Parasitism is as Natural as Cooperation: Man Follows Incentives

Parasitism is just as natural as cooperation. And so the function of the law is to discover new forms of parasitism so that the polity can insure one another against the new forms of parasitism.

So it is not simply natural to cooperate, it is natural to cooperate as much as incentives allow, and to act parasitically as much as incentives allow. And in almost all cases production is more burdensome than parasitism.

So, we create institutions to raise the cost of parasitism such that all incentives favor cooperation. We force everyone to participate in the market in order to survive.

And if we don’t grasp this we make the same mistake as the Enlightenment peoples, and in particular the classical liberal libertarians, and the cosmopolitan libertines: that man is good and oppressed, rather than man follows incentives and he needs to be prohibited from parasitism so that his only choice is production.

Not just because his participation in production increases productivity, but because his abstinence from parasitism decreases transaction costs, risk, and increases its corollary, trust.

In this way, prosperity is created not so much by the emphasis on the good, but on the prohibition of the bad, leaving only good actions available to man.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine