Greatest Collective Action challenge in Today’s GovernmentOlivia DavisonSo far in my readings, I have learned numerous reasons why collective action is hard to achieve successfully. In my findings, I feel as though the biggest issue in reaching a solution that is pleasing to everyone, is the free-rider problem. As our book defines it, free-riding is a situation in which individuals can receive benefits from a collective activity whether or not they helped to pay for it, leaving them with no incentive to contribute. I see this in countless situations in our society that reliance is what gets people in to this habit. By this I mean that so many people rely on others to use public goods sparingly or as far as what someone pays for health care. This controversy is hard to overcome because there are so many instances in society that this problem may arise. One example that spoke to me was a problem on our test. The problem arose from a fisherman who was exploiting the number of fish he caught. He had no intentions of limiting the number of fish he caught but instead was relying on the other fishermen to be sustainable. Reliance is primarily why the free-rider problem exists. The unavoidable concepts to this issue are the characteristics of a public good; goods that are non-excludableto anyone as well as the complete availability the good offers. How collective action plays apart of this problem is how does the government come to a solution to eliminate free-rider occurrences. Questions such as: who is willing to pay for this good and if it should be purchased? How are the costs of the good going to be split fairly? As wells as, if this person claims to not occupy this good, should they be taxed for it? Though, these questions are obtainable, it is too much information that is not realistic to achieve for every individual. What also occurs is that if every person was surveyed, there would be very small numbers and we would discover a lot of ‘freeloaders.’ So while dealing with free-riders, I find this problem to be one our government faces daily by not always being able to implement