Тег: Friedman

Legal systems that differ greatly from ours. I am taking over the translation relay and presenting the chapter on Ancient Athens.

I hope you didn’t miss me too much while the channel was on pause for a while — I have been very busy.

More than a year ago, as part of his Liberty Education Project, Vladimir Zolotorev began posting a translation of David Friedman’s 2019 book Legal Systems Very Different from Our Own — an extremely detailed answer to the question of how courts could operate not only under ancap, but in any conceivable conditions. For my part, I posted the original and published the translated chapters on my page. In November 2020, however, the translation stalled after the publication of four chapters.

And recently, Dima Kovalenko, who translated those four chapters, contacted me and suggested that I continue the work in his place. I gladly agreed. To get started, I took a relatively short chapter on the legal system of my favorite Athens during the time of classical democracy, and now I am happy to present to you the translation of this chapter. I have also formatted all five chapters into an epub and posted it on my page as well. Footnotes for the four old chapters are currently missing — apparently, they were not translated. I will add them in time. Please test whether the book reads normally for you — I tried formatting it in the newer epub3 format, but if it turns out that it is not sufficiently supported by your e-readers, then there is no point in overcomplicating things and it would be better to return to epub2; the book does not contain complex layout for which the new format would be absolutely necessary.

I would also be glad if someone would take on creating a cover for the book — for now, I am using the original English one, but the final edition will clearly require something else.

The Mechanics of Freedom in Audio

The translation of Friedman’s “Mechanics of Freedom” into audiobook format continues. The first and second parts have already been fully narrated; only a tiny bit remains — four more parts. The current version of the audiobook is available as a playlist, and the corresponding tracks are also attached to the text of each chapter.

In addition, with a slight delay, Oleg is also uploading the recorded material to his YouTube channel. There is more than just Friedman there, so he hopes the channel might interest you.

Montelibero News, Issue 3

Patry Friedman tweeted about our project, and may he truly be worthy of his great ancestors, which is no easy feat. People from all sorts of places, such as Iceland or Catalonia, have started joining the project chats.

Documents have been submitted for the registration of the company that will own the land being purchased as part of the project. So, I will soon be officially appointed as director, and it will be possible to apply for a boravak (the melodic local term for a residence permit).

The attempt to bring the surveyor mentioned in the previous issue to the site was only partially successful: the plot and even the access paths are so densely overgrown with bushes that we managed to break through to only one of the three areas.

Dead end, you can’t get any further to the plot — or, locally, velika šuma
One can make their way to part of the territory via the seasonal stream bed
Roughly a third of all the land is relatively cleared; there was an olive grove here

So, equipment for dealing with the underbrush was purchased, and starting tomorrow, Alexey from Tomsk and I will begin destroying it.

Asking the local expert where the trigger is on this barrel

When photos of all these “man toys” appeared in the project chats, the Tom Sawyer effect immediately occurred: people began to envy us and express a desire to immediately leave their stuffy offices and come to our sunny tourist paradise to paint a fence. Most likely, you won’t make it in time for the clearing stage, but then the road construction will begin, followed by building — processes that are no less fascinating. So, if you haven’t yet acquired a piece of Montenegro to build your own libertarian nest on — check out montelibero.org, or better yet, go straight to the main project chat — and join us.

Mechanics of Freedom: Update

First, I want to say thank you to Andrey Shevtsov, who quickly put together a PDF based on the text published on the website. Now those who wish can play at samizdat and print themselves a hard copy.

Secondly, besides attaching audio to each of the chapters individually, I have also gathered them into playlists for the convenience of listening in sequence, without the need to flip through pages.

Here is the English version.

[cue id=”7475″]

And here is the Russian one; it will be updated as subsequent chapters are recorded.

[cue id=”7371″]

And finally—you asked very much to make the navigation between chapters easier. I have set it up for the translation, so feel free to test it. I haven’t done it for the original yet, as it is a very tedious task since it has to be written manually.

Mechanics of Freedom — it’s all over!

I am happy to announce that I have finished translating David Friedman’s book The Machinery of Freedom and am finally posting it as a single file for e-readers. Download it, share the book with those you deem worthy, and be sure to visit the donations page to choose the size of the “like” you want to give.

Additionally, the creation of an audiobook based on the translation is gradually continuing; as of today, the entire first part of the book has been fully voiced, and the second has begun. The text is read by Oleg, and if you would like to thank him for this in some way, message him privately on Telegram and let him provide his details. Or use the payment bot for dash and send him some crypto directly via his Telegram name.

Unexpected Find

I’ve almost finished formatting The Machinery of Freedom into a single, easy-to-read file, while simultaneously performing final editing (working at a speed almost like Shulman’s when she was proofreading Pinker). In essence, I’ve formatted everything that is already on the website, and now I’m tinkering with the second of three appendices, where he recommends various pleasant and useful literature. And there, I came across this description:

J. Neil Schulman, Alongside Night (New York: Avon, 1987), The Rainbow Cadenza (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983). Two clearly libertarian novels. The first describes a libertarian uprising in the near future, the second—a society where the ratio of men to women is ten to one, and where women are drafted into prostitution corps. A movie is currently being filmed based on the first one, in which I am to play a small role.

Oh, I thought, how interesting, the movie has surely been made by now, I should look for it. I found it. It’s a freaking masterpiece! A low-budget production with a very low rating, because of which Neil Schulman decided to give up on trying to sell it—and released it for free on YouTube. The entire film consists almost entirely of memes and easter eggs, so I watched it for a long time, constantly hitting pause. I highly recommend watching it; with the right mindset, you will certainly derive great pleasure from this amateur artistic endeavor.

Friedman plays the very modest role of the King of Sweden in the film.

https://youtu.be/aX6q4qp55Q0?t=507

Critique of “Mechanics of Freedom”

My reader Sergey Soltys was discussing his anarcho-capitalist beliefs with an acquaintance and from time to time referred to Friedman’s Mechanics of Freedom. This ended with the interlocutor taking up reading the book, managing to get through about half of it, and posting a very detailed review, which I am now presenting for your attention because it is quite characteristic.

From this review, it is evident that the book was read sporadically and that the reader clearly did not grasp certain economic terms used in the text. The term “public good” suffered particularly. The reader believes that the key word in the term is “good,” whereas a good is simply some value, regardless of what it is, and the key is the definition of “public,” in opposition to “private good,” which refers to a very specific type of good possessing a set of characteristic properties.

Does this mean that the reader is an idiot and is fighting straw men? No, he is a smart and well-intentioned social democrat who values life’s comfort very highly, is ready to work hard and pay a lot for it, but is unwilling to delve deeply into how the economy works because he is a specialist in another field. Thus, for him, a complete lack of understanding of the theory of the firm, public choice theory, and similar things is forgivable.

The example of a perfectly intelligent person failing to understand Mechanics of Freedom shows the book’s shortcomings. It is long and disjointed; it was not sufficiently revised from edition to edition, and therefore often appeals to outdated facts about the USA from the middle of the last century; it is not rigorous enough in its use of conceptual apparatus.

Perhaps I refer to Friedman too much. That is a matter of taste. I like his language and characteristic humor; it is not that difficult for me to accept his system of definitions, although I often use slightly different terminology for myself. And simply, we both think roughly within the same paradigm of an economic approach to legal issues.

Perhaps I should still write my own work on ancap. Something clearer and more concise. More modern. Based on facts more accessible to the Russian-speaking reader. Svetov threatened to create something like that, but he isn’t in any hurry. I don’t know. I am not sure I have enough talent and perseverance. In any case, first I will finish polishing the Friedman edition. I have enough talent and perseverance for that.

Forgive me that the post came out more in a blog format. It is just that I am on the threshold of significant changes in my life, and that puts me in a very pensive mood.

A couple of questions about the Mechanics of Freedom

I couldn’t find the third edition of The Machinery of Freedom anywhere. Found it on this wonderful site. Thank you very much for the work you do; it is very important for our idea. I wanted to ask: is there any way to get the original book, the third edition, in PDF format?

Alexander

I had it in Word from the author, but since it’s urgently needed, I converted it to PDF. I also wanted it in epub, but the quality of the automatic conversion leaves much to be desired, so let some other enthusiast handle that, while I continue to polish the translation in this format.

Please recommend an introductory book on ancap, one that I could give to an acquaintance who is not familiar with the topic, so that without stumbling over a bunch of terms, they could understand how ancap can work (money, courts, police, etc.). Thank you.

анонимный вопрос

I believe that Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom is exactly such a book; otherwise, I wouldn’t have spent so much effort on it. The author does not bother with presenting the history of libertarianism or even just ancap, nor does he retell economic theory, but rather provides a vision: how it all works in a free market, and what specific forms, in his opinion, it will take (at least in the USA).

So let your acquaintance start reading on the site, and in about a month, I very much hope to finally post the final electronic version.

Yet another monstrous piracy

Not long ago, the audience of my Telegram chat watched in real time as I tried to crack an audio file in Amazon’s proprietary aaxc format and convert it into a human-readable mp3. Thanks to the help of readers and a bit of luck, I managed to do it in one evening.

Now, each chapter of the original text of David Friedman’s book The Machinery of Freedom is accompanied by audio where the author himself reads the corresponding chapter. Actually, I was cracking the audiobook for slightly different reasons, but I’ll get to that later; for now, I’ve put the intermediate result to use.

A translation of the first of three appendices to the book has also been published, but that’s a minor detail, needed only to change the number on the progress bar. For the most part, I am currently occupied with the final editing and layout of the translation into epub format.

By the way, regarding the audio. If anyone is interested in voicing the translation of the book, let’s collaborate. Record the poems from the epigraphs of all parts of the book and send the recording to me in a private message. Then, if the selection is representative enough, we will hold a vote on whose version to post on my site and, accordingly, suggest it to Friedman himself for his site. He has already prepared a section for his poems in Russian, but it’s empty for now, and this injustice should be corrected. And if the contest winner has the strength to voice the entire book (which is over twelve hours), that would be simply mega-cool, and it will almost certainly be rewarded by a grateful public.

Mechanics of Freedom, Chapter 66

That’s it, I’m publishing the last chapter of The Mechanics of Freedom, Welcome to the Future, hooray! Here, Friedman discusses what ensures digital privacy and what hinders its widespread adoption, why anonymous altcoins provide less anonymity than bitcoin mixers, and touches upon a topic I raised in Digital Identity — that it doesn’t matter how strong your ciphers are if the observer is omnipresent.

All I have left is to edit and post the appendices. Next, I’ll need to go through the entire text to make final corrections — the translation took over a year, so some stylistic inconsistency is inevitable for now. Then, I’ll need to format the text for e-books as well as for print. After that, I’ll upload all this wealth to the website, send it to Friedman, and offer the print version to both the DPRs and the Tea Club — in short, let it spread as widely as possible, for all our joy.

To make the joy complete, you can throw me an encouraging portion of bitcoins. Oh, right, I mustn’t forget to include an acknowledgments page in the finished book: for those who sent donations, those who translated, and the person who obtained the full version of the text from the author — in short, let no one be left out.