The translation of David Friedman’s book The Machinery of Freedom has finally been fully narrated. Now you can finally pump iron at some gym while simultaneously pumping your brain with libertarian theory.
On this occasion, I want to promote the new channel of Oleg, the volunteer who narrated the book. In the channel, he posts his narrations of various literary works. And, obviously, the higher the interest in the channel, the more incentives there will be for new audio to appear.
As a reminder, I have translations of three more books in progress: Libertarianism by Eric Mack, Practical Anarchy by Stephan Mol liqueur, and Legal Systems Very Different from Our Own by our own David Friedman. Translations move much faster when donations are made, so don’t be shy. The same considerations apply to my own book on ancap; it’s long overdue for completion, but I’m always short on time. However, when a fresh donation is hanging over my soul, whining about not being “worked off,” there’s no choice but to get to the keyboard.
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.
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.
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And here is the Russian one; it will be updated as subsequent chapters are recorded.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am posting the penultimate chapter of The Machinery of Freedom, Extracurricular Education: A Libertarian Approach to Children. Friedman describes in detail how he threw books at his children to see which ones would stick, and other antics dear to the heart of every ancap. While in the first chapters of the book, written before the author had children of his own, he campaigned for the quite vegetarian idea of implementing school vouchers, later he became a much greater extremist and began to challenge schools as such.
Chapter 64, Incorrect Use of Externality Arguments, is dedicated to the question of how the brain of even the most unbiased researcher tends to bend facts to fit a ready-made concept when it comes to searching for arguments for certain targeted actions. This is not to mention the difficulty of classifying various possible consequences as positive or negative, as well as the possibility of a consciously biased selection of facts. All of this completely undermines the utilitarian considerations used to justify a particular policy; therefore, in such matters, it is more appropriate to be guided by general theoretical, legal, and ethical criteria, leaving speculations that the world will end if one does not immediately march in the right direction to the demagogues.
