And you beat me. I'll delete and move what I said over to here.

The Video: "How to Make a $1500 Sandwich in Only 6 Months"

TLDW: A guy spends six months and $1,500 starting to assemble the ingredients and ends up making a sub par sandwich.

He says "it's not bad" but a lot of his taste testers were less generous.

I'm not trying to be critical of the project, and I think deepening one's skill sets in the basic areas of human existence is a good thing. I thought the video offered interesting, superficial incites into the division of labor.

Also on top of this take in the lessons of I, Pencil [Text], [Video]

PDF Warning:

The Law is a Fractal:The Attempt to Anticipate Everything - Andrew Morrison Stumpff

Hopefully this simple illustration from the paper get's your mind thinking about the point that is attempting to be made.

From a certain vantage, legal rules are analogous. Imagine, for example, that instead of a number line we were considering a collection of unique^4 factual scenarios and a rule that assigned legal consequences to each of those scenarios. For instance, we might consider a municipal park for which a city had adopted the rule, “no vehicles are allowed in the park.” We could treat “Point 1” on the number line as representing the act of driving a car through the park and “Point 2” as representing refraining from driving a car through the park. The rule would assign the label of “illegal” to Point 1 and “legal” to Point 2. ^5

As has been famously pointed out,^6 these two points and the rule itself are insufficient to cover all the specific factual situations that might arise involving vehicles in a park. At least they are insufficient in any reasonable rule system.^7 What if, for example, a police vehicle has to enter the park on an emergency call? If we want an appropriate, specific rule, we would need another point, between Points 1 and 2, corresponding to the factual scenario, “A police vehicle entering the park.” Point 1.5, let’s call it, to which we would assign, like Point 2, the label “legal.” But what if the driver of the car were a thief who had stolen it from the police? That specific scenario would fall between Points 1 and 1.5, perhaps 1.2, and would be assigned the label “illegal.”^8

And so on. Given the numberless potential variations, foreseeable and unforeseeable, in “vehicles,” motives, and circumstances, there can, provably,^9 be no end to the possible specific scenarios—and thus no limit on the number of rules that would result from trying to write an appropriate one for each possible, distinct fact situation.^10

This is my mistake ridden transcript from 17:27 - 20:03 of a David Friedman talk given at PorcFest 2013. The whole video has been posted here before [1][2], but I was reviewing some notes I had taken and wanted to highlight this part concerning market failure and public goods.

You can easily enough have a public good that is worth more than it costs to produce and it doesn’t get produced. And that’s one of the standard arguments that everyone but anarchists uses for why you need government and it’s a correct argument, it's just that government isn’t the solution because if you think it through you see that the mechanisms that are supposed to make government behave themselves are shot through with public good problems. That for example if you make yourself a well educated voter in order to vote for politicians who pass good laws you have just spent a lot of time and energy producing a public good shared with everybody else in the United States. That’s a public good with a public of 300 million people. It’s not going to get produced and that is why voters are rationally ignorant.

If you run through the way political mechanisms work, the problem economists call market failure; which is a situation where individual rationality doesn’t produce group rationality, such as public goods not getting produced occurs because individuals are not bearing the the costs of the actions they take or getting the benefits. That’s a exception in the private market and the normal situation in the public market. If you think about how political institutions work it is very rarely the case that a political actor either receives the benefits of correct decisions or pays the costs of wrong decisions.

I guess my favorite example of this is actually in the judicial system; there is a particular court decision, I could discuss if people are curious in the question part, in which a federal appeals court made a decision which hinged on a mathematical mistake that a smart high school student should have been ashamed of. And that decision almost certainly killed some thousands of people. It had to do with liability for vaccines, for the live polio vaccine. It held a company liable under circumstances which under the court's own argument should not have been liable. It was a mistake by about factor of 40 in comparing costs and benefits, the result was for a couple of years to slow the development of vaccines and that surely killed some thousands of people. The judges who made that decision never owed a penny to anybody. For what was clearly - I think - culpable negligence in their decision. So what’s wrong with the standard argument that says that market failure is a reason for government is not that the free market works perfectly but only that the alternative works worse. That we don’t have a good way to make governments act in our interest, unfortunately.

Davis v. Wyeth Laboratories, Inc., 399 F.2d 121 (9th Cir.(Idaho) Jan 22, 1968)

Can Judges be Criminally Negligent? - David Friedman

Some of my favorite excerpts from John Hasnas' fantastic piece The Myth of the Rule of Law

Interview with Tom Woods "The Rule of Law is a Myth"

This was the idea behind the concept of the divine right of kings. By making the king appear to be an integral part of God's plan for the world rather than an ordinary human being dominating his fellows by brute force, the public could be more easily persuaded to bow to his authority. However, when the doctrine of divine right became discredited, a replacement was needed to ensure that the public did not view political authority as merely the exercise of naked power. That replacement is the concept of the rule of law.

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But the myth of the rule of law does more than render the people submissive to state authority; it also turns them into the state's accomplices in the exercise of its power. For people who would ordinarily consider it a great evil to deprive individuals of their rights or oppress politically powerless minority groups will respond with patriotic fervor when these same actions are described as upholding the rule of law.

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But how can it possibly provide the order-generating and maintaining processes necessary for the peaceful coexistence of human beings in society? What would a free market in legal services be like?

I am always tempted to give the honest and accurate response to this challenge, which is that to ask the question is to miss the point. If human beings had the wisdom and knowledge-generating capacity to be able to describe how a free market would work, that would be the strongest possible argument for central planning. One advocates a free market not because of some moral imprimatur written across the heavens, but because it is impossible for human beings to amass the knowledge of local conditions and the predictive capacity necessary to effectively organize economic relationships among millions of individuals. It is possible to describe what a free market in shoes would be like because we have one. But such a description is merely an observation of the current state of a functioning market, not a projection of how human beings would organize themselves to supply a currently non-marketed good. To demand that an advocate of free market law (or Socrates of Monosizea, for that matter) describe in advance how markets would supply legal services (or shoes) is to issue an impossible challenge. Further, for an advocate of free market law (or Socrates) to even accept this challenge would be to engage in self-defeating activity since the more successfully he or she could describe how the law (or shoe) market would function, the more he or she would prove that it could be run by state planners. Free markets supply human wants better than state monopolies precisely because they allow an unlimited number of suppliers to attempt to do so. By patronizing those who most effectively meet their particular needs and causing those who do not to fail, consumers determine the optimal method of supply. If it were possible to specify in advance what the outcome of this process of selection would be, there would be no need for the process itself.

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Furthermore, virtually none of the law that orders our interpersonal relationships was produced by the intentional actions of central governments. Our commercial law arose almost entirely from the Law Merchant, a non-governmental set of rules and procedures developed by merchants to quickly and peacefully resolve disputes and facilitate commercial relations. Property, tort, and criminal law are all the products of common law processes by which rules of behavior evolve out of and are informed by the particular circumstances of actual human controversies. In fact, a careful study of Anglo-American legal history will demonstrate that almost all of the law which facilitates peaceful human interaction arose in this way. On the other hand, the source of the law which produces oppression and social division is almost always the state. Measures that impose religious or racial intolerance, economic exploitation, one group's idea of "fairness," or another's of "community" or "family" values virtually always originate in legislation, the law consciously made by the central government. If the purpose of the law really is to bring order to human existence, then it is fair to say that the law actually made by the state is precisely the law that does not work.

The title is me rewriting the later part of the upcoming quote so it's under the 200 character limit.

This quote largely summarizes my thoughts on hard issues. Couple it with Friedman's thoughts on public good problem. Libertarianism doesn't have all the answers, it won't lead to utopia. It often seems like libertarians are expected to have the perfect response to practically every issue while taking on a hypothetical philosopher king state.

A quote from Dr. Friedman on the subject of carbon taxes that I think can be extrapolated for pollution and other issues in general:

You are evaluating proposals for government policy on the basis of what they could do if optimally implemented not on what one can expect them to do given the incentives of the people making the decisions—what used to be referred to as the philosopher king model of government. It makes no more sense than evaluating the market alternative on the assumption that all the decision makers in that case will act to maximize social welfare rather than in their own interest. The question is not whether an optimal carbon tax designed and enforced by wise and benevolent economists would produce net benefits—very likely it would. It's whether passing a carbon tax designed and implemented as we can best expect it to be would produce net benefits.