Max Hobrough Chapter 3, Question 6

In chapter three Wheelan describes what positive and negative externalities that we face every day with most decisions that we make. Also in this chapter Wheelan tells us how and why it is either good or bad for the government to be in the economy. What really intrigued me was that really when you look at the outcomes of public goods that the government has backed away from and put into private hands we tend to fail, well these being very expensive at least. All of these which of came back to the government are such things like research for diseases and illnesses, law enforcement, and  public parks and recreation areas. The all have good impacts on society but nobody seemed to want to take fiscal responsibility for these programs because of all of the "free riders" who are paying nothing but benefiting from these programs. The author gave a great example of how something is private and stays private, Wikipedia, this is just run through outside donations from people who want to actually pay for this service. The reason for the authors point here is that instead of the government having to keep Wikipedia alive he would rather see the taxpayers money go to something more important like national defense. These basic goods are just used and used until the funding runs out for them because they don't wanna pay for what seems like a minor expense, but once you have massive amounts of people doing this there is no more service because nobody can pay for it. This whole idea of government being a bad thing in the economy is really subjective to how it is being used to help the people.