(profundity of the day)(read it)(propertarianism provides the wilsonian synthesis)

If I am correct, and that the reason for western rapidity of innovation, economic velocity, and intellectual progress, is the prevalence of truth telling in all walks of life; and that truth telling begets truth-thinking; and that truth-thinking leads to multitudinous goods – faster than all other institutional solutions; then why are not truth-speaking and truth-thinking as radical an innovation as literacy and reading?

(I am pretty sure it is.)

Oath-giving was expensive. Juries were expensive. A senate is expensive. Rule of law was very expensive. Literacy was terribly expensive. Science was expensive. High trust was very expensive. Yet these investments in our commons are the very reasons that westerners produce every good faster than all competing civilizations in both the greco-roman and re-enlightened eras.

We succeeded in incremental suppression of all free riding, and incremental increase in normative taxation – bearing costs for the production of norms.

If we require the payment of truth telling, no other innovation in institutions can compete with it.

Once we have implemented truth telling as common property with universal standing, then we can eliminate the centralization of parasitism in the state: monopoly bureaucracy. We will have successfully suppressed local parasitism and eliminated transaction costs by centralizing parasitism as a means of paying for the transition. Then eliminated the central bureaucracy as a means of parasitism. We can then – and only then – finally live in a nomocracy: under rule of law.

This simple act will result in the ‘scientific civilization’. It will complete the enlightenment attempt to restore our western civilization to its hellenic and indo european origins – rescuing it from babylonian mysticism forever. Not because people ‘believe’ one thing or another. But because we have eliminate all opportunity to, and utility in, doing otherwise.

(And if that isn’t the most profound argument you’ve run into this year I’ll be surprised.)

Source: Curt Doolittle – THE END OF HISTORY: THE SCIENTIFIC (TRUTHFUL)…