The Machinery of Freedom/animated lecture

From CWRE
< The Machinery of Freedom
Revision as of 16:29, 23 December 2014 by Woozle (talk | contribs) (saving work)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Claims

  • The term "liberalism" was stolen by the enemies of liberalism; modern libertarians are the true liberals. (¶1)
  • 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)
    • 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.
  • (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): 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?
      • 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.
    • national defense (not covered)
  • It's okay for different sets of people/entities to operate under different sets of rules, because:
    • any rules applicable to any given interaction can be worked out and agreed to non-coercively via this method
    • rules will be more closely tailored to the needs of the people ruled by them (¶20)
  • Rules created by private negotiation will be better than those produced by government because private is better.
  • 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.

Pages

Links

Retrieved from "https://cwre.org/w/index.php?title=The_Machinery_of_Freedom/animated_lecture&oldid=279"