Aeon,

But is the standard being employed here “Which President did the least damage,” or “Which President did the least damage in proportion to the damage he could have inflicted if he’d had a mind to?” Because if it’s the relative standard rather than the absolute standard, then it seems like the Cold War Presidents are the obvious winners. After all, any one of them could have incinerated most of the world’s population by authorizing a full-scale nuclear war, if he’d had a mind to. But none of them did, in the end. Can’t say that makes me too enthusiastic about the “winners,” though.

Sure, but the whole enterprise comes off a bit like “What’s the best method of public execution to be killed by?” If I had to be executed, and they gave me the choice, I suppose I would probably choose a well-sharpened guillotine over hanging, firing squad, electric chair, lethal injection, gas chamber, burning at the stake, crucifixion, etc. But it seems silly or even morbid to dignify the enterprise with time, attention, or the title of finding the “best” way to get yourself killed.

Dave_D:

If it were up to me I would legalize, regulate and tax all drugs.

I was right with you up until “regulate and tax.”

Why the hell would you bollix up a good thing like repeal by turning around and re-instituting prohibition against any recreational drug-dealers or drug-users who haven’t (1) paid tribute to the federal government or (2) properly begged the FDA for a permission slip?

Mainardi,

If you say so. I’m actually more sympathetic to Rothbard’s appraoch than to Friedman’s, and more a fan of Lysander Spooner than I am of Rothbard. But whatevs.

It’s good of you to acknowledge your error.

Mainardi,

Again, if you don’t know that he’s an anarchist then you haven’t read (or don’t remember) enough of “what he writes” to make an informed judgment about him or his work.

In The Machinery of Freedom he declares himself an anarchist on the first page of the introduction (“I hold that there are no proper functions of government. In that sense I am an anarchist. All things that governments do can be divided into two categories—those we could do away with today and those we hope to be able to do away with tomorrow.”) You might also consult Part III, “Anarchy is Not Chaos,” in which he spends over 50 pages (about a quarter of the length of the book) on the topic.

Reasonable people admit when they do not know enough about someone to tell whether somebody’s ill-conceived argument makes (say) a surprisingly boneheaded gaffe, or whether it’s indicative of being a moron, or whether it’s indicative of some other trait. What you have been doing, on the other hand, is pure bullshitting on the basis of clearly inadequate knowledge.

Lopez,

I can’t see where I complained about name-calling as such.

What I’m saying is that Mainardi evidently does not know enough about Friedman’s work to have any idea whether he is a “moron” or not. If you don’t know enough about Friedman to recall that he is an anarchist, then you don’t know what you’re talking about when it comes to David Friedman or his work. That’s not a problem, but turning around and talking about him when you have no idea what you’re talking about, is.

My complaint has to do not with name-calling, but with loud-mouthed ignorance.

Hellen,

I didn’t claim that The Machinery of Freedom “touches the more profound question of rights theory.” Nor did I deny that Friedman takes a utilitarian rather than a natural rights approach to the question.

What I did say is that Friedman is an anarchist, not a minarchist, and that his most famous work is a detailed explanation and defense of the institutional-economic structure of an anarcho-capitalist society, especially (“Anarchy Is Not Chaos”), which directly and explicitly defends stateless institutions over so-called “limited government.”

Whether it is a good book or a bad book or a book that’s good at some things and bad at others, it is clearly not a book by “a soft-core, utilitarian minarchist with not enough guts to take his premises to their logical conclusion, i.e. anarchism.” There’s nothing wrong with being ignorant about a particular writer’s work; but there is something wrong with loudly proclaiming baseless opinions about it when you don’t know what you’re talking about. That was a stupid mistake, and you ought to be embarrassed that you made it.

Whether Friedman is a moron or not depends on what he’s capable of, not on whether one quotation does or does not make a boneheaded mistake. You know something about the one quotation, but you apparently know very little about anything else that David Friedman has ever written. You can hardly expect your judgments about his capabilities to be taken seriously when you have no basis for knowing what you are talking about.

Hellen Mainardi:

Until now, I thought him to be a soft-core, utilitarian minarchist with not enough guts to take his premises to their logical conclusion, i.e. anarchism.

David Friedman is an anarchist. He is very well known as such. His most famous book, The Machinery of Freedom, is one of the first and most detailed works on the economic / institutional structure of an anarcho-capitalist society. In point of fact, if there is one thing that David Friedman is known for amongst libertarians, it is being an anarcho-capitalist.

I think that Friedman’s complaints against the use of “statist,” “collectivist,” etc. are silly and should have been thought through more carefully. But he’s certainly nothing like a “moron,” and in any case it seems that you have not paid enough attention to even the most basic facts about his views or his work for you to comment intelligently on what he is or is not capable of.

Eric,

I don’t see how the case of powerful drugs is any different from the case of other things that can be dangerous to others when used irresponsibly, such as whiskey, automobiles, rifles, tasers, kitchen knives, gasoline, chlorine bleach, or propane grills.

If you handle a potential danger irresponsibly, and somebody gets hurt, then the victim gains an enforceable right to collect damages as compensation for your negligence. That’s a good reason for people to set up courts to do objective fact-finding and make judgments on allegations of negligence. It is no reason at all to create, or to support, a regulatory state that imposes blanket prohibitions and jails anyone who so much as possesses some item that could possibly increase (to some unspecified degree) the likelihood that you’ll harm some unspecified third parties if you happen to use it without taking proper precautions.

Just so we’re clear, what do you suggest having the government do to people who have, say, a dose of PCP in their possession?

If they want someone really prominent for the 2008 presidential race, maybe they could drop Bob Barr to the VP slot, and instead nominate the exhumed corpse of Augusto Pinochet.

Minor disagreements aside, he does have lots of name recognition. Plus I hear he’s for privatizing Social Security.

Personally, I like “anarchism.”

If someone needs to know the details, I refer them to my blog.