David D. Friedman > Quotes

“Producing laws is not an easier job than producing cars and food, so if the government is 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?”
― David D. Friedman

“Part of freedom is the right of each of us to go to hell in his own fashion.”
― David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism

“If almost everyone is in favor of feeding the hungry, the politician may find it in his interest to do so. But, under those circumstances, the politician is unnecessary: some kind soul will give the hungry man a meal anyway. If the great majority is against the hungry man, some kind soul among the minority still may feed him—the politician will not.”
― David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism

“Anarcho-capitalism is not by definition libertarian. It is rather a prediction, not a definition.”
― David D. Friedman

“Special interest politics is a simple game. A hundred people sit in a circle, each with his pocket full of pennies. A politician walks around the outside of the circle, taking a penny from each person. No one minds; who cares about a penny? When he has gotten all the way around the circle, the politician throws fifty cents down in front of one person, who is overjoyed at the unexpected windfall. The process is repeated, ending with a different person. After a hundred rounds everyone is a hundred cents poorer, fifty cents richer, and happy.”
― David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism

“But property rights are not the rights of property; they are the rights of humans with regard to property. They are a particular kind of human right.”
― David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism

“The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.”
― David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism

“The marketplace is not a battlefield where the person with the most money wins the battle and takes the whole prize;”
― David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism

“Pretending to others that your opponents are stupid may sometimes be a sensible tactic. Believing that they are is usually a serious mistake.”
― David D Friedman

“In eighteenth-century England a system of professional police and prosecutors, government paid and appointed, was viewed as potentially tyrannical—worse still, French.”
― David D. Friedman, Legal Systems Very Different from Ours

“Since the function of politics is to reduce the diversity of individual ends to a set of common ends (the ends of the majority, the dictator, the party in power, or whatever person or group is in effective control of the political institutions), public property imposes those common ends on the individual. “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask rather what you can do for your country.” Ask not, in other words, how you can pursue what you believe is good but how you can pursue what the government tells you is good.”
― David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism

“We live in a complicated and interdependent society; each of us is constantly affected by events thousands of miles away occurring to people he has never heard of. How, in such a society, can we meaningfully talk about each person being free to go his own way? The answer to this question lies in the concept of property rights.”
― David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism

“That illustrates my rule of thumb for reading history: View with suspicion any anecdote that makes a good enough story to have survived on its literary merits.”
― David D. Friedman, Legal Systems Very Different from Ours

“Successful revolutionaries do occasionally end up in positions of power, but they seem more likely, on the historical record, to end up dead, courtesy of their comrades. In any case, revolution has its own logic, and it is, like that of politics, a logic of power. So revolution, like politics, selects out for success those with the desire and ability to wield power.”
― David D Friedman

“I believe, as many say they believe, that everyone has the right to run his own life—to go to hell in his own fashion.”
― David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism

“Monopoly power exists only when a firm can control the prices charged by existing competitors and prevent the entry of new ones. The most effective way of doing so is by the use of government power. There are considerable elements of monopoly in our economy, but virtually all are produced by government and could not exist under institutions of complete private property.”
― David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism

“Property is a central economic institution of any society, and private property is the central institution of a free society.”
― David D. Friedman

“One cannot educate children without talking about issues on which religions differ. The pretense of a religiously neutral education, at least in the U.S., is maintained mainly by the tendency of teachers, like other people, to regard what they believe in as fact and only what other people believe in as religion. A government school system in a diverse society is thus deeply divisive, since it means that some people's children are being indoctrinated with other people's religion.”
― David D. Friedman

“From Ayn Rand to bushy anarchists there is an occasional agreement on means called libertarianism, which is a faith in laissez-faire politics/economics.... How to hate your government on principle.”
― David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism