Customer Reviews

The Limits of Government: An Essay on the Public Goods Argument

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This book is an excellent critique of the public-goods argument for governmental action, demonstrating ways in which public goods can be provided without state interference. BUT there's so much more to the book than that. We get a critique of hypothetical-consent justifications of the state (raising serious problems for both Rawls and Nozick), an argument for property rights that combines Lockean and tragedy-of-the-commons arguments (maintaining persuasively that the famous "Lockean proviso," thought by many to make legitimate appropriation from the commons impossible, actually requires it), and more. This book is a gem!

In clear and concise prose, David Schmidtz offers an insightful analysis of public goods. Schmidtz rightly distinguishes public goods problems from prisoner's dilemmas, and explains both why and when people tend to contribute to the production of public goods. Unlike other works on this subject, Schmidtz integrates philosophical analysis with carefully crafted empirical tests, thus providing evidence for his general thesis that while some public goods problems are best solved by private contracts, others may require coercive state intervention.