Usually, when I start working on the translation of another part of David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom, I stall for a long time. He precedes each part with a poetic opus of his own composition, where the wit of the content is compensated for by the clunkiness of the form. Fortunately, this time I managed to deal with the poems relatively quickly. In them, David naively wonders how the world order manages to exist in such harmony despite the government’s disregard for these things, and how government services themselves only provoke a smirk: as if this public good is not very much of a good.

What is anarchy? What is the state? In this chapter, Friedman defines what he intends to rail against throughout the rest of the part, while leaving the clarification of all the philosophical murk to Lysander Spooner.