Review 5: Public Goods and Private Communities: The Market Provision of Social Services, by Fred Foldvary (1994)
Reviewed by:
R.A. Beauregard,
University of Pittsburgh,
Choice, Vol. 32 No. 1 (Sept. 94)
"For those with a Lockean bent, governments threaten individual rights and often deliver goods and services inefficiently. Yet, governments are needed to provide public goods (such as weather reporting) that are expensive, have broad social consequences, and are indivisible, thus leading to free riders. Supposedly, markets fail at providing such goods. Foldvary’s goal is to debunk this rationale. He constructs a thorough, impressive argument for the provision of public goods through nongovernmental bodies; specifically, consensual territorial communities. He argues that the spatiality of public goods means that their benefits are capitalized in site values, thus allowing site rents to be charged. This enables people to form proprietary communities to supply themselves with public goods and thereby bypass governmental inefficiencies and enhance individual rights. His argument – drawing on philosophical premises, public choice theory, and mathematical formulations – is sophisticated and includes illustrations of successful applications (e.g. Walt Disney World, resident associations, land trusts). The book contributes a significant argument to debates over the limits to government and the increasing privatization of society.”
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