When the public good has no merchant to champion it

There is a class of goods that no private merchant will supply in sufficient quantity, because the profit of supplying them cannot be confined to those who pay. Defense, justice, roads passable by all travelers, and — I would argue, extending the principle to our present moment — the infrastructure that keeps epidemic disease from crossing borders: these are goods the sovereign must provide, or they will not be provided at all. The Hill reports that the United States, once a pioneer in the worldwide fight against infectious disease, is now playing catch-up with a deadly Ebola outbreak, its former leadership having evaporated. This is not economy. It is the abdication of a public function that markets cannot discharge.

Consider the logic of the merchant, whom I do not blame for his narrowness — it is the nature of his position. He will not fund a surveillance network in a distant country because he cannot sell its benefits exclusively to his customers. The gains from early detection of a pathogen scatter across every trading nation, every airline, every port. No private firm can capture a sufficient share of those gains to justify the expenditure. This is precisely why public provision is warranted — not from sentiment alone, but from the same reasoning that justifies the building of a lighthouse on a dangerous coast. The ship that passes in safety does not pay the keeper; yet the keeper must be paid, or the ships are wrecked.

I wrote, in the Wealth of Nations, that the first duty of the sovereign is defense — the protection of the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies. A pathogen that moves through trade routes and airport terminals is not so different in its political economy from an army that moves through passes and harbors. Both impose costs on commerce, on labor, on the ordinary workman who can ill afford them. The question of who bears those costs is, at bottom, a question of institutional design. When the sovereign withdraws from the frontier of disease surveillance, the cost does not disappear; it is merely deferred, dispersed, and multiplied.

The Hill's account suggests it is not yet clear who will fill the gap left by American withdrawal. This is the precise danger I would have predicted — not from any knowledge of modern epidemiology, which I could not possess, but from the structural logic of public goods. When a dominant provider exits a commons, the commons does not automatically find a new steward. Other nations may be willing in principle, but coordinating a replacement is itself a public-good problem: each potential contributor hopes the others will bear the burden. The result, until some institution emerges to solve the coordination failure, is under-supply. People die in that gap.

I am sometimes invoked by those who wish to strip every public institution down to its studs and call the result freedom. I must dissent. The Wealth of Nations is not a brief for the elimination of public expenditure; it is a brief for the elimination of mercantile capture of public power — the monopolist, the chartered company, the interest group that bends the law to its own enrichment at the consumer's expense. Cutting the institutions that provide genuine public goods is not liberty; it is the removal of the very framework within which free exchange can occur. An economy whose workers and traders are felled by preventable epidemic is not a free economy. It is a disordered one.

The institutional question, then, is this: what framework can discipline the provision of global disease surveillance when the nation that formerly anchored it has stepped back? The answer — inference, not recollection — is that some combination of multilateral treaty, shared funding obligation, and transparent accountability must be constructed to replace what bilateral American leadership once supplied. This is difficult, unglamorous, and politically unrewarding in the short term. It is also, by the plain logic of the public-good argument, necessary. The sovereign who neglects it does not save the public's money. He merely ensures the public pays the bill later, at compound interest, in lives.