EMOTIONAL LABOR AS PUBLIC GOOD 11is essential to the delivery of public services, but government reform efforts increasingly treat public goods and services like those of the private sector. Not only does this obscure the importance of emotional labor, but reform efforts emphasizing efficiency and cost can result in bad governance. We refer to recent welfare reforms to underscore the dangers of treating public services as though they were of the private sector. Public services are not private services and governments do not operate like businesses.Second, we discuss the concept of the harbor of refuge. The state is granted broad authority by citizens to provide services that are not provided elsewhere—public goods—and to serve particularly vulnerable populations. For some populations—the most vulnerable, whether due to an inability to pay or due to an accident or crisis—and for some services like crisis response or law enforcement, government is the sole provider and/or provider of last resort. Both points—the nature of public goods and services, and the state as harbor of refuge—are meant to underscore the importance of understand-ing emotional labor. It is fundamental to the delivery of public goods and to serving the hardest to serve. If emotional labor is important to understand for a firm’s bottom line, as Hochschild and others argue, then it is even more important to understand when there is no bottom line, as in the case of public goods and services.The Role of the State: Providing Public Goods and ServicesEvery student in Economics 101 learns a definition of the field something along these lines: “Economics is the study of what to produce, how much to produce, and who gets it.” Though simple, this statement actually covers a lot of ground. Resources are scarce, so choosing what to produce is a matter of determining where else you might spend your time and energy and settling on the product that will accrue the most on your investment. When circumstances change, you shift from one enterprise to a more lucrative one. Similarly, you choose how much to produce by determining the point at which it does not pay for you to spend any more time or energy in production, and you stop there. You can decide to cut back or expand if prices of the materials that you use in production change or if new developments allow you to charge a higher price. Finally, the “who gets it” question involves a choice of allocation mechanisms. Most goods and services are “normal” and allocated according to price: If you pay for it, you get it. If you don’t, you don’t. Dog food, beer, clothing, oil changes, bananas, manicures, air travel are but a few examples of normal goods and services.Adam Smith (1776/1991) posited that people would get all the goods and services that they ever wanted and needed if each of them simply pursued their