DENIALISM HAS NO FUTURE IN ECONOMICS (useful arguments)(libertarians should read

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2015/04/u-s-taxes-low-compared-with-other-developed-economiesMORAL DENIALISM HAS NO FUTURE IN ECONOMICS

(useful arguments)(libertarians should read) (conservatives should read)(reactionaries should read)

BARRY:

We have high tax efficiency (people pay), high productivity (we work more), higher employment (more of us work, and work longer), vastly more entrepreneurship, risk taking, and innovation, and much, much higher consumption. (We also have counter-productive higher corporate taxation.)

The left’s argument is that under a democratic government, we can tax – without equilibrating effect – a divided, heterogeneous American domestic empire, via the same means as we do small, homogenous European extended-tribal nation-states that are not responsible for policing the world system of finance and trade, nor of their seas, borders, or neighbors. It is one thing to redistribute to kin, another to redistribute to free riders, and another to redistribute to one’s kin’s competitors

So what you mean, if stated truthfully (meaning: fully informed), is that we should exchange efficiency, productivity, employment and consumption for the production of additional redistributive commons of unequal desirability, against the wishes of the producers. Yet this would only increase the divisiveness of the heterogeneous population.

It is true that through immigration, the left, with the support of the academy, has perpetuated a conquest of the European people’s in exchange for income and status signals. And that via this conquest, that it will shortly be possible to engage in further appropriation, and greater dependence upon redistribution, providing fewer incentives to pay, to produce, to employ and to consume.

But it is not yet certain whether the heterogeneous polity will come to dissolution over it or not. And as we have seen from the success of the austerity movement, people will pay high personal costs to punish free riders. Yet, ignoring human instinctual morality that is necessary for the evolution of cooperation, mainstream economists – and particularly left-leaning mainstream economists – assume that democratic electorates will tolerate inter-cultural redistribution from high productivity to low productivity peoples without invoking moral demand for altruistic punishment.

Austerity is a normal, irrepressible result of the instinctual and evolutionarily necessary requirement to suppress free-riding.

It is anti-empirical (unscientific) to suggest (and possibly genocidal to suggest) that we should not, or under democracy that man will not, engage in the punishment of free riders.

Just how it is. That’s the science. Or has economics evolved from anti-operational, into a full-fledged anti-empirical, anti-rational religion?

Your opponents succeed politically because of moral intuition, even if they lack a rhetorical language to articulate those intuitions. Some of us are working on giving them that language. We just hope it is not too late to end yet another pseudoscience as we are systematically ending the rest of the progressives pseudosciences.

Moral denialism has no future.

Cheers 🙂

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine