The State by Anthony de Jasay (35 page)

family cohesion. Reassurance about the minimum needs of mother and child will induce some (not necessarily substantial) proportion of fathers to desert them who might not have done so otherwise. (As connoisseurs of the American Great Society era will recall, publicly diagnosing this phenomenon has brought much undeserved abuse and charges of racist arrogance on Daniel

P.
Moynihan's head, though his facts stood up very well to theattacks.) Their desertion, in turn, disables the truncated residual family unit, greatly reducing its capacity to look after itself. Hence a need arises for more attention and more comprehensive assistance to one-parent families. Once reliably provided, such aid in turn encourages some (initially perhaps small) proportion of unmarried young women to have children (or to have them early). In this way, additional incomplete families are formed. They have little capacity for fending for themselves. Hence the need for public assistance further expands, even as reliance on it becomes widespread enough to cease to offend class or community standards of respectable conduct.

1. Much the same kind of reaction may be set off by public care for old people, relieving their children of a responsibility and contributing both to the self-sufficiency and the loneliness of grandparents who, but for state care, would be living with their descendants as a matter of course. By the same token, some of the people who would have produced and reared children as the most basic form of old-age insurance, now rely on the state insuring them instead. Whether the consequent reduction in the birth rate is a good thing or not, it sets off demographic shock waves which can unpleasantly rock society for a couple of generations, among other things by endangering the finances of the Ponzi-letter scheme of unfunded public old-age "insurance."
   
 

Analogous processes, where effects become causes of further effects of the same Janus-faced kind, may be at work in (or at least are consistent with) many other areas of redistributive action. Their common feature is the adaptation of long-run personal and family behaviour to the availability of unrequited aids, which are first passively accepted, then claimed and ultimately, in the course of time, come to be regarded as enforceable rights (e.g. the right not to be hungry, the right to health care, the right to a formal education, the right to a secure old age).

1. Such adaptations are obviously liable to leave some people happier and others, perhaps even some among the beneficiaries of state help, unhappier, though it looks very problematical to say anything more than this. Something, however, can be said about some wider political implications, notably in terms of the environment in which the state operates and seeks to attain its ends. Functions which used to be performed by a person for himself (e.g. saving for retirement) or by the family for its members (e.g. looking after the sick, the very young and the very old) in a decentralized fashion, autonomously, more or less spontaneously if not always lovingly, neither will nor can any longer be so performed. They will be performed instead by the state, more regularly, more comprehensively, perhaps more fully and by recourse to coercion.
   
 

2. The assumption of these functions by the state carries with it side-effects of some momentum. They affect the balance of power between the individual and civil society on one side, the state on the other. Moreover, the addictive nature of social welfare and the fact that its beneficiaries can generally "consume" it at nil or negligible marginal cost to themselves, powerfully influence the scale on which it will be produced. It seems plausible to argue that
   

as the disabling, dependence-creating effects of aid are unintended, so is in the last analysis the scale of redistribution to produce social welfare. It is yet another example of the disconcerting habit of social phenomena to get out of control and assume shapes and sizes their initiators might never have envisaged. In the face of the habit-forming feedbacks at work, it is doubly unsatisfactory to apply to this particular form of redistribution the fiction of some deliberate social choice.*15

4.3.9
Partial loss of control over the scale of production of social welfare, and over the corresponding expenditure, is an important aspect of the predicament of the adversary state. I will revert to it when considering the phenomenon of "churning." However, I have only just begun to look at addictive redistribution and have yet to consider the workings of the sort of redistribution which fosters the proliferation of distinct, cohesive groups in society that, in turn, exact more redistribution.

4.3.10 Let us now put behind us the simplifying assumptions of an amorphous, structureless society which gave us the neat equilibrium solution of the preceding section on "buying consent." Society is now more like it is in reality, with its members being differentiated from each other by countless unequal attributes, among which the source of their livelihood (farming, lending money, working for IBM), their domicile (town or country, capital or province), their status (worker, capitalist, lumpen-intellectual, etc.) are but a few of the more obvious ones. People who differ from others in a number of respects can be sorted into groups according to any and each of these respects. Each member of society can be simultaneously a member of as many groups as he has attributes in common with somebody else. All members of a
given group resemble each other in at least one respect, though differing in many or all others.

4.3.11
There is, thus, a very large number of potential groups, each partially homogenous, into which the heterogenous population of a given society could, under propitious circumstances, coagulate. Some of these groups, though never more than a tiny fraction of the potential total, will actually be formed in the sense of having a degree of consciousness of belonging together and a degree of willingness to act together. Happily, there is no need here to define groups more rigorously than that. They may be loose or tightly cohesive, ephemeral or permanent, have a corporate personality or remain informal; they may be composed of persons

(e.g.
a labour union) or be coalitions of smaller groups (e.g. acartel of firms, a federation of unions). Finally, they may be formed in response to a variety of stimuli, economic, cultural or other. We will be interested in those groups which form in the expectation of a reward (including the reduction of a burden), to be had by virtue of acting as a group, and which continue to act together at least as long as that is needed for the reward to continue accruing. Defined in such a way, all groups I wish to consider are interest groups. All need not, however, be egoists, for the concept I have chosen can accommodate altruistic pressure groups or groups of eccentrics, plain cranks who act together to obtain a putative benefit for others (e.g. the abolition of slavery, the promotion of temperance and literacy, or the putting of fluoride in everybody's drinking water).

4.3.12 In the state of nature, members of a group, acting cohesively, obtain a group reward, i.e. a benefit over and above the sum of what each would obtain if acting in isolation, in two ways. (1) They may jointly produce a good (including of course a service)
which, by its nature, would not be equally well, or at all, produced otherwise. It is not certain that there are many such goods. Streets or fire brigades are likely examples. The group reward is secured for the members, so to speak, autarchically, without making anybody outside the group contribute, and without making him worse off. (2) They may jointly extract the group reward from outside the group, by changing the terms of trade which would prevail between non-members and the members when acting singly. Guilds, trade unions, cartels, professional bodies are the most prominent examples of proceeding in this way. In the state of nature, such tilting of the terms of trade, making the group better off and others presumably worse off, would not be based on custom (for how did "tilted" terms come about before becoming customary?), nor on sovereign command (for there is no political authority). Their only possible source is contract (without this presupposing markets of any particular degree of perfection). Hence, they connect to notions of alternatives and of choice.

1. The freedom of others not to enter into a contract with the group, no matter how unpalatable it may be to exercise it, makes group reward a matter of bargaining. This is most explicit in negotiated, one-of-a-kind transactions but routine, repeated transactions in organized markets with large numbers of contracting parties and corresponding to various configurations of monopoly, monopsony or competition of greater or lesser imperfection, all represent at least implicit bargains where the element of negotation is latent.
   
 

2. At least for our immediate purpose, which is to understand the difference between the group structure of the state of nature and the group structure of civil society, the critical determinant of group behaviour is the "free rider" phenomenon. Free riding manifests itself both within a group and in its relations with
   

others. Its basic form is well known from everyday life. The passengers in, say, a cooperative bus must over some period jointly bear the full cost of running it.*16 Otherwise the bus service will stop. However, any full allocation of the cost (defined with proper regard to the period) will do. The bus will go on running even if one passenger pays all and the others all ride free. There is no obvious, most-logical, most-efficient, most-egalitarian or most-fair rule for sharing out the total burden to be borne. If all passengers were cost accountants reared on the same accountancy textbooks, they might all grope towards a fare structure reflecting, for each trip taken by a passenger, the length of his trip, the number of stops offered along the route, the average frequency of the service and its peak vs off-peak pattern, the density of other traffic, physical wear and tear and a host of other variables entering into the long-period marginal cost of the trip in question. However, while all may regard it as technically correct (i.e. good cost accounting), there is no reason why they should all agree that the fare structure thus constructed is equitable, nor why they should wish to adopt it even if they did think it equitable. Altruism would make each want to pay for the others. A sense of equity might make them charge higher fares to those who profit most from the service, so as to capture and share out some of the "consumers' surplus" accruing to the latter. A certain conception of social justice, as distinct from equity, might make them fix high fares for rich and low ones for poor people.

4.3.15 Sorting out in some manner a suitable fare structure to cover the cost of a given service, however, is only half the battle. If variations in the service are feasible, the cooperators must also reach agreement on the variant to be provided. If the bus stopped at every front door, nobody would have to walk but it would take ages to get downtown. If it is only to stop at some front doors, whose shall they be? Should the passengers favoured in this way
pay more for the greater benefit they enjoy, compensating those who have to walk a way to the bus stop? No single "right" way seems to emerge which the members of the group would all want to adopt for allocating the group burden and sharing out the group reward, either on grounds of ethics or of interest, let alone both. Vague rules like "all pulling their weight," "all paying their way" and "all getting their fair share" can only be understood in relation to what they have in practice agreed, for there is no other common standard for one's proper "weight" to be pulled, one's "fair share" to be got. This is the more so as some members of the group may disagree with the others on what ought to have been agreed in fairness, good logic or justice without, however, opting out of the cooperative. Finally, whatever route and fares may have been fixed, each selfish passenger, on boarding the bus, might reasonably take the view that his hopping on it makes no difference to the cost of running it; the cooperative group as a whole is looking after the books and if there should be a shortfall, he would prefer not to be the one to make it up.

4.3.16 If all members of a state-of-nature group were selfish in the above sense, they would all want to minimize their burden and, in the borderline case, to ride free. For the group reward to accrue-for the bus to go on running, for a strike threat to be taken seriously in collective bargaining, for market-sharing quotas to be respected in defence of a cartel price, etc.-a given group burden must nevertheless be fully borne. It is widely believed that the free-rider problem, as an obstacle to cooperative solutions, is more acute for the large than for the small group because in the large group the free rider's anti-social behaviour has no perceptible impact on the group reward and a fortiori none on his own, hence it pays him to ride free, while in a small group he perceives the feedback of his anti-social conduct upon the group's reward and his share of it.*17 However, while it is probably true that people
behave better in small than in large groups, the feedback effect is unlikely to be an important reason. A member of the small group may perfectly well perceive the reduction in group reward due to his misbehaviour. It is nevertheless rational for him to continue to misbehave as long as the incidence of the consequent reduction of group reward upon his share of it just falls short of the share of group burden he escapes by free riding.*18 This condition may easily be satisfied by any group regardless of size, up to the point where free riding causes the group to fail altogether. Most of the reasons why small groups are easier to form and to maintain than large ones, have to do with the greater visibility of each member's behaviour. Moral opprobrium, solidarity, shame have less chance to sway people lost in a mass.