“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.”
This spicy little sentence is typical of the zingers littered throughout David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom. The anarchocapitalist classic turns 50 this year, and it’s worth revisiting for both its spirit and substance.
The book has a chaotic energy. Just a few pages after the epigraph—which pairs a moderately profane joke by Lenny Bruce with a verse from “libertarian troubadour” and future U.S. congressman Dana
