> public goods / roads a public good is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous in that individuals cannot be effectively excluded from us

> public goods / roads a public good is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous in that individuals cannot be effectively excluded from use and where use by one individual does not reduce availability to others You assume a road is a public good. Sunshine is a public good. A road is not. It's hard to imagine a society not oriented around roads, since the government has been building them for so long. But lots of people have an economic interest in using and maintaining the roads. > An even more obvious example is something like pollution control. Ah, the good old, "Libertarians can't handle externalities." Well there is lots of free-market scholarship on pollution and courts going back decades. If you're actually curious about it, I can point you in that direction. If you've already made up your mind, then there's no point elaborating. One quick aside: during the Industrial Revolution, government courts sided with industry in pollution matters, granting them the right (sometimes monopoly) to pollute. Plaintiffs were ignored by the government in pollution cases, since industrial progress was more important than their health. So government actually made pollution worse...