 In the 19th century, the political philosophy that supported small government and free markets was called liberalism. Unfortunately, between then and now, the enemies of liberalism succeeded in stealing its name, which is why people with similar views nowadays usually call themselves libertarians. The classical liberal, the 19th century liberal position, was that the function of government was to do a few things that couldn't be done by individuals on the private market by voluntary association, and those were traditionally listed as police, courts, and national defense. And I got interested, I suppose, when I was in my late teens, in whether you could push the idea of free markets and voluntary association even farther than that, whether it would be possible to have a society which was organized by private property, trade, voluntary exchange, that set of ideas, but in which there was no government, in which all of the useful things government does, because government does some useful as well as some useless things, were done in other ways. And it's an attractive idea because we have quite a lot of reasons to believe that where the same thing can be done either by government or privately, governments usually do it worse, and government doing things usually involves greater restrictions on individual freedom because when the government offers you a deal, you don't get to turn it down, whereas when someone in the private market offers you a deal, you do. So it seemed to me interesting to figure out whether you could construct a plausible set of institutions in which the basic police court's defense function were being done privately instead. I started writing about the subject and eventually wrote my first book, Machinery of Freedom, which was published now almost 40 years ago. Since writing that, I've learned more about historical legal systems that have existed and seen some that had some of the features that I had created for my imaginary system, but I didn't know that at the time. Some of that showed up in the second edition of my book and more will probably in the third edition. So how could you have a society in which the fundamental functions were produced privately rather than by government? And let me start with what in some sense is the most fundamental ones, namely making enforcing laws, what we would think of loosely speaking as the job of police and courts. National offenses are a somewhat different kind of problem and I will say a little bit about that later. So I want to imagine a society where individuals hire private firms to protect their rights and settle their disputes with other individuals. The same way we hire a private firm to ensure us against auto accidents, for example. So I pay some annual sum to one of a variety of different firms, each of which sells the service of making sure as best it can that I don't get robbed or murdered and that if I ever dispute with somebody else it gets settled in some reasonable and peaceful way. And there is an obvious problem with that system, one which occurs in 30 seconds or so to everybody who sees it described and most of them stop after those 30 seconds and they say well that's why it won't work and that finishes it. And the problem is conflict between rights enforcement agencies. So we will imagine that I'm the customer of one rights enforcement agency, you're the customer of another. One day I come home and I find my television set is missing, I call up my rights enforcement agency, I also notice that the door has been broken open. They prudently had installed a little video camera in my living room to try to monitor anybody who stole things from me and that camera shows a picture of you walking out my door with my television or at least they're pretty sure it's you. So my agency gets in touch with you and says would you please give our customer Mr. Friedman his television back and by the way you owe us $50 for our time and trouble in locating you and recovering his television set. And your reply is what television set? It's true I have a nice television set but I bought that from a friend of mine, I've never heard of Mr. Friedman, I've never robbed him, go away. Well my agency says well if you really feel like that, if you're not willing to discuss this matter in a reasonable fashion, we could send three or four big tough guys over to your front door tomorrow morning to carry out the television set with or without your permission. And you reply, ah, but if you do that I too have a rights enforcement agency and they will send five or six big tough guys to keep you from taking what I claim as my television set. And so people say we've set up a situation for a permanently violent society in which my agency and your agency and his agency are always fighting each other over the claims of our customers. And I think that's the wrong answer. I don't think that's at all likely to happen. And the reason it isn't likely to happen is that violence is expensive. That fighting people as a way of settling disputes first gives you very uneven results. There's no guarantee the guy who's in the right will win, though we'd like to believe there is. But more than that, it means people get hurt, they may get killed, houses get smashed, you've got to pay hazard pay to your big tough guys who work for you and so forth. There ought to be a better solution. And the obvious better solution in this case is arbitration. So that my agency says to your agency, look, we don't want to get into a fight with you. You don't want to get into a fight with us. How about we go to that private judge over there who's got a good reputation as an honest and competent judge. And we agree that if he says that the television set was stolen from Mr. Friedman, you won't defend your customer when we recover the television set. And if they say that it was not stolen from Mr. Friedman, we will apologize and pay some damages for the hassle we've imposed on him. Now, that's how you might settle it if it came up for the first time. But these agencies, as we imagine them, are going to be in business for a long time. My agency knows that over the next 10 years, it will have clashes like this with your agency 100 or 1,000 or 5,000 times. And therefore, the sensible thing to do is to agree in advance on the court that we'll settle them. So my agency agrees with your agency that any disputes between the two agencies will be settled by Mr. Smith's private court, which is an arbitrator that has got a good reputation for settling such disputes. Now, it may occur to you to ask the obvious next question, which is who enforces that contract? Because unlike the world that we live in now, there is no government sitting above the agencies, compelling them to keep their word. But the answer is that there is a way of enforcing contracts that we're all familiar with that doesn't require a government. And that's what economists sometimes refer to as the discipline of constant dealings. If you and I are going to be interacting for a long time, many times over, each of us knows that if he breaks his word this time, the other one isn't going to trust him next time. That's the end of a profitable relationship. Therefore, it is prudent in that kind of a repeat relationship to try to maintain your reputation by actually doing what you say you're going to do. One of the sources that got me thinking about these questions was a science fiction book by Robert Heinlein called The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which describes a society on the moon with private property and without government. It does a pretty plausible job, which is one reason I started trying to imagine if I could work out something similar for the world I was living in. And there's one little bit where the narrator is visiting Earth. And he says, you know, on Earth they have laws for everything. They even have laws for private contracts. Why would you contract with someone if you couldn't trust him? And it's sort of the reaction of someone to whom my imaginary society is the norm instead of the present society. So you would expect that those private rights enforcement agencies have an obvious incentive to keep their contract. Because if, when the judge rules against my agency's customer today, we ignore the verdict, then the other agency will ignore the verdict when it rules the other way. So we now have a contractual network. We now have a world where every individual is the customer of a private rights enforcement agency. And every pair of private rights enforcement agencies are customers of a private court, which I refer to as an arbitration agency. And that then raises some interesting questions. And the first question, I think maybe the most important one, is what kind of law will we get? And it's worth noticing that one of the features of this system is that the law is not the same for everybody. The law between me and you is a function of the arbitration agency that our rights enforcement agencies have chosen. And the law between me and him is a function of the arbitration agency that my rights enforcement agency and his rights enforcement agency have chosen. They might be the same rules, they might be not. That sounds odd and unjust to us. It sounds less unjust if it occurs to you that when everybody has the same rule, it might be the wrong rule they all agree to, in which case some of them having the right rule would be better. But in fact, in many real world societies, including America at the moment, the legal rules between people are not all the same. That if you think about state law, for example, that the laws are different from state to state in various respects. And therefore, the laws between two citizens of California are not exactly the same as between two citizens of Virginia. There are some cases, some conflicts that go to federal law, some that go to state law. So there as well, it's different. And there's a certain sense in which the legal system we all live in is a legal system of contractual law. Because if you think about an ordinary private contract where two people or two firms make an agreement, now in the current world enforceable in the courts, in a sense that contract is a private legal system because the contract between us says, if I don't finish the house I'm building for you by March, I agree to pay you damages of $5,000. That would be a possible term called a liquidated damage term in a contract. But that's really a legal rule. It's just a legal rule just between the two of us. So I'm now imagining a society where there are multiple legal rules. What will they be? And the first thing to realize is that the rights enforcement agencies are middlemen. And part of the product they're selling to their customers is the set of legal rules under which their conflicts will get decided. And like anyone selling things to customers, the agency has an incentive to try to produce the product the customers want to buy. So from this standpoint, each rights enforcement agency will be saying to itself, which arbitration agencies would our customers like to have their disputes settled by? And similarly, the arbitration agencies will be saying to themselves, if we want rights enforcement agencies to hire us, what legal rules will make people most willing to be under our rules? So that you have, in effect, a legal system that's being generated on the free market, roughly the same way that cars are produced now or that food is produced now, instead of one produced by a political mechanism. And that, to me, is one of the interesting features of this system. And what can you say about that legal system? And the answer is that, for reasons similar, though not identical, to the reasons that we expect markets to produce better cars than socialist systems, that we think that, in general, free choice in a private property trade society works better for producing things than political systems work. Some of the same reasons, although it was a little situation a little different, are going to result in producing good law as well. So imagine that the customers of my rights enforcement agency are people who believe in the death penalty. They think that the knowledge that if someone kills one of them, he's likely to get executed, makes it less likely they'll be killed. On the other hand, the customers of another arbitration agency don't believe that. They think that the death penalty doesn't deter, and they are really worried about the possibility that they might be convicted of murder, whether correctly or incorrectly, and get executed. So they would prefer a legal system that includes a death penalty. You can imagine other reasons. There might be moral arguments for and against as well, but it doesn't really matter for the argument I'm making. So my agency does a little market research. They have to agree that two agencies need to find a court that will be acceptable to both of them. So my agency does some market research, and it figures out that if it could guarantee its customers' capital punishment court in disputes with the other agency's customers, it could raise the price it charges its customers by enough to bring in an extra $100,000 a year, and they'd still stay with it because they'd be getting more nearly the law they wanted. And the anti-capital punishment agency does some similar market research, and they conclude that if they could guarantee safety from capital punishment, if they could guarantee that in the disputes it would go to a non-capital punishment court, they could charge an extra $200,000 a year. Well, in that case, the obvious solution for both of them is that they agree on a non-capital punishment court, and the anti-capital punishment agency either pays off the pro-capital punishment agency enough to make it agree to that, or agrees on some other legal issue to accept their view, so that you should imagine the agency is in effect bargaining to whatever set of legal rules, whatever court, maximizes the summed benefit to the customers of the two agencies. Now, if there are any economists listening to this, they'll realize that I've oversimplified in a number of important ways. And if they're sufficiently curious, I think Kato has, hopefully by now, upper recording of a talk I gave on the market for law where I went into some of the finer points on this, or if you go to my web page, you can find one of the things there that discusses it. But for at least a first approximation, I think it's fair to say that what I've described is a market where it's in the interest of the private courts to try to design an optimal legal system, a set of legal rules people want to live under, and it's in the interest of the rights enforcement agencies to then agree on those optimal rules. Now, of course, the optimal rules may not be the same for everybody. You could imagine a world where there are some people who are in very dry parts of the country where you need detailed legal rules on water rights. There are other people in much more favored parts of the country where elaborate rules about who can draw water out of a river when make no sense. So you might end up with more than one legal system, but each of those legal systems would be more or less tailored by design to serve the welfare of the people who are its customers, so to speak. Now, you might answer, wait a minute, this is no improvement of what we now have because after all, our legal system at present is made by the legislature, actually some of it made by judges, but a lot of it is made by the legislature. Congressmen want to get re-elected, so therefore, congressmen have got to try to vote for the laws that people like, so how is this market system any better? And there are a number of answers, and the first answer is what economists call rational ignorance, that you as an individual voter in order to control your congressman, in order to make in his interest to vote for the laws that benefit you, you require two pieces of information. You have to know what laws are in your interest, and you have to know what your congressman is doing. You have no reason to know either of those things in the present system, because if you do a little metal arithmetic, you work out that the chance that your vote will determine who wins the next congressional election is maybe one in 10,000 or one in 100,000. The chance that your vote will determine who wins the next presidential election is maybe one in a million, one in 10 million somewhere around that. In a large population democracy, each individual knows his vote has almost no effect of affecting out, no chance of affecting outcomes. So why should you spend a lot of time and effort watching what your congressman is doing, figuring out how he voted, why he voted, what the bills he voted on would do when that information is of no use to you? Similarly, why should you spend a lot of time and effort figuring out what the ideal legal system is when having figured it out, you have no control over what legal system you're under? So one reason why you would expect the market method for producing law to work better than the government method is one of the reasons you expect markets to do better at producing food and automobiles and lots of other things than the government does, because on the market, since your choice affects what you get, you can say, all right, this rights enforcement agency mostly contracts with Court A, that one mostly contracts with Court B, Court B has better laws, so I'll switch to the one that contracts with Court B. So just as in an ordinary market, you have a good deal of control over your outcomes. You don't have perfect control because the agencies have got to get agreement with each other, so not all the options are going to be on the table, but at least your choice has a substantial effect on what law you're under, whereas in the political system, your choice of who to vote for has very close to zero effect on what law you're going to be under, so you have a reason to pay attention in the market context and not in the political, just as for other goods and services. Furthermore, the information about what works is much easier to get in the market system, because you actually get to observe the alternatives, and I'm thinking now less about what the legal rules are than about how good a job the different agencies do of enforcing them. So if you think about the political context, we are never going to be able to compare the Obama administration of 2008 to 2012 with the McCain administration of 2008 to 2012, because only one of them got elected. So it is very hard, I don't think Obama's doing a very good job, but that depends on my guesses about what would have happened if he had done other things, which we have no way of knowing that Obama said I'm gonna have this big stimulus, it's gonna get unemployment down substantially, he said by how much, didn't happen. But of course Obama's defenders can argue, they might even be right, without the stimulus things would have been even worse. Therefore we should be grateful to him, even though he was too optimistic about how it would turn out, he did the right things. And there's no easy way, you can consult different economists and you can find one Nobel winning economist who says Obama did the right thing and one who says he did the wrong thing, hard to form an opinion on that. On the other hand, imagine that the question is which agency shows up faster when you report that you've been robbed? Well, I'm a customer of agency A, you're a customer of agency B, we compare notes assuming that both of us have been so unlucky as to be robbed, or we can observe other features of what they did, and we can see whether on the whole A does a better or worse job than B. So in that sense, we don't have perfect information, humans never have perfect information, but we're in a much better position to choose among the bundle of rights and rights enforcements, legal rules and the equivalent of police protection provided by one agency and another, than we are to choose among the promises of politicians, which is all we really get to go down. So that's another reason why you would expect that the system I'm describing would be more likely to produce good law than the system we now live under, and at least my view is that there's lots of evidence of the system we now live under produces pretty bad law in many ways. Now, another response you sometimes get from people is, wait a minute, how is this gonna work for criminals? Won't the criminals just form their own rights enforcement agency and insist on laws in which murder is legal and robbery is legal and so forth? And I think there are two answers to that. The simplest but perhaps less important answer is very few criminals would really want to live under those laws either, because after all, if we have a system where it's legal to murder people, that not only means it's legal for me to murder you, it also means it's legal for you to murder me, and that doesn't sound like such a great deal, and similarly for robbery. But even if the murderer said, oh, I'm much better at killing than other people, so I want a rule that allows murder, he's not gonna get it, because in order to get that, he has to persuade the victim's rights enforcement agency to agree to a court that allows murder. And if you go back to my discussion of capital punishment, it's pretty easy to see that almost all of the time, the value to one person of being able to violate someone else's rights is much less than the value to the victim of not having his rights violated. That the hit man might get paid $10,000 for a contract to kill me, I would be delighted to pay much more than $10,000 to have some assurance that people won't murder me. And again, this is a fairly brief talk, so I can't go into a lot of detail, but I think it's pretty clear that if the criminals really decide to try to form their own agency, that agency will be unable to get contracts on its terms with any other agency. The criminals are vastly outnumbered by the potential victims. The potential victims are willing to pay much more to get what they want than the criminals are to get what they want, and therefore the criminal agency would fight a hopeless war against the rest of society and lose, which is exactly what would happen at present if the criminals said, we're starting a new country, it's in the middle of the United States, it doesn't recognize any of your laws, what happens, well, you can predict pretty easily what would happen. So I don't think that's a serious argument. In fact, you would expect a good deal less crime and a good deal less of a problem of crime in the society I'm describing, not only because private firms usually do things better than governments do, but also because a fair amount of our present crime is created by government. That is to say, the government makes it illegal for people to do things that they want to do and that harm no one else. I'm thinking in particular of the war on drugs, but there are other examples of that. When you make things illegal, people want to do, the result is some people do them and you have a large number of people in prison. US has an extraordinarily high imprisonment rate, almost 1% of the population is imprisoned at any one time, which is higher than any other developed country, perhaps any other country at all, and that's largely a result of having made laws against victimless crimes and then having arrested people for breaking those laws. So I've tried to sketch out very briefly how one could have a society functioning in which there was no government but were institutions of private property and in which people's rights in fact got protected and in which conflicts between people were normally settled peacefully. Since I wrote the book, I've learned a good deal more about historical legal systems. The book I'm currently working on is a book on legal systems very different from ours which looks at a very wide range of them. And one of the things I discovered doing that is that what we think of as the normal model where laws enforced by professional policemen is actually not all that common historically. It's common at the moment. But even if you take something as recent as 18th century England, which I wrote one article about, 18th century England, there were no police. The English police force was invented in London by Robert Peale somewhere around 1820 or 1830. Nonetheless, laws got enforced. That was a, there were also essentially no public prosecutors except for offenses that were really against the state like robbing the treasury or something. And that was a system in which it was legally speaking, any Englishman could prosecute any crime. And it had in practice, it usually meant that the victim of a crime took responsibility for finding out who did it and getting him convicted. And that may sound odd to you, but of course half of our legal system works that way too because in the US we have two legal systems. One of them is called criminal law and one of them is called tort law which do roughly the same thing. They impose costs on people who do bad things to other people. One of them you call the cops and the police investigate and arrest somebody. One of them you call a lawyer and you sue somebody. If people are interested they can find in my book Laws Order a chapter discussing the question of whether it makes sense to have both of those systems or if they go off my webpage they can find some recordings of talks where I discuss what a modern system might look like if it was all tort law and no criminal law so that everything was privately prosecuted. But my more general point is that the simple model of government police enforcing law is only one of the many ways in which real societies have enforced law. There is no modern society that fits my imaginary description but there are historical societies, societies that have substantial elements of it. And if you go on my webpage, the book I'm currently writing you can read the drafts of the chapters. It's not all about that. The book is not really on that subject. The purpose of the book is to try to learn more about the ways that legal systems can work but some of the legal systems are actually ones in which the enforcement of rights is done in some more or less private and decentralized mechanism rather than by having a government that makes it enforces law. I've neglected so far the third of the standard functions of government as imagined by people who don't like very much government and that's national defense where national defense really means defending against foreign nations that might wanna conquer you. And national defense is a problem for my system and for all systems but in particular for my system because it's what economists call a public good. And public good to economists doesn't mean a good the government produces. Public good means a good such that the producer can't control who gets it. So if you think about a radio broadcast for example, if it's over the air rather than some kind of cable system that's a public good because if you broadcast it you can't say to each separate person who's listening to it you can't get to listen to it unless you pay me, all right? And so a public good then raises the problem of how do you pay for getting it produced? We would like a society where anything which is worth more to the people who get it than it costs to produce gets produced. That's sort of a simple definition of economic efficiency but in the case of a public good it's hard to do that an ordinary private good. If I produce it, I sell it to customers the amount they're willing to pay is a measure of what it's worth to them. If they're willing to pay more than it costs me to produce it, I make a profit. So therefore things worth producing tend to get produced. Again, I'm oversimplifying a little because this is an interview and not a semester of price theory in a university but roughly speaking the ordinary market system produces things worth producing but in the case of a public good when I put out that radio broadcast since you can hear it whether or not you pay for it there's a real problem in my raising the money to pay the cost to producing it. That problem in the case of radio broadcast was solved by the clever idea of producing two public goods one of which has a positive cost and positive value called a radio program one with a negative cost and negative value called an advertisement. It has a negative cost to the broadcaster because he gets paid for putting on ads tie the two public goods tightly together give away the bundle and you can make money and that's how we actually do produce radio and television but each case of a public good in some sense requires its own ingenious solution unlike ordinary market goods you don't have a presumption that it's worth producing it'll get produced. Well national defense is a public good because there isn't a way that I can keep the Mexicans from invading America and hurting me without also keeping them from invading America and hurting you. So that's the case where if we produce national defense at all we produce it for a whole lot of people and we can't control which one gets it. That's the problem. In my book I have a chapter which is national defense the hard problem because I whereas I would argue at least that police and courts even though they look like something that can't be produced privately in fact it's pretty straightforward to do it. In the case of national defense you can imagine a number of imperfect ways of doing it. One of them is charity. That may sound silly but if you think about how national defense is really produced it's quite common when there's a war on that people will volunteer even if there's no draft and even though army doesn't pay very much that's really a form of charity and they're saying I value defending my country and I'm willing to put my life on the line to do it. When there's a war on people that are often willing to buy war bonds even though they don't give a very good return on your investment because they want to finance the war at various times when you have something like the beginning of World War II in England people donate their firearms to arm the defense forces because they don't want the Germans to invade England. You can think of quite a lot of cases where a good deal of that is provided and you can imagine a variety of other sort of private voluntary methods by which it is possible to get some resources for national defense even without a government and then the question is are there gonna be enough and that really in my view depends on how powerful and how aggressive the potential enemies are so that when I originally wrote the Machine Rear Freedom which was about 1970 the Soviet Union was still in business it was a fairly powerful although less powerful than it appeared state it had a nuclear arsenal and it at least said that it wanted to conquer the world more or less and I was somewhat unsure whether in that world you would get enough resources. On the other hand defending ourselves from Canada and Mexico is not a really big project especially since neither of them shows any evidence of wanting to conquer us and if they wanted to we were a great deal Richard neither of them is. So from that standpoint I think it very likely that if what is now North, what is now America was turned into a market anarchist what we sometimes call an anarcho-capitalist society the sort of society which is anarchist in the sense there's no government but not in the sense of being chaotic society which is an orderly private property lawful society but one in which private arrangements rather than government keep it that way. If it was that kind of a society I think we would have very little difficulty defending ourselves from the actual neighbors that are sitting on our frontier and I think that if you look at the actual history of US conflicts since the Soviet fell they do not involve conflicts with people who were ever a serious threat to us. That it is true that something like 9-11 killed several thousand people but by the standards of international conflict that's a very very very small conflict. I remember doing some calculations at the time of the First Iraq War adding up the GNP of the countries on the two sides of that war and measured by economic resources the First Iraq War the odds were just about 100 to one. All right that's not a serious threat to the hundred so to speak. So my guess is that in the world as it now is the US could defend itself by voluntary decentralized mechanisms. Somewhere I think I've written up and if not I will write up a longer description of how you could imagine doing it and I imagine things like the open source movement for producing software which is a sort of a non-price way of producing what's in effect of public good namely software that anybody can use it's not copyrighted. As one model for how you might organize a volunteer military in order to defend a society without government. There's actually a short story by Rudyard Kipling who's one of my favorite authors which is called Army of a Dream where he's imagining in England where instead of people playing cricket and football they do military maneuvers where that's sort of the fashionable sport to do play warfare but play warfare on a full scale. I know people who spend time and effort fighting with swords and shields they're in the society of your creative and activism. There are a whole lot more people who do it with hateball. So I think you could imagine putting together a sort of a militia system like what the US to a considerable extent had in its early history where you've got lots of volunteers who aren't really professional soldiers they aren't all that good at it but there are a lot of them and if necessary they can be organized by professionals paid by charity essentially by donations to defend any likely threat that we would face. But that would be a longer discussion and the basic bottom line argument I want to make is that for police and courts and law making I am willing to argue the system I'm describing is unambiguously better than what we have because the laws are being both made and enforced by people who have a private incentive to do a good job if they want to have customers just the way other things are produced in our society that for national defense we really have a choice of bad solutions one of them is trying to use a political system to do it and one of them is trying in various imperfect ways to do it privately but there is one advantage in my view to the private system for national defense and that is that it greatly reduces the risk that has happened in many countries in the past our army will be the ones who conquer us that is to say the risk of the army but giving itself the enemies. If you go back to the beginning of American history and you look at the Second Amendment to the Constitution which is the one that defends the right to bear arms I think it's pretty clear what was going on in the minds of those people especially if you read other contemporary discussions and that is that they were facing a problem and the problem was that it was clear that professional soldiers on average beat amateur soldiers but it was also clear with Cromwell's seizure of power in England in the 17th century as the obvious example that a professional army was a danger that if you had a professional army at some point under some circumstances that army would decide to take over the country as Cromwell's new model army did in the mid 17th century in England that basically the first English Civil War you had these people on this side and those people on that side and they fought and finally parliament wins. Second Civil War you have on one side Oliver Cromwell on the new model army on the other side everybody else Oliver Cromwell wins and was military dictator for I don't know 10 or 20 years pretty good military dictator I should say but nonetheless a disturbing kind of approach. So one advantage the solution I think as I interpret the Second Amendment the solution the founders came up with was have a small professional army and an enormous militia and that way if you really have to fight the professional army can coordinate things they can make sure that everybody is using the same orders and the same instructions and such and the militia will give them manpower and a professional army ever gets up at E and tries to take over it's true they're better than the militia but the militia will outnumber them 100 to one and that's my reading at least of what was going on in the original system and I view my approach to how you do national defense in the society without a government as sort of a later modern up-to-date version of the same approach namely you have lots of people who aren't really very good soldiers but can be soldiers if necessary and therefore if the small number who are really good soldiers try to take over they'll be outnumbered 100 to one. So that's that I guess covers more or less what I wanted to talk about which is to give some sketch of at least my version of what a free market anarchist society would look like but sometimes referred to as an anarcho-capitalist society and it's the society where law is generated on the free market by an economic mechanism and I should say that among libertarians there was at least one other approach to the idea of anarcho-capitalism of private property anarchy that I'm familiar with and that's one which in effect assumes that legal philosophers will figure out exactly what the law ought to be and once that problem has been solved everybody will agree on the same law and I think that's quite unlikely. I don't observe that philosophy has made a great deal of progress in the last couple of thousand years. I think the problem of designing legal systems is much harder than it seems to people who haven't actually studied the law and I think that a system where goods are produced by private profit making entities who will make more money if they produce good goods is a better way for producing law than a system in which philosophers or academics speculate and then somehow by some magic process convince everybody else in the world to go along with them. But that's at least the system that I'm arguing for. I think that's what I wanted to say. People have any questions? You can find my email on my website. My website is www.DavidDFriedman.com. It currently has a PDF of all of my first book, second edition, if you want to download it and read it. It has in various forms several of my other books. I try to make books available online when my publishers will let me because I write books mainly to have them read, not mainly as a source of income and you can find lots of stuff I've written at various times on the webpage and you can also find recordings of many talks that I've given on various subjects. Thank you.