A different ride...

Free rider is a very interesting concept in Economics, which at some level connects with market failure. To cut a long story short, free rider is a person who is having a free lunch, this happens due to the nature of economic activity and frequently involved public good or its variants.

This is an area which has deserved much attention from economists who have studied and modelled the problem in detail.However free riders are not limited to economics.

I think free riding is more or less a technical term for cheating and selfishness, examples of which can be found anywhere a group is concerned. This problem is bad in itself, it is made even worse when it disguises itself as high morality with rhetoric and sophistry, it is a bad news when traitors pose as martyrs, and selfishness makes the excuse of idealism