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This book provides a novel account of the public goods dilemma. The author shows how the social contract, in its quest for fairness, actually helps to breed the parasitic "free riding" it is meant to suppress. He also shows how, in the absence of taxation, many public goods would be provided by spontaneous group co-operation. This would, however, imply some degree of free riding. Unwilling to tolerate such unfairness, co-operating groups would eventually drift from voluntary to compulsory solutions, heedless of the fact that this must bring back free riding with a vengeance. The author argues that the perverse incentives created by the attempt to render public provision assured and fair is the principal cause of the poor functioning of organized society.

"…while the intent of the social contract is to suppress free riding, its actual effect is to open up an altogether new ground on which it thrives with impunity. For the deterrent to state-of-nature free riding is the falling probability of successful public provision of a good as abuse of it by free-riding increases. When the necessary contributions for successful public provision are assured by coercion, no such check operates and free riding is never too risky. Risk, in fact, enters people’s calculations with the opposite sign: from a check upon free riding it turns it into a spur."

Anthony de Jasay

Anthony de Jasay was born at Aba, Hungary in 1925. (The original Hungarian spelling of his name is Jaszay). He was educated at Szekesfehervar and Budapest, taking a degree in Agriculture. In 1947-48 he worked as a free-lance journalist, his activity forcing him to flee from the country in 1948. After two years in Austria, he emigrated to Australia in 1950 and took a part-time course in Economics at the University of Western Australia. Winning a Hackett Studentship, he went to Oxford in 1955 and was elected a research fellow of Nuffield College where he stayed till 1962, publishing papers in the Economic Journal, the Journal of Political Economy and other learned journals.

In 1962 he moved to Paris and worked there as a banker, first in an executive capacity and then on his own account, till 1979, doing investment business in several European countries and the United States. In 1979, he retired to the Normandy coast where he still lives. He has a wife and three children.

While his initial interest and training were in economics, he has later turned to political philosophy, and his writings draw on both. He has published five books, several of which have been translated into a total of six languages, as well as numerous articles, mainly in English but also in French and German. He is widely considered as one of the foremost liberal philosophers.

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