David Friedman on How to Privatize Everything

"Producing laws is not an easier problem than producing cars or food," says David Friedman, author, philosopher, and professor at Santa Clara University. "So if the government's incompetent to produce cars or food, why do you expect it to do a good job producing the legal system within which you are then going to produce the cars and the food?"

Friedman sat down to talk with Reason TV at Libertopia 2012 in San Diego. Friedman reflected on the impact of his landmark book, The Machinery of Freedom, discussed the differences between libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism and revealed what his father, economist Milton Friedman, thought of his anarchist leanings.

Approximately 7 minutes. Interview by Paul Feine. Camera by Alex Manning and Zach Weissmueller. Edited by Weissmueller.

source: ReasonTV YouTube channel

(see video at the bottom of transcript)

transcript:

Paul Feine - Reason TV

I'm a Paul Feine for Reason TV. We’re here with Libertopia, San Diego, California and we’ll be talking with David Friedman, a scholar, a professor at Santa Clara University Law School, an economist, author and novelist and of course the son of the famous Milton Friedman. Welcome.

David Friedman

Thank you.

Paul Feine - Reason TV

You’ve probably been asked this at least ten thousand times in the past .. in a, I guess 40 years of your life, what is anarcho-capitalism? And hove do you differentiate between this version of anarchism or anarchy, and other say more leftist conceptions.

David Friedman

The term anarchy gets used by variety of different people in different ways, but I would said that for the ones who I would say are really anarchists on the left, the real problem is what economists call the problem of coordination - That you have a society with many millions of people, doing anything requires the cooperation of a large number of those people …someone has to harvest the food, turn this food to the cereal, deliver it to you, get the milk, etc., etc.  And how do you coordinate them!?
The anarcho capitalism version is, you just expand the way we normally coordinate things a little bit farther to include the things government now does so that you have in effect law and law enforcement, dispute arbitration and such, produced on the market the same way cars and food are, that it seems to me is much more believable story than to say that somewhere, somehow people in unexplained way will coordinate activities to produce everything right.

Paul Feine - Reason TV

Oftentimes libertarians will talk to another anarcho-capitalists and they will “butt-heads” and such. What to your mind is sort of the difference between the a sort libertarian conception of the ways that society would work and anarcho-capitalist?

David Friedman

Well I'd say that anarcho-capitalism is a one form of libertarianism, that we sometimes distinguish anarchists from minarchists, meaning people who do not want a lot of government, but some. And the fundamental problem with minarchist position, I think, and this was the I started talk today is that they believe that the government is incompetent to produce food and cars and housing and stuff, and therefore that the proper way to run the society as by private property and trade trade under the framework of laws that make it all possible; but they’re then relying on the government to produce that framework of laws.  Producing laws is not an easier problem than producing car or food. So if the government is incompetent of doing a good job producing cars and food, why do you expect it to do a good job with the production of the legal system, within which you are then gonna produce cars and food?

Paul Feine - Reason TV

What did your father think about sort of your anarchist leanings?

David Friedman

I think, basically, that his view was that institutions I described might work, but that probably wouldn’t; and my view is that they might not work but probably wouldn’t  (or would??)... so it wasn’t very sharp disagreement.

Paul Feine - Reason TV

Can you point at a particular era or time in history and place that you would have some sort of approximation of anarcho-capitalist regime? Or are there indication for the emergence of such institutions today?

David Friedman

Elements of it have existed in many societies, uh.. I don’t know of full-blown version, one of the societies that I discuss in the book, in the second edition, is a "saga-period" Iceland (Medieval Iceland). That was society in which there was a legal system, there was a system of courts, both of which are state, so to speak, but there was no executive arm of government. So once you got your verdict you head to enforce it and that was an example of what I would describe as “feud system”. Feud system is basically a decentralized rights enforcement system, where the sort of simple version of feud system is you do something bad to me, I threaten to use violence against you and society is so organized that the threat alone is much more effective if you really did do something wrong than if you didn’t.

Elements of this exist today, just think about things like patent fights going on in the high-tech world today, it's kind of fiefdom where I’m not going to attack you with guns, I'll attack you with the lawyers... or in a sense what holding you back from attacking me is the fact that I will attack you if you do… Uh, there is a very interesting book by Robert Ellickson, who was Yale law professor called "Order Without Law," which describes in modern day America, a few hours from where I live, an area in which part of the legal code ignores the laws of California, which is based on local community norms and they are really enforced by private action, so I think features of what I described exists in lots of contexts but I do not think the full-blown version existed anywhere.

Paul Feine - Reason TV

What seems to me the most interesting part of this legal system based on restitution is that sort of magically victimless crimes disappear. Is that attractive aspect of it, what would you think about that?

David Friedman

Much of restitution is the essential feature because you can imagine that in the anarcho-capitalism system there could be some crime for which there would not be practical for people to pay damages and you would therefore have to execute or lock them up etc. It is unlikely that I would be willing to pay as much to keep you from using drugs as you will be willing to pay to be able to use drugs, if you want to and did all for all the other victimless crimes - Therefore, it would be surprising though not impossible, if such a market generated such laws. But it could... If you imagine that the people feelings are strong enough. So I like to say that anarcho-capitalism is not by definition a libertarian. That anarcho-capitalism as libertarianism, is prediction, not a definition.

Paul Feine - Reason TV

The last question I have for you, you have been in this movement for a long time, libertarian ideas are in one dimension much more popular than ever before and many young people are being turned on by these ideas, Ron Paul is became a hero to many people, your father is became a hero to many more people every year, it seems - at the same time our government is in trouble, Europe is in trouble, are you optimistic about the future? What do you make of current trends?

David Friedman

I think that usually everything is going in both directions, that things are getting better in some ways and worse in others, is the usual pattern. A really big positive trend, I think, is China and India. Not that they are very libertarian, but that they are much more freer market than they were a 30-40 years ago and as a result are become much richer. I think that most people can see the writing on the wall for that. So that The story, that was widely accepted in nineteen sixties, which is that the only way poor countries are going to get richer is to have a strong, central government, central planning and preferably lots of foreign aid – is much less believable now than it was than.

A good part about things like current European problems is that government’s running out of money, and when the government runs out of money some are willing to consider selling off government firms and becoming more private, that might happen, one can hope.

But it might go the other way. I think that it would be disaster if Europe become one country, which is another direction in which things are pushing towards with EU problems. I think competition is a good thing for countries. I think probably the U.S. is too big and that it might be better off if we were 8 or 10 different countries, assuming we had a reasonable degree of free trade and weren’t fighting each other.

And similarly I think one of the virtues of Europe at the moment is that to a certain extent the EU countries are competing with each other.

Paul Feine - Reason TV

Thank you very much David. For Reason TV, I am a Paul Feine.