There’s a lot of talk about how public goods don’t exist enough of the time because they’re non-excludable, meaning that people are able to free-load.
This theoretical problem with capitalism falls apart when one realizes that private association can remedy this error. If a club offers goods to its members, they can make sure that collective goods exist by excluding those who aren’t paying their fair share.
It’s also not as if incentives exist so that politicians provide public goods. Instead, they produce coercive stuff, because it’s not always clear that what’s done is good. And, it’s certainly not measured.
Instead, we see a move towards the middle because of mean voter theorem meaning that unless the goods lie in the middle of a given political issue, you’re not likely to see many benefits.
Let me give an example. This example is to illustrate a point, it may not be true
Gun control might theoretically work in a society if that was a major focus. Maybe when guns are infrequent enough, we’d see some major benefits from doing so. On the other side, where guns are ubiquitous, people are incentivized to be nice to each other. Because of mean voter theorem, the middle ground doesn’t really contain much of the benefits of either of the extremes. The same could be said of public policy and goals in general
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