I present the translation of another chapter of The Machinery of Freedom, Anarchy and Effective Law. Here, Friedman recalls his description of the legal system in a free market and applies a standard economic efficiency analysis to it. The conclusion is that in the market for law, the benefit of law providers and its enforcers is not always precisely linked to the benefit of the clients of the respective agencies. In other words, ancap does not lead to one hundred percent justice for all, and the field of private law is also subject to market failures (which Friedman analyzes in detail in the previous chapter). Nevertheless, attempts to establish legal norms through political mechanisms are subject to similar failures to a much greater extent, so overall, the market still decides.

In Chapter 52, A Positive Conception of Rights, David Friedman, using the conceptual framework introduced in the previous chapter, develops the idea of Schelling points and claiming strategies from a model microsociety of two people to a society of arbitrary complexity.

In fact, Friedman introduces more extensively and with more justification the very definition of rights that I regularly use in my texts: rights are claims that are tolerated. It is not surprising that we found such a parallelism in thinking: if it hadn’t existed, I would hardly have undertaken to translate his book after reading literally a couple of chapters.

I continue to publish the translation of The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman.

In the chapter Bargaining in Anarchy, the author analyzes how, in a Hobbesian state of nature where there are no means to compel each other to abide by agreements, these very agreements can arise and be observed at all. In other words, how people exit the state of war of all against all without any state. To explain this, a rather curious concept from game theory is introduced: Schelling points. I don’t know about you, but for me, the material was completely new, so I sincerely enjoyed the process of editing the text.

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…

I have finished the last chapter of the second edition of The Mechanics of Freedom, from 1989. Only the relatively fresh chapters of the third edition, published in 2015, remain. The chapter is strange and looks like a bit of an off-topic addition to this book, because instead of the mechanics of freedom, it tells about a little-known author of detective stories from the beginning of the 20th century – G.K. Chesterton. The ending of the first edition seemed somewhat more logical, in my opinion, and as it stands, this chapter looks like a kind of expanded appendix to the book.

The review describes what a great man Chesterton was, a true old-school liberal who successfully combined this with Catholicism and a certain indifference toward Jews. This is probably interesting to connoisseurs of Chesterton, and I generally like the stories about Father Brown — but, in my view, this chapter is redundant in The Mechanics of Freedom.

Next, I will give you a break from Friedman for a while and switch to Molinism.

In the forty-sixth chapter, The Machinery of Freedom, David Friedman analyzes the idea of private money, free banking, and all that sort of thing, which in the eighties of the last century seemed much more distant and less feasible than it does now.

The main part of the chapter, The Money Market, is an exposition of the concept of private money itself. I haven’t read Hayek’s work of the same name yet, but it seems that Friedman based much of his work on it. The author analyzes why state maintenance of the monetary system will always perform poorly, and why there are no problems with private entities handling it.

The first additional subsection, Which Commodity Exactly?, concerns the question of which specific commodity the monetary system should be based on in the Wonderful America of the Future. Friedman suggests using a basket of exchange-traded commodities, the price of which would correlate as closely as possible with the level of consumer prices. In short, the boomer invented the stablecoin. Modern mechanisms allow for the easy issuance of tokens pegged to any commodity basket, but practice shows that tokens pegged one-to-one to the banal fiat dollar are the most popular.

The second additional subsection, Preference Is Not a Prediction, contains the author’s complaints that the system he invented is beautiful but unattainable, and that private money would more likely be pegged to gold—the inelastic supply of which, for some reason, Friedman views as a tragedy—but certainly not to a consumer price index.

After a considerable break, I am posting a single chapter from David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom, but I hope to speed up in the near future. As usual, I remind you that you can support the translation project with your donations to the wallet 1AFkD2bazCs5YZBBrSD7HsRMWLmRbg6QBo

Chapter 45, Is There a Libertarian Foreign Policy, is devoted to reflections on the moral dilemma facing a potential libertarian government of the United States. On one hand, significant efforts are needed to protect against such a serious adversary as the Soviet Union, which suggests a network of international alliances. On the other hand, every alliance implies the possibility of having to fight for others’ interests in wars that have nothing to do with libertarian values. Ultimately, Friedman concludes that a policy of non-intervention is still preferable for libertarians.

Since then, the Soviet Union has ended, and thus the arguments in favor of a policy of non-intervention have only strengthened.

I continue to provide you with content for leisurely quarantine reading, this time returning to grandfather Friedman. Chapter 44, Private Law Enforcement, Medieval Iceland, and Libertarianism, is not comparable in size to the previous one, of course, but it is still quite large. Nevertheless, it is much easier to read because this time it is not theory, but history, and based on fiction at that.

In general, the age of the sagas in Iceland is almost my favorite historical period, perhaps second only to ancient Greece, so I edited the text with great pleasure; I wish it were always like this. I hope you will also enjoy the reading, and from there, you can go ahead and download the saga of Egil — and off you go, diving into the world of proto-ancap!