David Friedman

> You can't have peace without the threat of force.

No, You or someone else would only come to my house and start claiming all my stuff if you believed it was in your best interests to do so. It might get you killed is indeed one reason that it might not be in your best interests to do so, but firstly there are many ways to implement the "it might get you killed" condition, and none of them necessarily rely upon a westphalian nation state as supporting infrastructure. In addition, if you believed it was not in your best interests for other reasons than "it might get you killed" it wouldn't matter, the end result would be the same.

People act in accordance with their best interests, it doesn't all have to be stick, it can be carrot, too. If you do not respect the property rights of others, it is only logical to assume that in turn, they will not respect your property rights. This makes it not in your best interests to do that.

Also, this response was directed at something that has nothing to do with the compulsion against the appropriation of private property by random people, it was a statement that it is wrong to extort people to finance your personal pet projects. If I set up a protection racket in my neighbourhood and enforce it with violence, it doesn't make it alright as long as I donate a portion of that to charity.

> The government is enormously wasteful for all the reasons you list.

So whilst acknowledging that the current system is completely broken, you still…

Your understanding of the points you are arguing against is so terrible and flawed that you need to start over from scratch.

(Note the difference between that statement and "the points you are arguing against are correct".)

"He assumes that, if people have to pay their own money, they are going to make rational economic decisions about health care purchases and will shop around for the best price. This is such utter crap that it is hard to believe that an open minded economist would utter it."

The idea that people don't take prices into account is such crap I can't believe anyone could believe it. You argue:

"They are made on other considerations like trust in the doctor and increasingly on patient evaluations of treatment options."

Which betrays a profound misunderstanding of how economics work. Those considerations are indeed weighed... all in a context of how much it costs! If you can't understand it in an emotional arena like health care, consider buying a house. Price isn't the only concern. How much you like it factors in to your final decision. But if you don't consider price at all, you're going to make a very bad decision by any measure, both conventional (you're going to run out of money) and economic utility.

"Yes, I by drugs at Costco because they are cheaper, but that is because Costco has negotiating advantage, not me."

Time for some 5 Whys: Why does Costco have a negotiating advantage? Because they are big? Well, why are they big? You can dance around…

I think it's worth quoting an extract from http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/legal_systems_very_different_12/Book_Draft/Systems/ChineseLaw.html 's discussion of Qing Chinese law:

> There are multiple cases where someone commits an offense on orders from a superior member of his extended family; the attitude of the court seems to be that although he must obey the order he is still criminally liable for the act; there appears to be no assumption in the legal system that an individual always has the option of acting in a way that does not violate one rule or another.

When I read this, it was more interesting to me that American society is fairly committed to the fiction that such an option always exists.

I don't believe that the mere fact that a person took some action itself demonstrates that the person believed that action to be morally blameless. Of two paths, both can be wrong. Of many paths, all can be wrong -- or the conseqences of staying on the "right" one might be personally unbearable. I imagine that a mother who opted not to rescue her child from a burning building might be haunted by the thought that this was wrong, regardless of a generally positive message from society.

Also, I've tried really hard to read your comment in a way that allows for the existence of guilt. I can't see it. Do you believe people can feel guilt? Why would C. S. Lewis feel sorrow, in the privacy of his own mind, to discover that he is the kind of person who would do…

Your summary of medieval Iceland displays your ignorance. Go read the article I linked and see Byock from UCLA if you will only crack open mainstream history. Byock supports the history just fails to recognize the polycentric and anarchist interpretation.

The point is that society functioned well and civil order, viz. not the chaos that "anarchy" is assumed, was maintained for longer than the US has existed. In the grand scale of history medieval Iceland succeeded almost 3x as long as the democracy you surely worship has been unquestioned as superior (just ~100 years now).

>Can you actually make a real case in teh real world that "government" in some for is not nesercery?

Let's gloss over that Lex Mercatoria why don't we. Yeah, I missed mentioning my #2 area of knowledge, Xeer customary law in Somalia. The quality of life there has improved vastly despite the UN insurgency (see proof in my past comments from CIA/World Bank stats).

Wait, I can just hear it now, "warlords". I'll spare myself the time responding to ignorant people like you and just drop one more link. Maybe one day I will be bestowed the honor to silence those who disagree and remain happy in my ignorance without reading.

http://daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/Legal_Systems_Very_Different_13/Book_Draft/Systems/SomaliLawChapter.html

I don't even feel like I take major part in IT industry. I just do my work, publish some research, contribute to some open-source projects etc. I may even get some great ideas at some point that will change something globally, but it is impossible to change the whole world for one men. Yet I follow HN and it is of value to me that other people create great things almost every day.

The same is true for Mars. I am almost sure I am not going into space in the next 50 years. Yet it is of value to me that someone goes into space or lives on Mars during my life. I would really like to see news from Mars, how people are doing there, what they invent to make their life better there etc.

Putting this into money is what Mars One [1] project proposes. They plan to raise money by putting their project on TV, because almost everyone would like to see how someone else is doing on Mars, even if not helping directly or participating in the project.

I think the original idea goes from chapter "Might have been" of the "Machinery of freedom" book [2]. There David Friedman proposed the same idea, just the goal is less ambitious: Mars is substituted for Moon.

[1] http://www.mars-one.com/

[2] http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf

There's at least one other survey that did the same trick - turned ~80% agreement in a big group into 97% in a minuscule subsample.

Additionally, John Cook - the guy who runs skepticalscience - did some studies claiming to find high agreement with "the consensus" among published papers about climate. But his paper were terrible, didn't show what he claimed they did, and were less relevant to your claim.

Here's a blogpost going into some issues with the Cook studies and the claims made for them:

http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/02/a-climate-falsehood-you-can-check-for.html

The difference between disagreeing with 80%-ish and 97% is largely of rhetorical importance. For propaganda purposes it feels like the difference between "a respectable minority view" and "a lunatic fringe". Alas, scientists almost never agree on ANYTHING to the 97% level. So if you hear that level claimed, the best bet is that somebody either fudged with the question - watering it down to such a degree that all the "skeptics" also agree - or fudged with the sample pool, making the surveyed group so tiny and self-selected as to exclude lots of legitimate scientists in related fields.