 A different worry about the necessity of harm concerns those cases involving restrictions on liberty in the compulsory provision of public goods. For it is part of the structure of public goods that the effect of individual contributions on provision of the public good is negligible. The negative impact of an individual’s failure to contribute is both small and is spread widely over the population. But that means that even if failure to provide public goods would otherwise count as a serious loss for all and a harm, the cost of individual failures to provide for such goods does not seem to meet Mill’s criteria for harmful conduct—the impact of individual failures to contribute to public goods is too small and spread too widely to constitute the breach of “a distinct and assignable obligation to any other person or persons” (IV 10). Insofar as this is a worry for the harm principle, it seems to be equally a worry for HP1 and for HP2.