ABSTRACT
All goods are more or less private or public and can—and constantly do—change with respect to their degree of privateness/publicness with people's changing values and evaluations, and with changes in the composition of the population. They never fall, once and for all, into either one or the other category. In order to recognize this, one must only recall what makes something a good. For something to be a good it must be realized and treated as scarce by someone. The state of public opinion in West Germany, for instance, makes it highly unlikely or even impossible that a statist-socialist system of the present-day Russian type could be imposed on the West German public. The lack of public support for such a system would doom it to failure and make it collapse. And it would be even more unlikely that any such attempt to impose a Russian-type order could ever hope to succeed among Americans, given American public opinion.
