Comments Elsewhere

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.