The Machinery of Freedom

Friedman’s case for a society with no state at all, argued on consequentialist rather than rights-based grounds: he claims private institutions would do the state’s jobs better, and spends the book working out the mechanics. The central chapters describe competing private protection agencies and private courts, and how they would have incentives to settle disputes cheaply rather than fight; later chapters take on national defence, which he treats as the hardest unsolved problem for his own position, and draw on the medieval Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon legal systems as historical evidence that decentralised law can work. The author is an economist and the son of Milton Friedman; the book is deliberately short on moral assertion and long on institutional design.

Why it’s on the list: It opens McCord’s Anarcho-Capitalism section, ahead of Benson’s “The Enterprise of Law” and Rothbard’s “For a New Liberty” — the block where the curriculum pushes the limiting case, asking what is actually load-bearing about the state once you have read the arguments for it.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the Political Philosophy and the History of Ideas part, section Anarcho-Capitalism — a structured curriculum shared on X on March 9, 2026 and saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Books To Read”. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• Milton Friedman — the author’s father, whose more moderate case for markets this book pushes past.
• Government — the institution the book proposes to do without.
• Capitalism — the system whose radical form the subtitle names.
• Man, Economy, and State — Rothbard’s treatise, the Austrian foundation for the same section of McCord’s list.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.