Absolutely. But the idea of a collective action problem is that sometimes it isn’t in anyone’s interests to provide the service by themselves.
This can interact badly with some of the (contingent) ways we’ve come to practice capitalism.
Ideally, a government can act as an internalizing force that allows economic actors to step out of local maxima – bad Nash equilibriums where everyone knows how to fix problems but gets punished by the market/shareholders for taking initiative to fix them.
It doesn’t have to be a government that solves a CAP – it can be an industry standards body, for example – but when they deal with things like individuals and libraries, we tend to call them governments.
True and governments have the unique position to have a longer view that would ideally introduce a whole new range of potential outcomes that might not be rational at shorter timescales.
One problem we face now is that the time scale of government is being shortened to that of the corporation. Government shouldn't think quarterly or annually but in terms of decades and generations.
This can interact badly with some of the (contingent) ways we’ve come to practice capitalism.
Ideally, a government can act as an internalizing force that allows economic actors to step out of local maxima – bad Nash equilibriums where everyone knows how to fix problems but gets punished by the market/shareholders for taking initiative to fix them.
It doesn’t have to be a government that solves a CAP – it can be an industry standards body, for example – but when they deal with things like individuals and libraries, we tend to call them governments.