> In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good)[1] is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous. For such goods, users cannot be barred from accessing or using them for failing to pay for them. Also, use by one person neither prevents access of other people nor does it reduce availability to others.[1] Therefore, the good can be used simultaneously by more than one person.[2] This is in contrast to a common good, such as wild fish stocks in the ocean, which is non-excludable but rivalrous to a certain degree. If too many fish were harvested, the stocks would deplete, limiting the access of fish for others. A public good must be valuable to more than one user, otherwise, the fact that it can be used simultaneously by more than one person would be economically irrelevant.
Public goods (by the orthodox definition) don't need to be auctioned off, and can't be auctioned off: by definition, there's no way to keep the loser of the auction from enjoying the public good anyway.
You are right that most government provided goods, like public parks etc, should be charged for. And that includes roads.
However I wouldn't necessarily make a blanket statement that _all_ government goods should be provided like that. It's just a very strong default, and exceptions need a strong argument to convince me.
For example, some goods are very cheap to provide and very hard to exclude. Or their use has very big positive externalities.
An example that springs to mind are childhood vaccines. They are easy to exclude, but they are cheap to provide and other people benefit from you using them. So I am very sympathetic to an argument that the government should provide standard childhood vaccines for free, and perhaps even pay people to take them.
Thanks for the correction, I was on a bus writing in a hurry with my phone, so no time for a comprehensive thesis. I agree that making a blanket statement like that misses a lot of important cases, real world has too many complications. The example of vaccines is a good one, as it's beneficial to everyone that everyone else takes them.
In principle you could still sell the vaccines and separately give people money for taking them. For cheap, well-established vaccines that would just be more hassle than it's worth.
For eg the first batches of the covid vaccine, it would have made a lot of sense though.
> Giving poor people money in form of UBI or tax breaks is the way to go in distributing all public goods.
Be careful, that's not the orthodox definition of public goods. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)
> In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good)[1] is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous. For such goods, users cannot be barred from accessing or using them for failing to pay for them. Also, use by one person neither prevents access of other people nor does it reduce availability to others.[1] Therefore, the good can be used simultaneously by more than one person.[2] This is in contrast to a common good, such as wild fish stocks in the ocean, which is non-excludable but rivalrous to a certain degree. If too many fish were harvested, the stocks would deplete, limiting the access of fish for others. A public good must be valuable to more than one user, otherwise, the fact that it can be used simultaneously by more than one person would be economically irrelevant.
Public goods (by the orthodox definition) don't need to be auctioned off, and can't be auctioned off: by definition, there's no way to keep the loser of the auction from enjoying the public good anyway.
You are right that most government provided goods, like public parks etc, should be charged for. And that includes roads.
However I wouldn't necessarily make a blanket statement that _all_ government goods should be provided like that. It's just a very strong default, and exceptions need a strong argument to convince me.
For example, some goods are very cheap to provide and very hard to exclude. Or their use has very big positive externalities.
An example that springs to mind are childhood vaccines. They are easy to exclude, but they are cheap to provide and other people benefit from you using them. So I am very sympathetic to an argument that the government should provide standard childhood vaccines for free, and perhaps even pay people to take them.