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From: radford@calgary.UUCP (Radford Neal)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Solution to Free Rider problem (dumbfounded)
Message-ID: <23@calgary.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 5-Jan-86 21:33:19 EST
Article-I.D.: calgary.23
Posted: Sun Jan  5 21:33:19 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 6-Jan-86 04:10:33 EST
References: <20@calgary.UUCP> <293@pyuxii.UUCP>
Organization: University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta
Lines: 70

The following reply to my posting on the free-rider problem leaves me
almost speachless, but I'll try to respond anyway:

> I just love the free rider solution.  I hope it goes into effect
> soon because I am going to run around the country looking for
> dam sites to start new projects.  I will find myself a top-notch
> ad agency to plug the project so that the locals will be beating
> down my door hoping to contribute to the trust fund.  As soon as
> the fund reaches a sizable amount, I will drop the idea and
> collect my reasonable fee for my troubles.  What a great way to
> make money.  I won't have to bother with any construction or
> such.

Another netter raised much the same objection. *I* thought people would
object that no one would contribute to worthwhile projects organized this
way. That fraud of the above sort would be at all common seems to me to
be incredibly unlikely. We are talking about a *trust fund*, administered
by the most reputable financial institutions around. The promoter gets
money out only under whatever conditions are in the trust agreement. This
might include some support during the period before the required sum has
been raised, but if this amount was so large as to make it profitable for
a promoter to set up fake schemes no one would contribute (at least after
the newspapers found out).

The idea that a good ad campaign will convince people they need flood
control when there have been no floods in living memory is rather ludicrous.
We're talking about *their personal money* here, not *somebody else's 
money* like with current dam projects.

> I'm amazed that the writer has not realized that in any dam building
> situation, there are folks who would be living upstream from the
> dam who would probably not be too excited about having their land
> and homes inundated by a lake.  Take the situation of the Hartwell
> Dam in South Carolina.  The damn cost many, many millions of dollars.
> Yet, those who directly benefited with flood control and irrigation
> and such, were only a few hundred.  To make that few people pay for
> a giant damn, if it was going to benefit them, would have been
> the ultimate of dumbness since 98% of those people were hovering
> on the poverty borderline in the first place.

A quote from my original article:

    Note that I'm not attempting here to solve all problems with
    building dams. In particular, I'm not addressing the "eminent domain"
    problem concerning getting the land for it.

I'm not very interested in dams. I was addressing the general "free rider"
problem using dams as an illustrative example. 

I certainly have no intention of coming up with a scheme which would
finance all the dams currently being built. I've never heard of the Hartwell
dam, but if your information above is correct it clearly should never
have been built. Many millions of dollars to benefit a few hundred people?
Lets see, that works out to maybe 100,000 dollars a person? If these 
people were offered the option of $100,000 cash or a dam, which do you think
they would have taken? Right, the cash. Such projects get built only with
taxpayer's money because they aren't justifiable by any criterion other than
benefit to the politicians involved.

> I just wish the netters who put forth these `pie-in-the-sky'
> schemes would look at both sides of the story and use a little
> logic.
> T. C. Wheeler

This reply has certainly raised my conciousness of conservatism in the
net population. My proposal is not "pie-in-the-sky". It is a straight-forward
application of existing social structures to the free-rider problem. 
Does no one out there have any imagination?

     Radford Neal