Comments on: The Machinery of Freedom

By: J Cortez

J Cortez — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 14:16:59 +0000

This is great news! Thank you!

By: Sam Grove

Sam Grove — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 13:57:11 +0000

Anyone wanting to read this book and find a free Kindle converter with a search that will convert from pdf to the appropriate format: search

By: Some Links

Some Links — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 17:58:29 +0000

[...] Steve Landsburg rightly celebrates David Friedman’s great – truly great – book, Th…. [...]

By: Dick White

Dick White — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:57:24 +0000

David Friedman is not and was not a racist; he would consider it too costly to be so. Good editing can improve a book (see Erik’s a “black person” example) but Friedman’s “black on the stool” syntax succinctly focuses the reader’s attention on what Friedman was illustrating. Besides, as the father of a black son whose lineage is not clearly from Africa, African-American is not helpful.

By: Bob

Bob — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 20:43:32 +0000

Eh. As “the Swede”, “the Jew” or the “African-American” wouldn’t raise an eyebrow, I wouldn’t ascribe any racist motivation. I’ll agree that in English as she is spoke today, black in the singular is generally used as an adjective, and that phrase is thus best adjusted. (Which is not particularly different from what Super-Fly was saying.)

By: EricK

EricK — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 16:05:25 +0000

“…the black on the stool…” really stood out to me too (far more than the others which seem basically OK). I doubt he would ever have referred to the owner of the restaurant as “the white”, which to me is pretty damning evidence of how he views (or perhaps viewed) minorities, and as such is more than just quasi-offensive. And note the problem isn’t a case of using one description (”black”) instead of a pc alternative (”African-American”?). Just changing “black” to “black customer” improves the sentence without using any silly politically correct terms

By: Super-Fly

Super-Fly — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 14:05:47 +0000

I’m not accusing David Friedman of being racist, and I certainly hate euphemisms and P.C. language as much as the next guy, but he might want to go through the book and kind of… “update” some of the language. There are parts where he says things like “the black on the stool of a restaurant” or “retarded children” or “Ghetto parent”.

I realize it’s all quasi-offensive (and I really hate growing level of euphemisms), but a lot of those phrases have a tendency to sort of “jump out” at people. Let’s get practical, if he’s trying to sell Libertarianism to people, it’s probably a good idea to “modernize” some of the language.

By: Fenn

Fenn — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 07:50:12 +0000

Michael— sorry, man. my mistake. the podcasts I remembered seeing arem’t of Machinery. there one of his fantasy novels.

By: Neil

Neil — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 01:14:45 +0000

@Steve: “There will be more of the Big Q type topics before long, I promise. Those generally take a little longer to write and I’m rather swamped with research and travel right now, which is why there have been fewer of them.”

Steve, that is simply not good enough! We expect you to drop your research and your travel and entertain us for free. Isn’t that what being a blogger means?

(As an economist, I still don’t understand the economics of blogging. Maybe you will enlighten us sometime.)

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 21:56:34 +0000

>for those who like audio— Friedman reads this book as a series of podcasts linked on his blog.

Fenn, do you have a link? I downloaded some of his podcasts, but didn’t see any MP3’s for The Machinery of Freedom.