The Machinery of Freedom

...Like theirs, his approach to politics is abstract and entirely separate from the realities of political life...

...The basis of his political philosophy is that "people should be permitted to run their own lives as they wish...

...Neither would the liberal arts...

...Within this new knowledge supermarket, a teacher's salary would bepaid directly to students and therefore his income would depend primarily on how many students wanted to take his courses...

...These "rights" give "any child above some very low age (say, nine years old)" the opportunity to exercise all the options of libertarian society, including getting a job or, presumably, if his playmates persuade him to do so, becoming a drug addict...

...Clearly, theft of what is recognized by others as "property" is wrong...

...Given these objections, Friedman would probably fall back on his favorite rejoinder: He didn't sign the Constitution and therefore doesn't owe anybody anything...

...Great teachers must necessarily be great scholars or thinkers...

...Do the parents have the right to endanger others by allowing their child to spread infection...

...It is amusing to dwell on Fried-man's more spectacularly unworkable schemes to "sell the state...

...It is no doubt true that colleges and universities in a free society are to a large extent based on "consumer sovereignty...

...Even if anarcho-capitalism as Friedman envisions it were desirable, it would not be possible...

...Friedman's very workable plan for "a free market university" is an ideal example of the limits of consumer sovereignty...

...At the very least, it involves simple gratitude (call it patriotism, if you like) for all of the benefits conferred on the individual by the community, Why does each person "owe" payment for every safety pin he uses but nothing for all the achievements of previous generations of fellowcitizens, e.g., language, law, custom, culture, and so on...

...their "greatness" consists of some activity that is worthy in itself, something beyond the mere "satisfaction of consumers...

...But because Friedman is an anarcho-capitalist, he doesn't stop there...

...While the search for justice has occupied civilized men at all places and times, the word is barely mentioned in The Machinery of Freedom...

...Different court systems would have to be compared and one privately owned system of justice purchased...

...He doesn't deal with the minimum requirements of social order, the differences between men, and above all their similarities, i.e., their common human nature...

...Unlike the Founders, he believes that men as well as angels can live without government...

...Recognition of the principle of consumer sovereignty does not equal total commitment to it...

...Arrangements for police protection would have to be made by each citizen...

...He claims to have found a "simple" solution in "the rights of youth...

...The Folly of Pure Libertarianism Property rights and consumer sovereignty, as we see, have shortcomings as principles for organizing or understanding political society...

...This peculiar version of the "social contract" is the closest thing we can find to a source of Friedman's views...

...It is intriguing to consider the effects of education on the "please us or else" plan...

...His ethical imperatives have no basis in the real world...

...The Limits of Private Property A difficulty related to Friedman's adherence to consumer sovereignty as the supreme principle of human action is his faith that private property is the necessary basis of human society...

...This way of looking at politics provides a sufficient method of dealing with many conflicts between individuals...

...There'd also be the risky business of buying food and drugs...

...Does anyone have a "right" to interfere if his parents find medical care morally objectionable or too expensive...

...But there is really not much to be gained from contemplating such inconveniences of libertarian life as the futillity of yelling cop in a world of private protection agencies, or its more severe dangers—for instance, the insecurity of a nation guarded by a voluntarily funded and voluntarily staffed defense establishment...

...If Friedman thinks there is anything automatic about the prerequisites of political freedom, I refer him to his admitted hero Adam Smith, who expressed deep concern that all the "intellectual, social and martial virtues" would disappear from the laboring poor in advanced societies "unless government takes some pains to prevent it...

...Friedman does, it must be admitted, take a stab at this problem...

...Despite his assertions to the contrary, anarchy is chaos...

...It seems that the author of The Machinery of Freedom found out one day that non-pasteurized milk is illegal in Illinois and the injustice of this so overwhelmed him that he wants to do us the great favor of getting the Food and Drug Administration out of our lives...

...Even more important are those shared values that prevent and resolve conflicts between fellow citizens...

...He is not arguing solely that we would benefit if the FDA set less stringent safety standards, though he does make that point...

...It shares much with the work of minor social contract theorists such as John Rawls, on the Left, and one of Friedman's favorites, anarchist Lysander Spooner...

...The equality of "wants" is the one type of equality of which Friedman is very tolerant...

...Unfortunately, it also contributes to the illusion that political freedom is something easily maintained...

...beginning of his discussion of "Adam Smith U.," as he calls it, Friedman expresses a heartfelt sympathy with New Left critics of the modern American University...

...Indeed, considering how much time everyone must spend shopping for his necessities, it's difficult to determine when there would be time to produce them...

...Political and philosophic truths, whatever they may be, are more difficult to discern than what constitutes a "better mousetrap" and the search for that truth is not necessarily best guided by the market, i.e., the desires of a consumer no matter how ignorant...

...The subtitle of Friedman's book, Guide to a Radical Capitalism, reflects its contents much more accurately...

...What would life be like in Friedman's dream society...

...This omission is no doubt intentional...

...How do property rights protect their offspring...

...The goal of the political program he sets forth is to have private enterprise absorb all of the functions currently performed by the state, and to have the market thus maximize everyone's happiness by giving them "what they want...

...It is important not to miss Friedman's point here...

...But justice is much more than "social justice," and the public good is more than an economic concept...

...Though there would be no bridge inspectors in Friedmanonia, students would learn to "hire" competent engineering professors or suffer the economic consequences of building bridges that don't stand...

...The Machinery of Freedom, however, is no mere endorsement of the wisdom of James Madison...

...Suppose a parent values his automobile so much more than his child that he arranges with his protection agency to have a car thief followed and captured but not a kidnapper...

...Nevertheless, they demonstrate clearly enough that despite the way the separation of "human rights" and "property rights" has been used to debase the public discourse, a distinction between the rights of property and the human ends they serve is necessary for any intelligent political judgments to be possible...

...Unfortunately, even if one accepts the assertion that a ten-year-old is capable of running his own life, Friedman doesn't explain who is to take responsibility for younger children...

...That is why so many people find Friedman's views "peculiar" (as he puts it...

...Naturally this is all contingent on whether the owner of the streets between his home, the chemist's, and the butcher shop sees fit to let him pass, something Friedman never doubts...

...Robert McTiernan...

...One thing is sure: we'd all be very busy...

...If history teaches any lesson about freedom, it is that the stability of any liberal political order always rests on the stability of other nonpolitical or subpolitical institutions...

...What is the source of this rare agreement...

...The notion that the institutions of private property and a free enterprise economy are the essential bases of political freedom, is certainly not a new one...

...The "machinery of freedom" referred to in the title is, of course, the capitalist system...

...Nevertheless, within any discipline, education must always be based on a hierarchical principle, authority rather than choice...

...Fortunately, some disciplines have built-in protection from this proclaimed "renaissance" in education...

...The individual's capacity to choose wisely is not discussed, presumably because a moron can "want" as well as any philosopher...

...Within a college each student can choose among different courses of study...

...Political liberty, to quote no less a friend of human freedom than Lord Acton, is rather "the delicate fruit of a mature civilization...

...Its purpose is to persuade us of the superiority of a libertarian society and to explain how it could be achieved and how it would operate...

...Since procreation does not require any economic obligation to any other person, are children simply property like a refrigerator or a house...

...They don't even touch on the equally grave and more difficult problem of the degree of parental autonomy over a child's education and moral rearing...

...How things become property, how they acquire this necessary public recognition is not dealt with...

...These simple examples demonstrate merely the most basic problem of preserving the lives of future citizens and protecting the community...

...At best, this failure leads to political proposals that the ordinary citizen would find unconscionable...

...Unfortunately, their first customers wouldn't have the advantage of any such built-in protection...

...Education is supposed to free a student from his narrow opinions and predispositions...

...The implication is that the market price of everything is always the just price and that the "deserving poor" merit nothing but their poverty...

...from Friedman's silence we must infer that "to do justice" is merely to impose the will of one group on another...

...Like many contemporary liberals and conservatives, he is opposed to military conscription and laws banning drug use, gambling, pornography, and other "victimless" crimes...

...The Limits of Consumer Sovereignty Focusing on the limits of consumer sovereignty is certainly not a plea for John Kenneth Galbraith's point of view...

...Libertarians in general, and anarchists in particular, find that children are a real nuisance when it comes to discussing "rights...

...Friedman's law is "taxation is theft...

...We must resist the temptation to wander deeper and deeper into the mad world conjured up in The Machinery of Freedom...

...But this deification of property does lead to some bizarre conclusions...

...Friedman never asks why these freedoms are valuable or what ends they are supposed to serve, They are simply procedural guides, and therefore inadequate as principles of justice...

...For David Friedmanis no old-fashioned Whig, but rather a modern libertarian...

...for instance, going after your neighbor with an axe would constitute about the same type (if not the same magnitude) of offense as chopping down his cherry tree on the sly...

...There are even more disturbing consequences, and not the least of these arise from the existence of children...

...Although we are told that there are no such things as "needs," only "wants" that are valued differently by different individuals, a child might "need" an inoculation to spare him from some contagious disease...

...According to the author of The Machinery of Freedom it is the shared goal of getting educational institutions to "produce what the consumer wants," and his main intention is to demonstrate that the market is a more effective means of doing so than the democratic system...

...Still, whatever the basis of this new freedom, on the way home from buying some laws a member of Fried-man's society would be well-advised to have the sausage he bought examined by the local free-enterprise chemist...

...Each of them is like a separate, tiny puzzle that gives the solver, i.e., the finder of the flaw, a curious sense of satisfaction...

...We must look instead to its real value, that is, the way it demonstrates the limits of the author's supreme principles: consumer sovereignty and private property...

...Students can apply to and attend a variety of institutions, many of which are free to choose the type of education they will provide...

...One doesn't have to believe that Americans are the unwitting tools of Madison Avenue to recognize that even within a liberal society some essential institutions must be exempted from the fundamental liberal axiom, the equal right of every individual to choose his course of action...

...Fried-man's libertarian society is possible only to the extent that its members arealready citizens of the "land of steady habits...

...His enemy is not big, bad, or foolish government, but government itself...

...In keeping with this notion of private property rights, the individual regards his labor and even his personas "his property...

...The Federalist Papers show that the Founders hoped the "great variety of interests, parties and sects" which exist in a large, commercial republic would ensure that a "coalition' of a majority of a whole society could seldom take place on any other principles than those of justice and the general good...

...Rather, underlying this reform is the individual's "right" to swallow whatever he damn well pleases, be it aspirin or thalidomide...

...But education based strictly on supply and demand curves encourages the belief that he has the "right" to indulge them rather than the obligation to rise above them...

...Most libertarians themselves oppose these proposals and concede that common sense mandates at least a "nightwatchman" state...

...Obviously, in a state of anarchy, public property and public responsibility would be impossible...

...At the...

...In his view, nearly everything is a form of private property...

...In the first place, "social justice" deserves consideration and not contempt...

...First of all, each person would have to decide which "laws" he wants to live under...

...Its inventor's purpose seems to be the encouragement of intellectual fadism and sycophantic professors...

...Still, the author owes us some explanation...

...The prospects for philosophy and political science at Adam Smith U. are especially distressing...

...The public philosophy of a libertarian society would necessarily undermine tradition, religion, education, and the abiding faith in the justice of the community, even though these are the roots of the qualities so necessary for that society's survival...

...They tend to avoid the direct question: Do parents own their children...

...This setup, despite its shortcomings, seems to have provided a lot of people with a decent education and fulfilled the nation's need for citizens with a wide variety of skills...

...This tension is rooted in another conflict: one between the consumer, who chooses between alternatives and therefore must be a knower, and the student who is by definition a learner...