Anarchism and the Public Goods Issue : Law , Courts , and the Police

In the early 1970s, James Buchanan and Gordon TuUock held a series of seminars examining anarchism as a feasible method of social organization (Tullock 1972b; Tullock 1974b). The general consensus was that that good which may be termed "security" is a public or collective good. Since "security" is both (a) essential for the very existence of any social order and (b)incapable of being supplied voluntarily , government, that agency with a (legitimate) monopoly on the use of compulsion and control, is indispensable. Interestingly, numerous articles have appeared since then in Public Choice and Mookherjee) that have called into question , on both conceptual and empirical grounds, the accepted wisdom regarding the concept of collective goods and its corollary, free riding. These articles would seem to call for a reassessment of the original "public choice" consensus on the feasibility of anarchism as a method of social organization, but to date no such reassessment has been forthcoming. This paper is an attempt to use what is essentially "public choice" analysis-which assumes that individuals will make "rational" c h o i i based on self-interest-to show how the primary collective good, security, might be provided noncoer-cively, i.e., in the absence of a state. For pvposes of presentation, the broad concept of security will be subdivided into three components: (1) law, (2) the courts, and (3) the police. The "public choice" position on anarchism is thoroughly traditional. The proposition that security is essential for social order is combined with the usually implicit assumption that it is a single, indivisible lump, i.e., that since security is a "nonexcludable" good, in order for it to be supplied to any one individual it must be supplied to the entire population, and supplied in the same quantity and quality. The rational individual will therefore reason that he will maximizehis utility