Free rider is a term related to the political commons and rent seeking. It is like rent seeking, except it is perhaps more nuanced and eventually discourages the effective use of public goods found in the political commons.
When I was a young adult, my wife, Cyndi, and I went out with a group of people. My father warned me that if the group split the bill evenly, we could wind up paying for other people’s dinner. We were pressed for cash, so we ordered frugally. Sure enough, the group decided to just split the total cost evenly, and Cyndi and I wound up paying far more than we ordered. It was an expensive lesson.
After more education and research, I found that this situation has a name: free riding.
Regarding the free rider problem and public goods, the Khan Academy wrote:
The best way to pay for public goods is to find a way of ensuring that everyone will make a contribution, thus preventing free riders. For example, if people come together through the political process and agree to pay taxes and make group decisions about the quantity of public goods, they can defeat the free rider problem by requiring—through the law—that everyone contribute.
They define a free rider as “someone who wants others to pay for a public good but plans to use the good themselves; if many people act as free riders, the public good may never be provided.”
Free riders, rent seeking, regulatory capture, and the political commons are tightly related and need to be considered holistically. For simplicity’s sake, let us assume that corporations engage in regulatory control and rent seeking, and individuals primarily engage in free-rider behavior. That is not a perfect division. For example, high-net-worth individuals may engage in all three behaviors, while corporations can engage in free riding as well, particularly in intercorporate deals.
The combination of these behaviors is powerful for the social justice movement. Let us look at a few examples, including government programs. While I am not saying we should not use these programs, they do have their risks and downsides, and we need to tread carefully. Most free riders and rent seekers want more, not less. I suspect it is addictive, even more so when social justice advocates push them.
However, even these massive costs potentially pale compared to the longer-term issues. These include a seemingly endlessly increasing appetite for freebies, increasing numbers of free riders, and donor fatigue. Will the government replace charitable activities? Will there reach a point with these programs when they are no longer affordable, and if so, what happens when the programs’ addicts go cold turkey?
This is truly a wicked problem. We need to create actionable knowledge and engage in critical thinking to find sustainable ways to help citizens in distress while reducing the problems from deliberate free riders, rent seekers, and regulatory capture.