The Progressive Era redefinition
Walter Block, an Austrian economist and professor of economics at Loyola in New Orleans, Louisiana, told Bob Zadek that the common law once handled pollution through ordinary property suits. A farmer or a “little old lady” who came to court could have his property protected from environmental damage caused by another, so that the polluter bore the cost and passed it along through the pricing of its product. In the 1880s and 1890s, Block said, the so-called Progressive Period changed that. The next time such a plaintiff came to court, the court conceded that property rights were being violated but held that something more important existed: the public good. Block summarized the reasoning as letting the factory spew smoke and the railroad run amok with sparks, because the public good consisted of manufacturing. How the Free Market Will Save the Planet (2014)
Block offered a motive for the shift. In the 1890s, he said, the United States wanted to engage in imperialist ventures and to overtake Great Britain in armaments, and that required not letting farmers and little old ladies run roughshod over manufacturers and railroads. He read a short quotation from Murray Rothbard, whom he called his guru, describing Holman v. Athens Empire Laundry Company in 1919, during the Progressive Period, in which the Supreme Court of Georgia declared that pollution of the air, so far as reasonably necessary to the enjoyment of life and indispensable to the progress of society, is not actionable. Block glossed “not actionable” as meaning you cannot sue polluters, and added that if you cannot sue polluters they will pollute, because using expensive anthracite coal instead of cheaper sulfur coal would otherwise put them out of business. How the Free Market Will Save the Planet (2014)
The same episode described a second step. As a sop to environmental plaintiffs, Block said, government imposed minimum smokestack height regulations; where a smokestack had been twenty or thirty feet high, so that the source of pollution was identifiable, it became three hundred feet high, making it hard to tell where the pollution came from. In his account the government created the problem and then blamed private enterprise and demanded the Clean Air Act. Had the libertarian system of property rights of the 1830s through 1850s been kept, he argued, the problem and the statute would never have arisen. How the Free Market Will Save the Planet (2014)
Public choice and the regulator’s self-image
Michael Munger took up the phrase from a different direction in a discussion of vaping regulation. A caller identified as Dave said he had read that the FDA was moving vaping to the status of a tobacco product, and treated it as evidence that people do not change when they move between sectors. Zadek, addressing the caller, said it was Professor Munger, and framed the point as core Public Choice: the motive to make more money, become more powerful or more important does not get left at the door when government becomes your employer. Leviathan in Chains: Michael Munger on Public Choice Economics (2017)
Munger’s answer turned on the asymmetry in how motives are described. In the private sector, wanting a bigger staff and more pay must be selfishness; in the public sector, in the case of the FDA, they are working for the public good, and when they want more staff it is so they can do better research, and when they want more pay it is because they are working so hard for the public. He extended the point to a nonprofit organized to end homelessness: the staff still want more staff and more income. People are not narrowly selfish, he said, but they do want to impose their view of the good on everyone else. Leviathan in Chains: Michael Munger on Public Choice Economics (2017)
On vaping specifically, Munger said the people at the FDA may not be craven or lying; they may actually think this is the right policy. The problem, as he described it, is that it disenfranchises individuals in terms of their personal autonomy and substitutes the judgment of someone far away who has expertise but maybe not many contacts with actual medical problems. He called vaping probably an improvement in many ways over smoking cigarettes, and characterized the opposition as resting on the fact that it is still a tobacco product. His conclusion was not that people in government are always selfish, but that they convince themselves the public good is their objective, so that more staff and more pay are justified as working so hard for the public. Leviathan in Chains: Michael Munger on Public Choice Economics (2017)
Education as a public good
Zadek raised the strongest statement of the doctrine himself in a conversation with Matt Beienburg of the Goldwater Institute. He posed the question of why a childless couple must be taxed so that their money is handed to a family with children, and answered that it has long since been decided, going back to Jefferson and the founders, that a democracy requires an informed electorate that understands civics and the duty of citizens to watch governments behave. That active citizenry requires education, and therefore education is considered by almost all of us, but not all, what is called a public good, a benefit to us collectively as a country; the childless are allocating a small portion of their tax dollars for the collective good. Arizona Chooses Students Over Systems - Matt Beienburg (2022)
Beienburg did not dispute the premise so much as relocate it. He said the federal government has no authority in the United States Constitution to stick its nose in K-12 education and that the founders never envisioned it, but that most state constitutions, Arizona among them, contain provisions saying the state will provide a public school system. The wording varies, he said, but the framers of the state constitutions largely said they believed this is a good they wanted to make sure their citizens were educated, not only in math and reading but to be good citizens with a sense of American constitutionalism. Arizona Chooses Students Over Systems - Matt Beienburg (2022)
Beienburg then turned to the arithmetic. Childless adults, he said, currently pay far more in taxes for students to attend a public school system than they would under an education savings account; Arizona spends over $11,000 per kid per year from state and local taxes alone, on top of thousands of dollars of federal funds, while an ESA offers families an education for $7,000 that the family prefers because it is freely chosen. He described ESAs as a complement to public schools alongside open enrollment and independently operated public charter schools, all of which make family choice the priority. Arizona Chooses Students Over Systems - Matt Beienburg (2022)
Earlier in the same episode, Zadek laid out the concentrated-benefits-and-diffuse-costs frame: the cost to one family of inferior education profoundly affects that family, but parents lack the time, organization and motivation to spend hours effecting change, while the benefit per teacher in salary, tenure and lifetime job security irrespective of performance is quite large, so teachers collectively have more at stake individually than parents do. Beienburg answered with the COVID period, saying teachers’ unions obtained almost $200 billion of federal COVID stimulus bailout funds for public schools in the same breath as schools were closed for two years, and that the literature has made clear the academic, emotional, mental-health and physical damage to students. He said the unions organized protests in Arizona and elsewhere with fake tombstones, coffins and obituaries, and that a million students across the country, thousands in Arizona alone, dropped out of public schools while those schools gained a windfall. Arizona Chooses Students Over Systems - Matt Beienburg (2022)
In the closing exchange, Zadek asked whether an argument can be made that public education as an institution has outlived its usefulness. Beienburg answered that public education has been divorced from its original purpose, that the teachers’ unions have taken it from something focused on students and education to a model for pushing a political agenda, and that the NEA and others have gone all in on indoctrination, pushing concepts like CRT and the 1619 Project. He said the issue is less about the form than about a system of monopoly with the force of government behind it, dominated by one constituency, the unions, which he called the worst of all worlds. Arizona Chooses Students Over Systems - Matt Beienburg (2022)
Student loans and the unvoted decision
Zadek applied the term to federal student lending in a conversation with Elizabeth Nolan Brown. He recalled that student loans once involved no government at all and were private loans like a car loan or a house loan, then described the federal government first guaranteeing student loans so banks would lend and administer them, and later, during the Obama administration, taking over the entire program. He said the government nationalized or socialized the private business of student loans, and that the result is a system in which students get unlimited money without regard to ability to pay, for unlimited amounts, to spend irresponsibly so long as they give money to a school. Student Loan Debt Forgiveness (2022)
Zadek contrasted this with commercial lending, where lenders make loans to businesses because the borrowed money will generate revenue that repays the loan. He said the government’s position is that it is so important for a student to learn medieval history that it will underwrite the whole process and free everybody from any economic consideration, and that he and friends at Reason call that a public good. His formulation was that we have kind of decided without a vote that it is just plain good for the country for somebody to study ethnic studies or medieval history. He said he does not question whether that is good or bad, calling it an individual decision, but does question whether we collectively benefit from underwriting it, and noted there has been no consideration of whether the student is using the borrowed money in a way that benefits all of us, since we are footing the bill. Student Loan Debt Forgiveness (2022)
Brown added that people often borrow to go to school for a few years, do not end up with a degree in their field, and end up doing something totally different, so the arrangement incentivizes taking particular classes or majors, or just going to school in general, when people are not really going to end up using that and then say it is covered. Student Loan Debt Forgiveness (2022)
Across episodes: the phrase as a recurring target
The topic recurs in four episodes, and what changes is the setting rather than the argument. Block supplies the historical origin in Progressive Era courts and the Holman quotation; Munger supplies the public-choice mechanism by which regulators describe their own preferences as the public good; Zadek supplies the strongest affirmative statement of the doctrine in the education segment and then applies the label to student lending; Beienburg supplies the state-constitutional basis for public schooling and the ESA alternative. The excerpts show no development in the underlying position across the episodes, only its application to pollution, vaping regulation, K-12 schooling and student debt.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not define “public good” in the technical sense of non-rivalry and non-excludability, nor do they present any guest defending the concept on those grounds. They do not state the outcome of Holman v. Athens Empire Laundry Company beyond the quoted declaration, or identify the amendment or provision on which any case turned. The student loan segment breaks off before the discussion of political strategy and legal challenges, so nothing in that portion is available here.