The Machinery of Freedom [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

The Machinery of Freedom [pdf]

daviddfriedman.com

36 pointsmhb22 comments

This book was extremely influential on me during my formative years.

I have flipped to four sections which looked interesting and found them all totally unconvincing. The author doesn't so much explore topics as expound on them, with an ideological bent that fails to question itself adequately.

E.g. the premise of the (bluntly opinionated) "Sell the Schools" - the post office is declining because it's a government monopoly? Are you sure sir?

I also found the Post Office stuff a bit bizarre. It isn't clear to me why people are so obsessed with the Post Office. I mean, I thought the Post Office hate was recent, but this book is from 50 years ago! Do they also hate libraries for competing with book stores? It seems to be a foreign concept to some that not all useful services are naturally profitable enterprises without augmenting them in some way that negatively affects their service.

> The author doesn't so much explore topics as expound on them, with an ideological bent that fails to question itself adequately.

I agree with this, and you said it well. The author, including in his more recent writings, seems to have some rather deep-set biases and ideologies but, at least to me, appears to wrap it up with what is presented as honest philosophical and economic "explorations".

Firefox says this file is offered at an https URL but delivered via HTTP, and is thus a security risk.

Host should correct misconfiguration.

Society is composed of lots of little tribes (each a few 10s or 100s of thousands of people).They have different values, they see the world in different ways. The real power of the internet over the last 30 years is it is now all but impossible for a tribe not to get its message out there if it cares to. I like to point to the fact that people are now able to compare commercial media narratives to what the people involved actually said. It was always obvious that there was a gap, but the size of that gap was much bigger than most people realised. The consensus of opinion was always an illusion.

People can fight it as much as they like, but the libertarian answer of promoting freedom and equalising power between those tribes is the strategy that will lead to the best outcomes for most people. A state isn't populated by a homogeneous group of people and we have to tolerate real diversity of opinion. It is the classic Stallman situation - the people advocating for more freedom usually turn out to be better at getting sustainable outcomes.

The size of the tribe is critical.. i believe one of the reasons the US has lasted for so long is the distributed nature of power. I also believe one of the major issues we face today is we continue to consolidate that power into a central federal government with unlimited power.

I haven't heard of David Friedman before, or at least I don't think I have, but after reading the preface and a few other pieces about him, including his own words, I get the feeling that he is ... controversial, to say the least, or at least I hope so.

I may read through more of this paper to at least entertain a perspective that at first appearances differs wildly from mine, but the bits I have read don't look good. In what case has unbridled capitalist markets ever solved anything, much less everything? Almost all of the issues plaguing the U.S. at the moment are due to private interests infiltrating government, policy, etc. Somehow, this author feels oppressed by the U.S. Post Office, of all things, but is perfectly happy privatizing all of life, including laws.

We can't talk about religion or Musk here, but this type of thing gets posted and upvoted. This author even appears to be a denier of global warming effects. In his own words:

> I don't think there is any good reason to expect AGW to produce bad effects on net, let alone catastrophic effects.

And isn't it strange that the most extreme capitalists and libertarians usually happen to be independently wealthy?

> Almost all of the issues plaguing the U.S. at the moment are due to private interests infiltrating government, policy, etc.

How could a good government exist that isn't controlled by private interests? The alternatives are either the government is run by interest groups external to the government, or it is run by the head of government (in which case it is a dictatorship and you have to deal with the likes of Xi Jinping that is much worse).

To come up with an alternative would be to invoke vague fuzzy principles that have never been observed in practice.

Suppose you had a government with better checks and balances than the one we have. More parties have a veto over new laws etc., and it is easier to repeal existing ones. The law against murder stays because ~100% of people want it; the laws against building new housing or repairing tractors are gone because >10% of people don't.

It then becomes more difficult for special interests to enact legislation not in the public interest because legislation only stays in effect when there is near consensus that it should.

>>he laws against building new housing or repairing tractors are gone because >10% of people don't.

I think it is a fallacy (one often made by supporters of democracy) to believe that 90% of people want X, with X being the thing the government refuses to do....

in this case housing... Sure lots of people claim to want more housing, claim to support more housing.. right up to the moment that new housing is going to be built in their backyard then they no longer desire that new housing... That housing should he build "somewhere else" ... in someone else's backyard...

NIMBY is a problem for all kinds of things and is not resolved with popularity, because most people do not want a Nuclear Reactor, Trash Dump, or "Affordable housing" in their neighborhood

They want nice expensive housing that will drive up their property values... I want Single Family homes on nice large lots...etc

> I think it is a fallacy (one often made by supporters of democracy) to believe that 90% of people want X, with X being the thing the government refuses to do....

No, no, it's not that 90% of people want more housing. It's that we'd have a form of government where, unless 90% of people want to prevent more housing, anybody can go build more housing. You'd need 90% support to pass a law (e.g. zoning regulations), 10% support to repeal it.

So you get all the laws everyone can agree on and none of the ones they can't.

> the laws against building new housing or repairing tractors are gone because >10% of people don't.

I'm having a hard time believing this. The evidence demonstrates that the complete opposite occurs - people reject almost all new housing projects because it would devalue their property. Imagine if more industries were subject to the same tendencies NIMBY property owners effectively use to veto housing projects by manipulating zoning procedure.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35116007

More than 10% of people don't want a law prohibiting new housing, therefore you can't pass a law against it and anybody who wants to can build it.

A law prohibiting new housing is different than groups fighting specific projects. For the most part people are fine with housing projects...as long as they are in someone else's neighborhood. That's how we end up with the vast majority of people being against a law prohibiting new housing and then also NIMBYing every new housing project.

This is where the checks and balances thing comes in. Maybe your local housing prohibition has to be approved at the state level. Which for most local ordinances is a rubber stamp, or just automatically happens if no one asks for a vote, because what do people in Oakland care about parking rules in San Diego? But if you're trying to NIMBY housing development, and a lot of people are against a law prohibiting new housing development, you can't have one.

That would be a government captured by the small-government interests. While that is the interest group I would want controlling government, it is still going to get attacked with the same template - some form of "all our problems stem from [private interests who are befitting from light regulation] infiltrating government.

"Infiltrating the government" generally implies having the government do something nefarious. If the government did hardly anything, there would be people who don't like that, but that's not really the same thing. The difference between someone infiltrating the government and someone impeding anyone else from infiltrating the government.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com