The machinery of freedom

What Hacker News says

1. slopinthebagJun 2026
   I find this comment a bit odd. There is a ton of literature on the topic, as well as lively debate online. I would recommend both The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman and Michael Huemer’s The Problem of Political Authority (specifically pt 2) as great readings on the topic.

   If one judges any idea by the average discourse on internet forums, especially throwaway comments, and trolling, no idea would ever stand up to scrutiny.

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2. pdonisMay 2026
   > until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all

   Here's the problem: you can't.

   First, people have disagreements, often very fundamental ones, over what "benefits us all". There's no way to resolve many such disagreements short of brute force.

   Second, "enforce"--note the last five letters of that word--means some people are given the power to do things to other people that, if anyone else did them, would be crimes. Throw you in jail, fine you, restrict the things you can do. Indeed, that's how David Friedman, whose "The Machinery of Freedom" is worth reading, defines a government. And the problem is that government still has to be done by humans, and humans can't be trusted with the power to do such things.

   Ultimately the only defense we have is to not give other people such power. Not governments, not tech giants, nobody. But that requires a degree of foresight that most people don't have, or don't want to take the time to exercise, particularly not if something juicy is in front of them. How many people back when Facebook first started would have been willing to simply not use it--because they foresaw that in a couple of decades, Facebook would become a huge monster that nobody knows how to rein in? If my own personal circle is any guide, the answer is "not enough to matter"--of all the people I know, I am the only one who does not use Facebook and never has. And even I didn't refuse to use it back when it first started because I saw what things would be like today--I just had an instinctive reaction against it and listened to that reaction, and then watched the trainwreck slowly develop over the years since.

   So we're stuck. Even if we end up deciding that, for example, the government will break up the tech giants, slap huge fines on Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc., maybe confiscate a bunch of their property, maybe even make them do a bunch of community service, possibly even some of them serve some jail time--it will still be just other humans doing things to them that no humans can be trusted to do. It won't fix the root problem. It will just kick the can down the road a little longer.

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3. ursuscampJun 2024
   I emailed him about his book Machinery of Freedom in my 20s (15+ years ago) and he was willing to engage in good faith debate with a complete nobody on the internet who emailed him out of the blue. He was not remotely pretentious or insufferable.
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4. hiAndrewQuinnJun 2024
   An extreme example indeed, and a heinous one, which is probably why contact killings are so rare and so expensive. My key operating words of "on average" and "over the long term" are in full effect here.

   I direct interested readers to David Friedman's _The Machinery of Freedom_ for some worked examples of how capitalism might minimize such actions from taking place.

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5. a_gnosticMar 2024
   David D. Friedman's solution seems pretty good.

   http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf

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6. jostylrNov 2022
   A book that made the idea of a lack of government believable and appealing to me is David Friedman's Machinery of Freedom. He presents a flushed out vision of a withered state and it is the anarcho-capitalist version of anarchy, the only version which I feel is realizable without force-based coercion.

   The idea is to envision a society which is stable, but has no government and yet not perfect people. There can still be theft, violence, laziness, polarizing differences of opinion, etc. but the society thrives despite the absence of a government and nimbly handles these problems. He presents a vision of how it could work. It is not a prescription since it is impossible to prescribe an anarchic society as there is nothing to prescribe to. The criminal justice system becomes a bunch of competing rights organizations, similar to competing insurance companies. It allows for economic evolution of laws as everyone can choose what kind of system they want to be governed by and conflicts of competing legal systems get negotiated and arbitrated. One can choose not to be governed by any laws, but if that individual comes into conflict with others, then there is no one to defend them. They are not automatically cast out for not being part of anything.

   Most other anarchic systems seem to assume unity of purpose, a good work ethic, a lack of criminality, and an inability to fundamentally dissent from what the larger group wants. They often get presented as more of a direct democratic government that everyone belongs to while Friedman's approach is literally a lack of any coercive government. There is no governing body that all must yield to, including the collective. The fundamental transactions between people are voluntary and coercion to produce societal needs is both unnecessary and rejected. I find it to be a believable society with the people we have.

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