[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":9},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-bio-david-friedman":3},{"bio":4},[5,6,7,8],"David D. Friedman is an American economist, legal scholar, and author best known for The Machinery of Freedom, a foundational text of anarcho-capitalism that argues for a society ordered by private, competing institutions rather than a state. Trained as a physicist, he has taught economics and law at several US universities, and is the son of economist Milton Friedman.","The Machinery of Freedom appeared in 1973 and has been revised twice since. Its distinctive move is to argue for a stateless order on consequentialist rather than moral grounds: not that the state is unjust, but that private, competing institutions would in most cases do the job better, and where he thinks they would not, he says so.","Trained as a physicist at Chicago before turning to economics and law, he taught for years at Santa Clara University without holding a degree in either subject. His later book Legal Systems Very Different From Ours examines historical and contemporary legal orders, from the Icelandic sagas to Romani custom, as evidence of what law looks like when it is not produced by a modern state.","That is the work the Free Cities movement draws on most heavily, because it turns private law from speculation into a matter of comparative evidence.",1788062495751]