William Watson writes for the Fraser Institute’s Fraser Forum about what constitutes a “Public Good” vs. a Private Good. He draws on research which challenges the conventional notion that public goods should and must be funded by governments (with taxpayer dollars) because private entities don’t have any incentive to fund these things. This includes a liberty-oriented alternative to protectionism – e.g., patents and copyrights – of intellectual property: “Similarly, economist David Levine, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, argues that intellectual property, which is conventionally thought to be a public good, does not need protection via patents and copyrights, the traditional means of providing artists and inventors with the legal monopoly power to charge others for the use of their ideas.”
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"Toronto Pride" is "child abuse"63
By Ron Gray Xtra’s article shows nude men in the ‘Gay’ Pride Parade. This has been happening for four or five years. The first time, the police arrested the naked men, but a homosexual Crown counsel in Toronto conspired to have the charges stayed, on the spurious grounds that they were “not naked” — they were wearing shoes! It’s this sort of sophistry that brings the law and Canada’s ‘justice’ system into disrepute. At the same time, a pro-life activist like Don Spratt — who went into Vancouver’s ‘Bubble Zone’ with tape over his mouth, to illustrate that the Supreme Court refused to defend his Section 2 Charter rights — gets put in jail for trying to be a voice for the most helpless among us. Shameful! Quite understandably, in subsequent years the Toronto police didn’t bother to arrest naked men in the shameful ‘Pride’ parade: why should they waste their time when Crown counsel will not pursue an open-and-shut case? Many Torontonians now take their children to see the parade; this is outright child abuse. Yes, the federal government is contributing to criminal actions. Why? because our supposedly “Christian” Prime Minister and high-profile “Christian” Minister of State lack the guts to say “No!” to bureaucrats and political advisors who tell them such acts of betrayal will gain public support. • The Prime Minister has made the Conservative government the defender of the abortion industry. • His government has introduced the most extravagant budget in Canadian history, adding to the burden that will have to be repaid by our children and grandchildren. (And the Liberals and NDP criticize them for not spending enough!) The men and women now sitting in the two chambers of Parliament apparently don’t understand that buying votes today with money that belongs to future generations is theft. • They are anti-life, anti-family, and anti-thrift and antinomian. If the Christians who stayed at home during the last election had gone to the ballot-box to vote for the CHP, we would have about 60 CHP Members of Parliament to call the government to account for this kind of criminal behaviour. So whose fault is it? It’s ours! We lack the conviction to “throw the rascals out”! Ron Gray is the past leader of the Christian Heritage Party. ...
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Transgendered Teacher Files Rights Complaint Against Alberta Catholic School Board63
The latest battle between an embittered, activist teacher and a faith-based educational institution in Alberta, a transgendered substitute teacher has filed a human rights complaint against the Greater St. Albert Catholic School Board. Janet Buterman, 39, claims she was dismissed by the school board because she was undergoing a sex change. The Catholic school board argues the procedure is in conflict with Catholic values. Buterman filed the complaint the same day Alberta formally includes sexual orientation into its provincial Human Rights Act. The complaint is just the latest attack against freedom of religious expression and conviction in the province – similar precedent-setting cases involve Red Deer pastor Stephen Boissoin’s current Court of Queen’s Bench appeal against the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal and chemistry instructor Delwin Vriend’s 1991 battle against King’s College over a dismissal regarding Vriend’s sexual orientation. The Vriend dispute led to a Supreme Court appeal, pitting Vriend against the province. The court ruled in Vriend’s favour, resulting in the province’s current Bill 44 efforts to enshrine sexual orientation into its provincial Human Rights Act. ...
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Domestic violence and despotism in Ontario54
There was a disgusting incident in Toronto last week. According to the National Post (Mar. 28), “city councillor Rob Ford was escorted out of his Toronto home in handcuffs and charged with domestic assault Wednesday.” He was charged with assaulting his wife and uttering death threats, charges that he is going to contest. What I honed in on in the National Post article was a line that said: “… even his critics reacted with sympathy to such a public spectacle. His lawyer went a step further, saying Mr. Ford’s humiliating arrest is the product of a flawed system … Dennis Morris placed the blame squarely on Ontario’s zero tolerance approach to domestic disputes, which compels police officers to lay charges whenever someone lodges a complaint of violence against his or her partner. ‘The police don’t have a choice,’ he said yesterday…. Critics… say the pendulum has swung so far that domestic disputes best dealt with in a family therapist’s office are clogging the courts. … ‘You often get people who have simple issues that need to be worked out, but now with the charge being laid, it may just add fuel to the fire,’ said Kerry UnRuh, a Winnipeg family law lawyer. ‘All of a sudden now you’ve got people litigating matters that have escalated as a result of the police getting involved.’” What UnRuh says is so elementary and obvious that only the intellectual squalor of feminazism could make people so blind as to not see it. Yet there are a sufficient number of femi-fascists – and those scared of them – to get laws passed that are rooted in that ideology, and those laws govern us today. But what really struck me was that it takes an incident involving a politician to draw attention to this tragic, family-rending situation in Ontario law. Do a Google search of “councillor Rob Ford” to see how much coverage this incident is getting. The fact is that dozens and probably hundreds of Ontario families are unnecessarily destroyed, invariably with the husbands/fathers facing the brunt of the machinery of the state, because of the current law on domestic violence. And nobody’s blanketing the airwaves and the internet with their stories. This is clear evidence of the entrenched reality of despotic fascism in Canada today; it reflects the inequality that exists between the governed and the governors. If a governor gets treated badly, it’s news, people notice, and perhaps a commitment is made to investigate the need for reforms. But if John Doe is the victim, then life – ho-hum – goes on. Enforcement of the principle of equality between the governed and the governors was the central issue for the Magna Carta, the foundational document, one could argue, for Western democratic civilization. Without a commitment to equality between the governed and the governors, you have tyranny – despotism. It might at first appear as a benign despotism so that ignorant fools and lazy bums can be seduced into doing nothing to resist the evil. But despotism doesn’t remain benign for long. Ultimately, what we see here is the war between Secularism and Christianity. Secularism makes the state the central organizing principle for reality. We could call it Messianic State-ism. An expression of that notion is the idea that crimes are ultimately offences against the state, not offences against the particular victim. Resolution of the problem, therefore, has to placate the state actors, not the victim. Another effect of this approach is that the state tries to make it easier to manage such problems by trying to make offences clear cut – “zero tolerance” – and by coming up with an approach that generalizes across populations rather than solutions that can be relatively easily tailored to particular circumstances. Here’s one comment included in the National Post article by someone with experience in domestic dispute case, making the case for a more flexible approach. “Robert Rotenberg, a Toronto lawyer who devotes 75% to 85% of his practice to domestic dispute cases, said his first reaction to Mr. Ford’s case was concern for his children, followed by a suspicion that there is more to the story of the couple’s troubles. ‘By arresting him,’ Mr. Rotenberg said, ‘it’s only going to make matters worse. Instead of he and his wife getting help, they’re getting divided.’” The Secularist approach to addressing domestic disputes is barbaric and abusive. It is an assault on human dignity. And it is a gross violation of Christian ethics which places far more confidence and authority in the family and family government than State-ism does. Tragically, usually due to a misplaced desire – sentimentality? – for the protection of women, even many Christians have bought into the idolatrous State-ist approach to dealing with domestic violence. If Ontarians insist on having one or two “zero tolerance” policies, I would suggest that one of them should be zero tolerance for feminazism. ...
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$400,000 to Toronto Gay Pride a stimulant too far53
June 24, 2009 By Joseph C. Ben-Ami Last week’s announcement of a $400,000 grant to Toronto’s Gay Pride Week is the latest indication of how detached the Harper Conservatives have become from their key supporters and how incoherent their evolving electoral strategy is as a result. That the government has not triggered a grassroots revolt by now is remarkable, a testament to the discipline of party members more than their loyalty. A few more announcements like this and it won’t be able to count on that either. Anyone who has attended Gay Pride Week knows that it has nothing whatsoever to do with being gay and everything to do with being as lewd and offensive as possible. It’s Marti Gras run amok. Public nudity is de rigueur at a gay pride parade, as are simulated sex acts of all kind, and some not so simulated. I’m not gay, but I suspect that such shockingly bawdy behaviour is embarrassing to many who are. But this isn’t about Gay Pride Week and its climactic parade through the streets of downtown Toronto – it’s about what the Harper Conservatives stand for… if anything. Go here to read the rest of the article. ...
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November 13, 2009
The link for “Read article here” is not working.
November 14, 2009
2nd time in a week, Ian. Don’t know what it is with the dead link. Here’s the text of the article:
The term “public goods” is one of the most misunderstood
in economics. One misinterpretation
is that it is synonymous with “the public good,”
which is what governments are supposed to pursue but
which they so often seem to lose sight of. Another is that
“public goods” are goods and services supplied by the
public sector. There are many publicly provided goods
and services, but relatively few are “public goods”; the
great majority are “private goods.”
So what do economists mean by “public goods”? We use
the term to refer to goods (or services) characterized
by a particular set of technical characteristics—namely,
that people can consume them jointly and cannot be excluded
from consuming
them, or at least
can only be excluded
at a substantial cost.
The classic example is
a lighthouse. You and I could both get our bearings from
the same lighthouse at the same time and your doing so
would not reduce the usefulness of the lighthouse to me.
Moreover, it would be hard to exclude people from using
the lighthouse as anyone sailing by could use it simply
by looking at it. The lighthouse owner could not put a
turnstile on the ocean and prevent sailors from looking
at the lighthouse unless they paid a fee. If he wanted
to exclude others from using the lighthouse, he would
probably need to have a navy at his disposal.
Compare this idea of a “public good” with the idea of a
“private good.” A hamburger is an excellent example of
a private good. The hamburger you eat is not available
to me to consume. Our consumption is not and cannot
be joint. If we are both to have a hamburger, then there
must be two—one for each of us. If we share a hamburger,
then we each only get some fraction of it. We cannot
both get a whole hamburger out of the experience. Plus,
it is relatively easy to exclude someone from eating a
hamburger. McDonald’s does it every day. If you don’t
pay, you don’t get a Big Mac.
Are there many “public goods” like the lighthouse? Many
economists would argue that knowledge is a public good.
Your knowing that 2 + 2 = 4 does not prevent me knowing
it too, and it would be hard for anyone to exclude
others from that knowledge; word about 2 + 2 = 4 could
get around easily. Anyone who claimed the right to that
knowledge and tried to police it would have a hard time
doing so.
National defense is often thought to be a public good. If
an army defends a city, it defends everyone in the city,
whether or not they have helped pay for the army. Most
armies simply do not have the technology to let enemy
shells fall on districts that have not paid their defense
tax, but block barrages
on districts that have.
If some people within a
district have paid their
tax and others have not,
exclusion becomes impossible.
The army cannot defend the citizens who have
paid their taxes and not defend those who are in arrears
(unlike a fire department, for example, which could put
out fires in houses whose owners are fully paid up and
not put out fires in homes whose owners elected not to
pay their taxes).
Most things are a matter of degree, of course. In some
cases of joint consumption, the consumption experience
of various people is not exactly the same. For example,
we could both see the same play at the same time but it
is unlikely that we would sit in the same seat. You may
be front row center and I may have to sit in the balcony.
Or I may have a short theater patron in front of me and
therefore enjoy a completely unobstructed view, while
you may have a seat behind someone who is very tall.
In the same way, the ability to exclude isn’t zero to one—
either perfectly costless or completely impossible—but
is usually a question of cost. The formula for the world’s
most famous soft drink probably is not that much more
complicated than 2 + 2 = 4, but at considerable expense
William Watson
PUBLIC GOODS
How should they be provided?
http://www.fraseramerica.org Fraser Forum 11/09 31
to itself, the Coca-Cola company has managed to keep it
a secret for more than a century. Over-the-air television
signals can be jointly consumed by millions of people at
once, but it is possible, also at some expense, to exclude
those who have not paid a fee. For example, the British
government finances the British Broadcasting Corporation
with a license fee charged to every television set
owner (currently ?135.50 for a color TV), and it has at
times policed the fee—at great cost, presumably—by
having agents in signal-detecting trucks drive through
neighborhoods trying to uncover TV-signal poaching
by people who have not paid for a license.
How public goods should be provided is the question
about them that worries economists most. In the past,
academics believed that the free market would not
provide any public goods, or would provide a smaller number than was optimal. Why would anyone provide a
lighthouse, for instance, if they could not charge people
for its use? The obvious corollary was that only governments
could or would provide public goods.
That notion was overturned by University of Chicago
economist and 1991 Nobel Prize-winner the late Ronald
Coase, who, in a characteristically exhaustive article in
1974, traced the history of private lighthouses. He found
that people with important shipping interests would
provide for the safe passage of their ships even if this
enabled other people to steer by their lighthouses too.
Similarly, economist David Levine, a professor at Washington
University in St. Louis, argues that intellectual
property, which is conventionally thought to be a public
good, does not need protection via patents and copyrights,
the traditional means of providing artists and inventors
with the legal monopoly power to charge others
for the use of their ideas. In his obviously controversial
view, the sometimes substantial cost of using another
person’s inventions acts as natural protection for the income
those ideas can generate, while the head start that
innovators have on their competitors is another source
of commercial advantage. Not surprisingly, you can read
Professor Levine’s book on intellectual property for free
online; he has chosen not to try to exclude readers from
its benefits by charging them for it.
In the 1950s and 1960s, most economists thought that
if public goods were not provided by governments, then
they would not be provided at all. Thinking and research
since then suggest that there may be many cases—examples
include roads, parks, lighthouses and, Professor
Levine would argue, intellectual property—where the
market does a perfectly good job of providing public
goods. Even in some of these areas, government may
not be as crucial as is often thought.
Suggestions for further reading
Boldrin, Michele, and David Levine (2008). Against Intellectual
Property. Cambridge University Press.
Coase, Ronald (1974). The Lighthouse in Economics. Journal
of Law and Economics 17, 2: 357–76.
Schmidtz, David (1991). The Limits of Government: An Essay
on the Public Goods Argument. Westview Press.
*Key Concepts is a series of essays on the fundamentals of economics and markets. In addition to appearing in Fraser Forum, these
essays will form the basis of a live Ask the Professor discussion, held at http://www.fraserinstitute.org each month.
Please join us on November 25 at 11:00 am Pacific time for an online discussion of this essay with Prof. William Watson.