It's an indicator of societal dysfunction

yeah it's ridiculous. free rider problem is from redistribution by FORCE not by sovereign decisions between provider and customer. but hey, i'm sure there's still people who think running servers like nostr relays with zero auth is fucked because of the people who use auth, right, same shit.

Correct. Parasitism in the biological world is a common and legit way of life. But, so is fighting it. Perverse incentives, usually a government initiative, encourage intra species parasitism in humans, and remove incentives to fight it.

I don't think it is *necessarily* indicative of bad outcomes but it *can be* for be for some important things. It's a downward pressure on incentive but maybe it could be overcome if the culture was strongly against it. Seems like it would be hard to do though. Adding force to mix just inverts the problem so that the politically connected are the free riders of the citizens. We don't live in a perfect world though, so we just do what works and try to improve on it.