ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the various activities in which utility-maximizing citizens can engage in an effort to reduce, or even to eliminate, the coercion that is placed on them by the government’s supply of policies with public and non-private goods characteristics. Citizens have preferences for expenditure and tax policies and thus will seek redress from a coercive situation by working for changes either in expenditure policies or in tax policies or in both. Social movements always involve a relatively large number of individuals. Governments supply a large number of public policies, but citizens do provide for themselves many goods and services with public goods elements. The reason is simple: governments may not make these goods available or, if they do, they may not provide them in sufficient quantities to eliminate coercion. Often governments make the supply of certain private goods, such as narcotics or the operations of one’s own stills, illegal.
