Libertarians value voluntary groups, including associations and communities, on the ground that they are supposed to be formed by agreements. They think of people conforming to social norms as acting voluntarily if they are not coerced by the state. But conformity often results from cost-benefit structures which are not designed or created by anyone. If costs of violating social norms are prohibitively high, people will choose to falsify their genuine preferences. It is true that spontaneous norms are indispensable for reciprocal cooperation within groups, which is an important aspect or a necessary consequence of individual freedom. But some social norms are not optimal, and some collective actions impose serious negative externalities on outsiders. These may be called “community failures.”
In this article I examine how social norms are maintained, how they resolve the collective action problems, and how undesirable-in the light of people's welfare or fairness-social norms and collective actions can be destroyed. Then I argue that what is needed is the metabolism of social norms. “The expressive function of law” may exist, but we should bear in mind that spontaneous systems of assurance are often self-enforcing and robust, and that government officials are also under the sway of social norms. Instead, we should expect “norm entrepreneurs” who discover meaningful social norms and take risks of having a commitment to them for their subjective returns.
