Hacker News Reader

Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

> I don't see how law enforcement is more of a public good than education. There is enough wealth in the country, and enough means to provide decent education to everyone and decent law enforcement. Why is education not a public good when law enforcement is?

I don't see how law enforcement is more of a public good than donuts. There is enough wealth in the country, and enough means to provide decent donuts to everyone and decent law enforcement. Why are donuts not a public good when law enforcement is?

What, you don't agree with the use of public funds to supply the basic human right of donuts? Too bad, you have to pay anyway whether you like it or not.

If that sounds ridiculous to you, you now understand how many people feel about other uses of public funds that you happen to agree with.

View on HN

I think you don't understand what a public good is. A public good is not something that is paid for by public funds. Here is a reference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good

I understand quite well how you'd like to frame the topic, yes. To use the terminology of the page you linked to: education quite clearly qualifies as both rival (since it has non-zero per-student costs) and excludable (since each student participates in education individually), which makes it not a public good by the definition you linked to.

I never stated a belief about whether or not education is a public good. The person I responded to stated that law enforcement is a public good but not education. I wanted to know why he/she thought this. I don't see how one can be considered a public good and not the other.

While law enforcement has some potentially excludable components, for the most part it seems non-excludable: stopping crimes and criminals protects everyone. Exclusion mostly seems possible geographically, and we already effectively do that at the borders of states and countries. On top of that, unlike education, law enforcement does not have a blindingly obvious solution for how to run it privately. (While I understand that solutions exist for how to "privatize" law enforcement, any attempt to privatize the use of force has huge difficulties and dangerous pitfalls.)

>While law enforcement has some potentially excludable components, for the most part it seems non-excludable: stopping crimes and criminals protects everyone.

that is true only in the ideal situation of unlimited law enforcement resources and the type of crimes affecting everybody. In real situation going after specific criminals or crimes [esp. the ones affecting only specific subset of the society] leaves other crimes unpunished and laws unenforced. Thus any real law enforcement inplementation (not theory) demonstrates rivalness and excludability.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com