I am starting to post the translation of the fifth part, The Machinery of Freedom.
As usual, everything begins with a poetic epigraph. In it, Friedman ironizes Hobbes’ idea of a mythical state of nature, in which a war of all against all occurs, and only the state is capable of protecting little people from this primitive horror. As for me, I had to recall how sonnets are structured.
Chapter 49, The First Legal System. Friedman announces his new book about legal systems that differ greatly from ours. At the time, it was still being written; now it is finished, but I haven’t tackled its translation yet. He asserts that literally all (or almost all) current legal systems originate from the fairly simple-to-understand tradition of blood feud, and then demonstrates this with several examples.
Chapter 50, Anarcho-Capitalism: The Kindergarten Version. Here, Friedman points out how this original legal system, through some simple tweaking, turns into the basic model of law and order under ancap—which has about as much relation to real modern models of stateless law enforcement as Robinson Crusoe’s economy has to a real economy.
Next, I will briefly switch to the translation of Eric Mack. Very little has been collected for it so far, but I hope you will encourage me with your donations. Details are on the translation page.
And a small curiosity illustrating the popular opinion that ancaps are usually not strong in mathematics. As the work neared completion, I clearly saw that my statistics for translated chapters weren’t adding up; I recounted them, and it turned out there are slightly more chapters in total, and slightly fewer have been translated, than I had previously shown in the images. Everything flows…
