David Friedman

The David Friedman cited here is the son of Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, and the father of Patri Friedman (former Google engineer, now director of the Peter Thiel-funded Seasteading Institute: http://seasteading.org/). His book The Machinery of Freedom has a lot more about law without government, both historically and speculatively: http://www.amazon.com/Machinery-Freedom-Guide-Radical-Capitalism/dp/08… His weblog is pretty good reading for HN fans too: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/

I loved David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom. His blog is also filled with a lot of interesting thoughts: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com

Note that a more recent edition of this page can be found here (warning, docx download): http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/Somali%20Law.docx The index of updated docx chapters: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsContents.htm The index of HTML chapters this link is for: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/legal_systems_very… My favorite chapters are probably the ones on Irish and Jewish law.

I can highly recommend "Legal Systems Very Different from Ours" by David Friedman http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsContents.htm It includes a few chapters on religion-based legal systems and is interesting throughout.

Actually basing the legal system on money might not be the worst. Certainly better than basing it on influence and connections. About your question: you might like this paper https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1546&a… It doesn't offer any answers, and it's about criminal justice; but it's good food for thought about unintended consequences. See also the excellent http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsContents.htm as parodied in https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/30/legal-systems-very-different-fro… and reviewed in https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/13/book-review-legal-systems-very-d…

I share your feelings on government but, after reading The Machinery of Freedom, I believe anarchy is worth a shot. I wonder if you would reconsider anarchy if there was a private system of entities providing government-like services and compete with each other. http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf

The question here is whether that 97% accept that humans are the main cause of global warming, which is arguably not supported by the evidence presented in the Cook paper. To quote Friedman in a follow-up post: > My objection was that the 97% figure lumped together categories 1-3, when only category 1 fitted Cook's "main cause." Categories 2 and 3 were papers saying or implying that human action was a cause—"contributed to" in the language of the example. Category 1 contained 64 papers, or 1.6%, not 97%.[0] Which does not mean that there isn't a large consensus that humans are the primary cause of global warming. What we can infer is: 1. The Cook paper is not evidence of that consensus 2. That Cook himself is perhaps not a reliable source. [0]https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/03/john-cooks-response-to-my-…

Or the common good, or providing the weak a champion to resist violence had no role in the establishment of institutional policing? David Friedman has a great summary of how a variety of societies pursue justice and the origins of our own system and comparisons of the systems. http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/legal_systems_very…

Wasn't something like it actually done in classical Athens? http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/legal_systems_very… bottom of page: "The solution was simple. I offer to exchange everything I own for everything you own. If you refuse, you have admitted that you are richer than I am, and so you get to do the liturgy that was to be imposed on me."

Side note - if the article sounds uber-rational econ, it may be in part because the author is the son of Milton Friedman. Here is his first post on the topic. http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-use-of-old-exams.html There is a great quote at the end. And, for a last comment ... . I like to say that being a professor is better than working for a living, except when grading exams. One reason is that grading exams is a pain. Another is that it is when you find out that you have not done nearly as good a job of teaching as you thought you had.

> Along with inestimable human livelihood and wealth, the free market creates various possibilities to foolishly harm oneself. As opposed to the ability for the state to foolishly harm us? Sure, a free market allows humans to be human and make mistakes, but allowing others to take your freedom in the interest of self-preservation is a fool's compromise. Certainly, you raise great philosophical questions though. One of my favorite thought experiments is to imagine how many things done by the government today could be accomplished without the government. I don't mean obvious things like the postal service, I mean fundamental services like road building and a court system. I plan to read David Friedman's book soon on this topic, called "Legal Systems Very Different From Ours": http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/legal_systems_very…

Well; it really depends on your jurisdiction, but you should know that there is such a thing as consumer protection and tort liability --yes, even for things you get for free, like FOSS. See for instance [1,2]. Also, in the specific case of FOSS, this kind of jackass-ery might soon come to an end anyway if/when the EU and UK follows through with their (relatively) recent moves to introduce stronger software liability provisions (eg [3]). [1] http://www.ifross.org/en/what-legal-standard-liability-and-warranty-ge… [2] http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/21st_century_issue… [3] http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/workspace/analysts-warn-[3] vendors-on-software-liability-7284

There have been a lot of different ways to make and enforce laws through history, each with their particular costs and benefits. For a review of several I recommend this work (in progress) by David Friedman. http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/legal_systems_very…

Name-dropping Milton Friedman would be useful to court Friedmanites, not necessarily libertarians. I'm guessing that his son David (http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/), who is even more libertarian than his father, would likely have a different opinion.

The headline is horrible—it's kind of like saying "Scientist's Theories Led to Atomic Bomb" for an Einstein obit—but Ronald Coase was one of the most creative economists of the 20th century and deserves to be widely known. For a great introduction to Coase's Theorem and its implications, I recommend Law's Order by David Friedman (available in a nearly illegible online edition at http://www.daviddfriedman.com/laws_order/, but I recommend the print version). It will challenge many of the things you think you know about externalities.

I think we already have "private" dictatorships in most of the world. 2/3 of states are fucked up, just look at failed state index or press freedom index. > The argument is that if you eliminated the government, the alternative (private dictatorships) would be even less accountable. If you are right and private defense organization would collapse into one, then why there is no single government? (Moreover, some of states(like USSR) get decomposed into few more, so the number of states even grows). Why do you assume there is no reason to prevent a number of PDO turning into violent one? There are great books: Murray Rothbard's "For a new liberty: libertarian manifesto": http://mises.org/document/1010/ David Friedman's "The machinery of freedom": http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf

My initial comment was pointing out that we libertarians very explicitly don't underestimate corruption; which factors very strongly in why we view centralized power in the form of legitimized coercion as A Bad Thing. My follow-up to an off-topic but related comment was that accountability exists in freed markets; just not in the way you might be used to in democratic societies. My intention is not to defend freed markets from every possible criticism. There is plenty of literature out there that does that much better than I could already. A nice place to start is David Friedman's "The Machinery of Freedom" for pragmatic details. [1] Just as accountability can come in many different shapes and sizes, so too can regulation. The only requirement is a bit of imagination. [1] - http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf

I enjoyed David Friedman's discussions of the incentives present under market anarchy in "The Machinery of Freedom", now available in its entirety online[1]. Your objections are not new and have been discussed at length by market anarchists. Whether or not you find the responses satisfactory is up to you. David writes for a mainstream audience which is assumed to have some familiarity with concepts of economics and property, but does not need to already be a libertarian. I feel he is the best representative of market anarchist thought. [1]http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf

Becker-Posner Blog: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/ David (son of Milton) Friedman: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/

You might find David Friedman's chapter "The Economics of Love and Marriage" interesting http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_Chapter_21/PT…

For commercial law there is the obvious test of whether the law leads to prosperity. Can we have a utopia in which our favourite artists, well funded by copyright royalties, are free of the tyranny of the day-job and may create full time, unfettered by copyrights on existings works that they wish to improve, rework, remix, play-off and a dapt? Probably not, but the problem we face is clear enough: construct a system of commercial law around the trade-offs that lead to artist abundance. There is an Economics and Law movement, partly inspired by Coase's Theorem, http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/The_Swedes.html, that has high hopes of economic efficiency as a basis for discerning between good and bad law.

his old blog http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/

There's at least one other survey that did the same trick - turned ~80% agreement in a big group into 97% in a minuscule subsample. Additionally, John Cook - the guy who runs skepticalscience - did some studies claiming to find high agreement with "the consensus" among published papers about climate. But his paper were terrible, didn't show what he claimed they did, and were less relevant to your claim. Here's a blogpost going into some issues with the Cook studies and the claims made for them: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/02/a-climate-falsehood-you-can… The difference between disagreeing with 80%-ish and 97% is largely of rhetorical importance. For propaganda purposes it feels like the difference between "a respectable minority view" and "a lunatic fringe". Alas, scientists almost never agree on ANYTHING to the 97% level. So if you hear that level claimed, the best bet is that somebody either fudged with the question - watering it down to such a degree that all the "skeptics" also agree - or fudged with the sample pool, making the surveyed group so tiny and self-selected as to exclude lots of legitimate scientists in related fields.

I don't even feel like I take major part in IT industry. I just do my work, publish some research, contribute to some open-source projects etc. I may even get some great ideas at some point that will change something globally, but it is impossible to change the whole world for one men. Yet I follow HN and it is of value to me that other people create great things almost every day. The same is true for Mars. I am almost sure I am not going into space in the next 50 years. Yet it is of value to me that someone goes into space or lives on Mars during my life. I would really like to see news from Mars, how people are doing there, what they invent to make their life better there etc. Putting this into money is what Mars One [1] project proposes. They plan to raise money by putting their project on TV, because almost everyone would like to see how someone else is doing on Mars, even if not helping directly or participating in the project. I think the original idea goes from chapter "Might have been" of the "Machinery of freedom" book [2]. There David Friedman proposed the same idea, just the goal is less ambitious: Mars is substituted for Moon. [1] http://www.mars-one.com/ [2] http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf

Note the ex officio statement in the IP chapter: even if a copyright holder does not want to initiate border measures (e.g. destroy fanzines), this can be enforced by governments, http://www.mfat.govt.nz/downloads/trade-agreement/transpacific/TPP-tex… In 2013, Japanese lawyers warned about the fair use implications, http://japanitlaw.blogspot.com/2013/01/tpps-effect-on-fanzine-environm… & http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/IP_Theory_13/Paper… Article 18.76: Special Requirements related to Border Measures 5. Each Party shall provide that its competent authorities may initiate border measures ex officio [118] with respect to goods under customs control that are: (a) imported; (b) destined for export; (c) in transit, and that are suspected of being counterfeit trademark goods or pirated copyright goods. [118] For greater certainty, ex officio action does not require a formal complaint from a third party or right holder.

I think it's worth quoting an extract from http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/legal_systems_very… 's discussion of Qing Chinese law: > There are multiple cases where someone commits an offense on orders from a superior member of his extended family; the attitude of the court seems to be that although he must obey the order he is still criminally liable for the act; there appears to be no assumption in the legal system that an individual always has the option of acting in a way that does not violate one rule or another. When I read this, it was more interesting to me that American society is fairly committed to the fiction that such an option always exists. I don't believe that the mere fact that a person took some action itself demonstrates that the person believed that action to be morally blameless. Of two paths, both can be wrong. Of many paths, all can be wrong -- or the conseqences of staying on the "right" one might be personally unbearable. I imagine that a mother who opted not to rescue her child from a burning building might be haunted by the thought that this was wrong, regardless of a generally positive message from society. Also, I've tried really hard to read your comment in a way that allows for the existence of guilt. I can't see it. Do you believe people can feel guilt? Why would C. S. Lewis feel sorrow, in the privacy of his own mind, to discover that he is the kind of person who would do…

Your summary of medieval Iceland displays your ignorance. Go read the article I linked and see Byock from UCLA if you will only crack open mainstream history. Byock supports the history just fails to recognize the polycentric and anarchist interpretation. The point is that society functioned well and civil order, viz. not the chaos that "anarchy" is assumed, was maintained for longer than the US has existed. In the grand scale of history medieval Iceland succeeded almost 3x as long as the democracy you surely worship has been unquestioned as superior (just ~100 years now). >Can you actually make a real case in teh real world that "government" in some for is not nesercery? Let's gloss over that Lex Mercatoria why don't we. Yeah, I missed mentioning my #2 area of knowledge, Xeer customary law in Somalia. The quality of life there has improved vastly despite the UN insurgency (see proof in my past comments from CIA/World Bank stats). Wait, I can just hear it now, "warlords". I'll spare myself the time responding to ignorant people like you and just drop one more link. Maybe one day I will be bestowed the honor to silence those who disagree and remain happy in my ignorance without reading. http://daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/Legal_Systems_Very_Dif…

People can and do protect what they believe to be their property. Families and tribes can and do protect the territory they believe to belong to their members. I like David Friedman's description of property rights not primarily as moral or legal constructs, but as mutually recognized commitment strategies which discourage trespasses. He points out that territorialism in the animal kingdom is similar to property rights (obviously without the existence of a state). Animals mark their territory (e.g. with urine), and other animals tend to respect those boundaries, because there is mutual understanding that the territory holder will fight a trespasser to the death if necessary, and the damage to the trespasser (even a stronger trespasser) will most likely not be worth it. Perhaps the territory holder would be better off just retreating, but what makes it "property" is the near certainty that he won't retreat. http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Order_without_the_state/Order_W…

> You can't have peace without the threat of force. No, You or someone else would only come to my house and start claiming all my stuff if you believed it was in your best interests to do so. It might get you killed is indeed one reason that it might not be in your best interests to do so, but firstly there are many ways to implement the "it might get you killed" condition, and none of them necessarily rely upon a westphalian nation state as supporting infrastructure. In addition, if you believed it was not in your best interests for other reasons than "it might get you killed" it wouldn't matter, the end result would be the same. People act in accordance with their best interests, it doesn't all have to be stick, it can be carrot, too. If you do not respect the property rights of others, it is only logical to assume that in turn, they will not respect your property rights. This makes it not in your best interests to do that. Also, this response was directed at something that has nothing to do with the compulsion against the appropriation of private property by random people, it was a statement that it is wrong to extort people to finance your personal pet projects. If I set up a protection racket in my neighbourhood and enforce it with violence, it doesn't make it alright as long as I donate a portion of that to charity. > The government is enormously wasteful for all the reasons you list. So whilst acknowledging that the current system is completely broken, you still…

Your understanding of the points you are arguing against is so terrible and flawed that you need to start over from scratch. (Note the difference between that statement and "the points you are arguing against are correct".) "He assumes that, if people have to pay their own money, they are going to make rational economic decisions about health care purchases and will shop around for the best price. This is such utter crap that it is hard to believe that an open minded economist would utter it." The idea that people don't take prices into account is such crap I can't believe anyone could believe it. You argue: "They are made on other considerations like trust in the doctor and increasingly on patient evaluations of treatment options." Which betrays a profound misunderstanding of how economics work. Those considerations are indeed weighed... all in a context of how much it costs! If you can't understand it in an emotional arena like health care, consider buying a house. Price isn't the only concern. How much you like it factors in to your final decision. But if you don't consider price at all, you're going to make a very bad decision by any measure, both conventional (you're going to run out of money) and economic utility. "Yes, I by drugs at Costco because they are cheaper, but that is because Costco has negotiating advantage, not me." Time for some 5 Whys: Why does Costco have a negotiating advantage? Because they are big? Well, why are they big? You can dance around…