----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- Patrick, Well, there is no discussion of either intermediate cases or of "public functions" in the original 1954 paper, which is very short. He brings in this discussion in the 1955 paper to respond to critics of his original paper who pointed out the existence of the intermediate cases. Samuelson fully agrees with the critics that there are intermediate cases. He does not clearly say that those functions you mentioned must be or should be provided publicly, and he clearly did not say that they were pure collective consumption goods, although he probably did at the time believe that they should be provided publicly as they largely were then. I continue to disagree that his definition of pure collective consumption goods (definitely the clearest term) is based on mathematics. I shall not repeat this again, but simply note that the mathematics follows from the definition. Now, you seem to deny the existence of such pure collective consumption goods, and that is certainly a defensible philosophical and methodological position, partly because such goods are by their very nature hard to "put one's hands on" (much less assign property rights with excludability characteristics to them). But, once one allows the possibility for such a good to exist, the mathematics follows logically, although again, I grant that one can object in general to the use of such mathematics or deny the applicability of the mathematics because it assumes some kind of nonexistent collectivity in the face of methodological individualism. But, it is not the math that is doing the defining. So, let us confront then the final question, the existence of pure collective consumption (or "public") goods. Samuelson poses the standard example of national defense. Why do you reject this? I can appreciate that if it is defense against a ground attack on certain boundaries of a country that it might not be a pure collective consumption good, with national defense actually only defending a subset of the population. But, what about deterring against overwhelming nuclear attack that would destroy all human life on the planet? Is this not a pure collective consumption good? As a final point I would say that you make to much of denying a reality to "public functions." These are simply services and we treat services as being like goods in usual economic analysis. Whether these publicly provided services are actually pure (or even intermediate) collective consumption goods, or whether they could or should be provided privately, is quite another matter. Barkley Rosser ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]