----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- [log in to unmask], "Jr." wrote: > > 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? Thanks, J. Barkley, for the invitation. I dug up a part of a chapter in a provisional text on Market Failure that I wrote a couple of years ago and posted it to my web site. The address is below and a more complete answer is there. But to give you a brief answer, it is obvious to anyone who thinks about it, from the modern perspective, that exclusion of beneficiaries is possible. The provider only needs to have the power to expel someone from the protected area. And if a provider of national defense does not have this power, she could hardly provide national defense. It is almost as obvious that the long run marginal cost of supplying people in most practical situations is about the same as the long run average cost. The important question is why Samuelson (and his supporters) did not think of these facts. As for Kevin Quinn's post, I did not claim to be a Coasean. As for his further argument that Coase's "revolution" is only vocabulary, he will have to do more than simply make the claim. Otherwise, the discussion will turn ideological which, contrary to his suggestion, so far it is not. So far the discussion is about the history of the concept of a public good, insofar as those who define it wish to have a theory that helps them show the effects of government policies. To challenge the theoretical orthodoxy, which Coase did, does not turn one into a ideologue. If we agreed that it does, we would have no grounds to claim that economics is a system of thought capable of being improved. And this organization (HES) would not be concerned with the history of economic thought but with the history of economic discussion. It would be a branch of literature. http://www.gunning.cafeprogressive.com/issues/econ/topics/ndpubgd.htm -- Pat Gunning American University of Sharjah United Arab Emirates ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]