David D. Friedman

This is the home page of David Friedman. Not the Hawaiian artist David Friedman, or the composer David Friedman, or the fix-what's-wrong-with- government David Friedman (050) or the fifteen year old David Friedman or the eighteen year old David Friedman or the legendary film pornographer David Friedman or even the economic journalist David Friedman but the anarchist-anachronist-economist David Friedman. ... My first novel, published by Baen, is historical fiction set in an invented historical background (or, if you prefer, fantasy without magic).

David Friedman, like his late father Milton Friedman, is both an academic economist and a popular intellectual with an unabashed libertarian orientation. However, there are important differences between the views embraced by the two men. Academically, David Friedman is best known for his largely theoretical work in the economic analysis of law and his textbook-level writings on microeconomics. Politically, he is an advocate of the radical libertarian position known as 'anarcho-capitalism,' arguing that even the limited functions of the night-watchman state (police, courts, law, and punishment) can and should be privately supplied.

David Friedman (b. 1945) is the leading advocate of life without any government interference. He's an amiable man, a formidable debater and a writer who's a pleasure to read. He earned his B.A. at Harvard University, his M.S. and Ph.D. (both in physics) at the University of Chicago. ... he currently teaches law and economics at Santa Clara Unviersity in California. He is best-known for The Machinery of Freedom: A Guide to Radical Capitalism, originally published as a Harper & Row mass market paperback in 1971 ... It's a charming yet rigorous classic on liberty which keeps coming back.

Friedman's other books include Price Theory: An Intermediate Text (1993), Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life (1996), Law's Order (2000), and his latest book Harald (2006). He has contributed chapters to 15 books including The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economic Theory and Doctrine (1987) and The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics (1993). His articles have appeared in American Economic Review, Bell Journal, History of Political Economy, International Review of Law and Economics, Journal of Economic Perspectives, The Journal of Law and Economics, ... and Liberty, among other publications.

David Friedman has elaborated another argument against government inference. "Market failure," [he] writes, applies to government itself in a more egregious form than it applies to the marketplace. And while the market has built-in corrective features, government does not ... Representative democracy, he says, has a perverse incentive—a free-rider problem—right at its core: the voting system ... Friedman generalizes to this conclusion: "... In private markets, most of the time, an individual who makes a decision bears most, although not all, of the resulting costs, and receives most of the resulting benefits ..."

David Friedman, in his book The Machinery of Freedom, notes that there are only three ways to get something: (1) by trading, (2) by receiving a gift (from love or friendship), or (3) by force ("do what I want or I'll shoot you"). Honest, peaceful people operate in the first two ways. Criminals and the state operate by force, aggression, coercion. The gentle invisible hand vs. the visible fist of force.

Government produces all order.
Under anarchy there is no government.
Therefore anarchy is chaos.
Q.E.D. ...

My life is chaos turned miraculous;
I speak a word and people understand
Although it must be gibberish since words
Are not produced by governmental plan.

Now law and order, on the other hand
The state provides us for the public good;
That's why there's instant justice on demand
And safety in every neighborhood.