking in places where it’s cheaper (public, or high-traffic areas like roads, towns, and marketplaces) might cause cultural habits that treat this high-traffic category as a commons.
Maybe the public goods category isn’t an economic category, but a socio-cultural and political category. Maybe the state founded to regulate this category is nothing but a concession to our cultural habits which because of history seek and expect some kind of rulership.
