BAFFLED BY PROPERTARIANISM? STUCK ON SCARITY? It’s OK, I understand if you are b

BAFFLED BY PROPERTARIANISM? STUCK ON SCARITY?

It’s OK, I understand if you are baffled. it happens. If this wasn’t hard it wouldn’t have stumped Hoppe. He’s no dummy. I just got lucky. He learned under justification, rationalism and marxism, and I learned under criticism, science, and computabilty. It is only logical that he would invent a justificationary, rationalist, and cosmopolitan argument, and that I would be puzzled by it, and restate it as a critical, scientific, and operational method. It’s just mental modeling. He was from an earlier generation that wasn’t aware of these problems. Even my work is only the result of his creating a ‘problem’ that I could understand was false. And it’s just deterministic that someone would finally understand Mises’ error, and combined Mises in economics, Brouwer in physics, and Bridgman in mathematics, with the failure 20th century analytic philosophy, as mere tautology – a problem of linguistic operations.

So, I am not ignoring the distinction between physically scarce and physically non-scarce goods. I am stating that with this argument, Hoppe wants to attribute causality to that distinction in order to justify his priors. In other words, he is unknowingly (I assume), constructing a straw man argument to justify priors, rather than determining causality. This is a common philosophical error.

Instead, I’m saying that your argument is false because it is impossible. It is impossible because your conclusion that we face a problem of scarcity, is irrelevant, since scarcity is only perceivable, experienceable, and therefore knowable by price (cost). it is operationally impossible for humans to have developed concepts of scarcity, and it is impossible for us to act because of scarcity. What we act upon, and what we know, is what we measure: cost. Our measurements exist. Our knowledge originates in measurements. Our subjective value of different choices is determined by those measurements.

So what I think everyone on the libertine side is missing, is that Hoppe is assuming a conclusion that justifies what he claims to deduce from it. Rather than using praxeological (existentially possible), internally consistent, externally correspondent, and falsified criticisms.

SCARCITY VS COST

Scarcity is a universal, unknowable, marginal indifference. It is praxeologicaly non-existent. I cannot know and act on it. Cost is particular, knowable, and decidable because of marginal differences. It is praxeologicaly existential. I can know and act on it.

Scarcity is important between states, that need not reduce local transaction costs, but which must avoid conflict despite differences in local rules.

Morality is important between individuals, because they must reduce transaction costs sufficiently to engage in production in a division of knowledge and labor.

Polities must form laws (rules) of cooperation, that mix the necessary rules of morality (prohibition on free riding), with the rules necessary for the production of commons, with the utilitarian allocation of privileges (norms) that assist in either parasitism or the organization of production or both.

Rothbard, as a cosmopolitan, was trying to justify separatism. Not describe necessary properties of cooperation, nor the necessary properties of rule of law, under which a group of people can cooperate without allocation of discretion to individuals with authority.

Not sure why this isn’t terribly obvious. But then I have been working on the problem a very long time.

Curt Doolittle