Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is this February 10th, 2020, Facebook post by Bob Higgs:

When you affirm that unless the state coerces people a certain good will not be produced (or will be produced in “suboptimal amounts”) you are affirming that people do not value that good enough to pay for it (or for what you allege to be “optimal amounts” of it). Arguments about how people really value certain collective goods but will not voluntarily finance them because of free-rider incentives are almost always raw assertions about unobserved valuations. In fact, people voluntarily support many collective goods. As a rule the free-rider argument serves not as a scientific proposition, but as one of the central elements of the apologetics of the state in neoclassical welfare economics.