The Machinery of Freedom/animated lecture

Claims

• The term "liberalism" was stolen by the enemies of liberalism; modern libertarians are the true liberals. (¶1)
  • objection: Liberalism was about doing away with centralized control of markets; modern liberals are against that too -- they're just willing to admit that corporate control is just as bad as government control, and that well-designed government regulation can decrease centralization overall.
• Libertarianism (formerly called liberalism) is the philosophy that supports small government and free markets. (¶1)
• Libertarianism holds that the function of government is to do a few things that can't be done by individuals associating voluntarily in private markets: (¶2)
  • police
  • courts
  • national defense
• Where the same thing can be done either by government or privately, private is usually better. (¶3 ¶16 ¶23 ¶30)
  • Private markets produce better products than socialist systems do -- "we expect markets to produce better cars than socialist systems".
    • Objection: it's not clear what definition of "socialism" he's using here.
      • Europe (especially Sweden) is often called "socialist", but they produce pretty good cars.
  • objection: This ignores the fact that there are some things government does better and private organizations do worse. While it may be that the REA/AA scheme will in fact do better than government, we can't assume that this will be so just because "private is better".
    • response: For the most part, Friedman does support his conclusions with reasoning.
      • objection: It just needs to be understood that this reasoning is necessary. We can't just assume that the private organizations will do better than government because they are private organizations.
• (DF's main argument) The basic functions of government can be handled privately:
  • police (enforcing laws)
    • individuals hire private firms (rights enforcement agencies - REAs) to protect their rights and settle their disputes with other individual
      • objection (DF¶6): conflict between REAs
        • objection detail (DF¶7): REAs will use violence to settle their disputes
          • response (DF¶8): violence is expensive -- REAs are not likely to use it to settle conflicts because in the long term it's a losing proposition with uneven results
            • objection (W): What if an REA is unreasonable?
        • response (DF¶9¶13): REAs will hire arbitration agencies (AAs) to settle their disputes with other REAs
  • courts (making laws) - handled by arbitration agencies (AAs)
    • objection (DF¶11): who will enforce the use of AAs and adherence to their decisions?
      • response (DF¶11): the discipline of constant dealings
        • objection (W): ...which requires a highly stable, non-transient society -- which we don't have now, and which there is no reason to expect would be delivered by this system
    • objection (DF¶17,W): What if two REAs can't agree on an arbiter? (e.g. what if one REA's customers prefer a death penalty, while another REA's customers are opposed?)
      • response (DF¶18): an argument that has something to do with raising prices in response to demand and/or buying the acquiescence of the other and/or its customers. This doesn't really answer the question.
        • objection (W): To the extent that the argument is relevant, however, it seems to depend on everyone having similar amounts of money -- otherwise a view can prevail because of the holder's wealth rather than the degree of their conviction that they are right.
  • national defense (not covered; conceded that privatizing this is an easier problem to solve)
• objection (DF(¶13): Under this system, different sets of people/entities will operate under different sets of rules. Isn't that unfair?
  • response (DF(¶13)): Actually it's an improvement, because:
    • we already live under a system where rules vary (by state, munucipality, etc). (¶13)
    • any rules needed for any given interaction can be worked out non-coercively via this method (¶15)
    • rules will be more closely tailored to the needs of the people ruled by them -- people will only get the rules they want (¶20)

Pages

• /transcription: a complete transcription of the lecture in the video

Links

• The Machinery Of Freedom: Illustrated summary: the video