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To: Nebullis
If nobody cooperates, nobody wins. If only one or a few don’t cooperate, they win big. The incentive for the one-time freeloader is enormous. It is a winning strategy for the individual at a cost to the group. If everybody cooperates, it comes at a determined cost to the individual, a benefit to the group, and an indirect, uncertain, long-term gain to the individual. The shared well-being of the group comes at a cost to the individual and is dependent on the behavior of others in the group as well as group size, number of interactions with the group and other parameters.

Precisely. It's the free-rider problem that, IMO, is the most serious defect of a fully libertarian society, and the easiest way to see it is when considering national defense.

Presumably, since there is no coercive mechanism for funding defense, defense is a fully voluntary, cooperative effort. But the free-rider performs a simple sort of mental calculus - I can, he realizes, get the benefits of defense without actually paying for it. After all, society can hardly leave my house selectively undefended when it is planted right among a whole load of other folks who are paying for defense. So I don't pay, and yet I receive the benefits anyway.

Of course, the system breaks down when enough people do the same calculation and thereby refuse to fund defense. In a sense, the flaw of a hard-core libertarian society is that it relies on people to rationally act in their individual self-interest, except when it comes to something like national defense, where the game changes and people are suddenly supposed to think in terms of the common good. But then again, if people acted consistently acted altruistically, for the common good, communism would work just fine. But they don't, and it doesn't.

30 posted on 07/21/2002 9:51:29 AM PDT by general_re
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To: blam
ping
31 posted on 07/21/2002 9:56:35 AM PDT by farmfriend
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To: general_re; Nebullis
Hmmm, I guess I just don't get the 'gravitas' of the situation here.
- Both of you seem to think that 'libertarians' are hardwired to resist altuism. Why is that?


"Of course, the system breaks down when enough people do the same calculation and thereby refuse to fund defense. In a sense, the flaw of a hard-core libertarian society is that it relies on people to rationally act in their individual self-interest, except when it comes to something like national defense, where the game changes and people are suddenly supposed to think in terms of the common good. But then again, if people acted consistently acted altruistically, for the common good, communism would work just fine. But they don't, and it doesn't."


We the people band together, and pledge our lives, fortunes, & honor to a common defense.

-- I fail to see how a libertarian approach to politics violates that idea.

33 posted on 07/21/2002 10:35:17 AM PDT by tpaine
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