Free The State by Anthony de Jasay by Anthony de Jasay Page A

overcoming "isolation" by making each individual act as he would if all had one common will, and providing "assurance" to each individual who pays that he is not a lone sucker, for all others pay too.*30 If the general dilemma is conceived of as a sequential game, a society's perpetual learning process, it seems obvious that it can have a solution for each intermediate stage, and arbitrary to rule out the likelihood of at least some of the solutions being cooperative, so that as a general proposition, at least some quantities of some public goods will get produced on a voluntary basis.
     
"Some quantities" of "some public goods" as a result of non-coercive spontaneous solutions, sounds insufficiently affirmative. The reflex reaction of capitalism's adversary may well be that, because of external economies and diseconomies, only an all-embracing compulsory arrangement, i.e. a state, can ensure that the right amount of public goods gets made. In this view, the prisoners' dilemma would represent one limiting case, that of total failure to "internalize," and the state would be the other limiting
    case in which the entire benefit of an external economy gets internalized from the state's aggregative point of view. The in-between case of the voluntary association, the spontaneously formed interest group, would stop short of complete internalization and as a consequence would typically tend to fall between the two stools of the unresolved prisoners' dilemma and state provision of the right amount of the good. Nor is it, of course, always true of any and all levels of output that if the state has in fact chosen that level, it considered it (given all constraints, scarcities and competing claims) the "right" one. If the claim that the output of a public good chosen by the state is the right output, is to be more than a tautological statement of the state's "revealed preference," it must somehow be related to some independently derived standard of the optimum.
     
    1.5.25 In the case of individually consumed goods, this standard is, by and large, the Pareto-optimum reached by equating the marginal rates of substitution and transformation between any two goods. But as it is nonsense to speak of a marginal rate of substitution between a public and a private good (a person cannot decide to give up a dollar's worth of chocolate to get a dollar's worth of clean air, law and order or paved street), this standard does not work. When the post-1981 Polish state imports one more water-cannon and reduces chocolate imports by the corresponding sum, the decision can hardly be related to the marginal Polish chocolate-eater's relative liking for law and order and chocolate. If it expresses anything, the decision must express the state's balancing of the real interests of society that it considers important, in proportion to the importance it attaches to each. The individual chocolate-eater is obviously unable to attach the proper weights to the interest of the vanguard of the working class, of the Organs, of proletarian internationalism, etc. How much tax to surrender to the state so it may buy law and order or clean air for the use of the individual taxpayer in question is not a matter of any taxpayer's choice. The state cannot buy a collective good for him.
     
    1.5.26 A standard which will do for "collective choice" (if we must resort, for the sake of argument, to this question-begging concept) what Pareto-efficiency does for individual ones, can always be contrived by supposing either (a) that society has but one will
    (e.g. a will manifested by unanimity, or possibly the general will),or (b) that the several more-or-less divergent wills (including, arguably, the will of the state itself) which are present in society can, by a system of weights attached to each, be expressed as one will (what Robert Paul Wolff disdainfully calls "vector-sum democracy").*31
     
Whoever fixes the relative weights to be attached (i.e. makes the interpersonal