Economic Intuitionism (or Scientific Praxeology)

*“Reforming Mises, and the Jewish**(Ukrainian)* Wing of Austrian Economics.”

A RECONSTRUCTION OF PRAXEOLOGY AS ECONOMIC INTUITIONISM FULLY COMPATIBLE WITH RATIO-EMPIRICAL SCIENCE

I. PURPOSE:

To restore credibility to Austrian Economics by transforming it from Rationalist and pseudoscientific, to consistent with all scientific and logical disciplines.
To quash rationalist and pseudoscientific fallacies that have discredited Austrian economics, discredited the quest for moral economics, distracted from the quest for moral institutions through moral constraint on political economy, and cast the quest for liberty itself as the province of ‘the lunatic fringe’.
To provide a language for dividing economics into moral (Austrian operational economics) and immoral (Keyensian redistributive economics) disciplines.
To provide a scientific and critical rather than ideological and justificationary discussion of Austrian Economics (at least the German wing) as a method for testing the truthfulness and morality of economic theories – and to advocate restoring morality and truthfulness to economic science.

What follows is a series of posts I have written in the past few months as I have worked on Propertarianism. It may require that you have a non-trivial understanding of philosophy. And your average passionate advocate of political ideas does not have that understanding. But hopefully you will glean some ideas from it, and provide me with some useful criticism.

Thanks

Select Continue Reading to continue…

II. BACKGROUND TERMS:

BASIC TERMS (And yes, you probably need to read these rather than assume you know what they mean.)

– Rationalism vs Empiricism

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/

– Intuitionism in Mathematics

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intuitionism/

– Operationalism in Physics

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/operationalism/

– Operationism in Psychology

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/199/1/operat.htm

– Instrumentalism (Eccentric Usage)

I am a scientific realist, however, I use the term “instrumentalism” (probably a bad choice of words) in a much narrower sense: to refer to our use of logical and physical instruments to reduce phenomenon to that which we can somehow experience and compare, contrast, qualify, quantify or decide.

III. CONTENTS:

CONTENTS OF THIS DOCUMENT

The first post summarizes the argument. The remaining articles expand the Introduction take you from basic philosophical concepts, through a series of short essays

REFORMING AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS IS NECESSARY (To return the dialog to truthful and moral Austrian economics, and deceptive and immoral macro economics)
WHY ARE YOU REFUTING MISES, ROTHBARD AND HOPPE? (To Save Austrian Economics from the lunatic fringe)
PRAXEOLOGY AS MISES FAILURE TO DEVELOP ECONOMIC OPERATIONALISM (Restoring Austrian Economics To Compatibility with Ratio-empirical science)
MISES POSITION IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
THE STRUGGLE TO PRODUCE A MORAL ECONOMIC SCIENCE
SCIENCE IS THE DISCIPLINE OF SPEAKING TRUTHFULLY
MORAL CONSTRAINT FROM LAW THROUGH MATHEMATICS
CRITICISM: EMPIRICISM, INSTRUMENTALISM, OPERATIONALISM, FALSIFICATIONISM VS JUTIFICATION: RATIONALISM
JUSTIFICATION AS ADHERENCE TO CONTRACT, CRITICISM AS ADHERENCE TO DUE DILIGENCE
SCIENCE AS TRUTHFUL SPEECH – GERMAN RATIONALISM AND JEWISH COSMOPOLITANISM AS IMMORAL INFORMATION DISTORTION EQUAL TO THE INFORMATION DISTORTION OF KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS.
TRANSLATING KANTIAN RATIONALISM INTO SCIENTIFIC TERMS
WHICH IS MORE LIKELY: A PURPOSEFUL DECEPTION OR ANTI-SCIENTIFIC RATIONALISM?
THE ANTI ROTHBARDIAN CANON
A LIST OF HANS HERMANN HOPPE’S ERRORS
LIBERTARIANISM IS JUST COMMON PROPERTY MARXISM
THE REFORMATION OF WESTERN THOUGHT
THE ONLY MEANS OF ELIMINATING THE STATE AND CONSTRUCTING A CONDITION OF LIBERTY

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

– “Praxeology and Its Critics” by Bruce Caldwell.

http://public.econ.duke.edu/…/Praxeology%20and%20Its%20Crit…

– Do We Reason When We Think We Reason, or Do We Think?

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/…/peop…/associates/miller/lfd-.pdf

– The Objectives of Science

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/…/…/associates/miller/poincare.pdf

– Truth Defined

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/…/associa…/miller/TruthDefined.pdf

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

YES, REFORMING AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS IS NECESSARY

—“Calling Mises pseudoscientific is the typical positivistic criticism to Austrian Economics. It adds nothing. The young Austrian economists who are pupils of Don Lavoie had been working on Popper, Lakatos, Machlup and Hayek for a long time.”—Gabriel Zanotti, Philosophy Professor at Austral University

Gabriel

Let me see if I can summarize the argument and put an end to rationalist obfuscation of economics:

Calling science positivistic (justificationary) is a typical Rothbardian/Misesian misrepresentation of the scientific method, which is critical not justificationary.
Calling a logic (axiomatic, prescriptive, complete) a science (theoretical, descriptive, incomplete) is simply false. (And adds nothing, other than casting Austrian economics as a source of ridicule). Models can be built out of axioms or laws, but all axiomatic deductions are tautologies, producing proofs of operational possibility, while all laws remain incomplete and therefore non-tautological, producing additional hypotheses, which are candidates for theories and laws. But all theoretical statements remain theoretical. The reason being that all non-tautological premises remain forever theoretical.
The ‘axiom’ of purposeful human action tells us precisely nothing since it may constitute a test, but not an axiom since it tells us nothing of the scope of possible purposeful human action. We can instead say that any economic hypothesis, theory, or law, must be reducible to a sequence of rational human actions, (operations) in order to be existentially possible.
This difference is why we rely upon ratio-empiricism, not rationalism, and not positivism for scientific (truthful) investigation. Logical arguments test internal consistency but not external correspndence, and external correspondence does not tell us about the internal consistency of our arguments, and without operational-intuitionistic testing (operational definitions) we cannot know if what we imagine is existentially possible. And without falsification, assuming we are both internally consistent, externally correspondent, and existentially possible, we have not tested our internal, external, and operational theory for parsimony – leaving open the possibility of error, bias and deception in all three.
The differences between mainstream (orthodox) economics, and Austrian (heterodox) economics, are (a)that manipulation of credit is disinformation (lying) which produces cumulative effects of disinformation (lying), and (b) that as an act of disinformation (fraud), manipulation of credit produces involuntary transfers (immorality), because it lacks fully informed, productive, warrantied, voluntary exchange, free of externality (moral constraint).
Rationalists tend to be, and by definition, must be, justificationists – they are not critical. Justification in rationalism, is indifferent from positivism in science. They are identical propositions. No matter how much justification we do, we are merely engaging in confirmation bias. Instead, it is irrelevant which method we use to construct a theory. The means of constructing a theory are irrelevant. Justification is irrelevant. Truth candidates (internally consistent, externally correspondent, operationally possible, and ultimately parsimonious, yet incomplete statements) are produced by criticism: whether they survive scrutiny: testing.
One *CAN* however, work through purely rational, non-positivistic processes, however, this is not to to say they are not working empirically (through observation). As far as I know this is impossible. But that does not mean they are not working ratio-empirically. It merely means that they are engaging in tests of internal consistency given current knowledge, and working using operational possibility (existential possibility), but that they are not criticizing their work through tests of external correspondence – although as far as we know, no one makes theories without tests of external correspondence, because that would mean we were not explaining economic phenomenon – which would be somewhat fruitless.
This ‘Austrian’ (heterodox) investigation remains ratio-empirical, and consistent with all other scientific investigation. However, so does mainstream economics (orthodoxy). And the ONLY DIFFERENCE between mainstream and Austrian economics then, is that the mainstream seeks to lie to us, and Austrians seek to speak the truth. So the difference is not methodological – it is whether we attempt to find improvements to institutions of cooperation that retain the western principle of truth telling, or we engage in lying. Keynesian economics is dishonest, not necessarily unscientific. Austrian economics suggests only that economics must be practiced scientifically (ratio-empirically), not axiomatically or statistically: that sequences of operational possibility actions, informed by incentives, each of which is subjectively testable, is necessary to make a truth statement, while statistical correlation ignores these choices. Ergo, economics is indifferent from all other sciences: ratio-empirical discipline. The question is only whether we seek to tell the truth (Austrian) or to lie (Keynesian).
And it is equally dishonest and pseudoscientific to state that an axiomatic system is identical to a theoretical system, and equally dishonest to cast mainstream economics as methodologically flawed. Particularly when Austrians have contributed nothing to the study of economics in nearly a century, while in the past twenty years alone, the orthodox community has expanded our knowledge of general rules and insight into our existing economies with regularity.
The Cosmopolitan thinkers, like the german rationalists, are exceptional at this kind of deceptive conflation. A few of us think that it is a natural consequence of talumudic authoritarian dual ethics in the jewish community, and kantian authoritarian conflation of truth and duty in german philosophy. However, Mises and ROthbard and to some lesser degree Hoppe, have all tried to assert fallacies that cast the difference as possible, logical and methodological rather than as moral. Meanwhile the social democrats continue to justify the morality of takings (involuntary transfers) rather than treating every ‘taking’ as a lost opportunity for productive voluntary exchange – and therefore returning us to manorial era constraints upon the behavior of the unproductive classes that contributed to the rise of the west.

CLOSING

I hope this helped you understand my position. In my view I am attempting to restore Morality and truth telling to economics. But that will not be done using fallacious arguments in the rationalist tradition. It will be by demonstrating that moral action using institutions that do not engage in lying, produce superior economic conditions: greater prosperity without the fragility caused by decade after decade of institutional lying.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

L’viv Ukraine

WHY ARE YOU REFUTING MISES, ROTHBARD and HOPPE IF YOU ADVOCATE AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS?

Because Austrian Economics if stated scientifically, rather than rationally, constrains economics to moral theories and policies, and correctly repositions economics as a moral discipline: the search for institutional improvements to voluntary exchange – in the same way that I have tried to reposition science as a moral discipline: the search to speak the truth; and philosophy as the construction of meaning from the truth that we discover with science – a discipline which expressly lacks meaning (and must).

(Note: You might want to re-read that paragraph a few times – it’s very important.)

This is a profound transformation of multi-disciplinary intellectual history into a single, unified theory of peer-cooperation in pursuit of prosperity. And it corrects the errors inserted into the Cosmopolitan (Jewish) branch of Austrian economics by Mises (pseudoscience), and Rothbard (ghetto immorality – the absence of truth-telling), and Hoppe (German Rationalism)

This transformation of western thought into truth-telling for the purpose of moral cooperation (voluntary exchanges among warriors of universally equal rank), explains why the west innovates and prospers at higher rates than the rest of the world, whenever it is not bound by babylonian-levantine mysticism, barbaric deception, or Asian systemic truth-avoidance: we work constantly to eliminate transaction costs and seize opportunities at lowest cost (early).

This approach to man’s intellectual struggle correctly positions truth-telling along with trust (transaction costs), property, voluntary exchange, and contract as the necessary institutions of prosperity creation: the high trust society.

Anglos attempted to combine science and morality – trusting man in the absence of moral authority. But anglos, were an island people without borders to defend, an homogenous in-bred people, and a heavily commercialized people. They had fewer fears. Defectors from moral norms are not a problem for an in-bred island people. There is no group to defect to.

Germans attempted to combine philosophy and morality – a less radical transformation of religious authoritarian morality. Germans were a landed people with borders under constant question, and who were intermixed with other groups on all sides, and were not as economically diverse as the anglos and as such not as bound to trade. So, “defectors” – those who no longer pay the high cost of the normative commons, were more of a concern.

Jewish cosmopolitan authors, an un-landed diasporic and separatist people, attempted to preserve internal rule-authoritarianism, separatism, and the parasitic value of separatist dual-ethics. They viewed host civilizations as hostile, generated separatist hostility internally by intention as a means of group cohesion, and often practiced dualist ethics that guaranteed their moral separatism.

So each of these groups were, as all groups must, attempting to react to the enlightenment using their group evolutionary strategies: island naval and commercial, landed martial and agrarian-commercial, and un-landed, diasporic commercial.

It is sometimes hard for us to imagine that our use of “Truth” reflects our group’s evolutionary strategy, and that many of our judgements are unconscious. But all groups use truth differently.

Truth is unknowable and therefore merely contractual in Jewish philosophy – it is a purely pragmatic vision. In German philosophy, truth is dangerous and must be inseparable from duty, which is why all german philosophy conflates truth and duty. In anglo philosophy, truth is divine and its consequences divine – knowing the mind of god. Our duty is truth regardless of consequences, because we believe all consequences are optimum. Neo-puritanism, in the anglo world, which is the dominant postmodern philosophy in government and academy, does not practice anglo truth, but has adopted german and jewish counter-enlightenment philosophy of the sociology of knowledge and truth: truth is what we desire it to be.

This is systematically destroying our rule of law, which has been, in the past, the source of our empiricism. The source of our science. Not the other way round. Without scientific law, we cannot have a scientific society.

Law is the most influential property of any society because it determines what one must do, not what one prefers. As such, an un-empirical laws, is an incalculable, un-decidable, and therefore subjective law.

The solution is to restore truth telling. To increase the scope of property to include the normative and informational commons. To use law to restore truth-telling.

All society will adapt rapidly to this change. No authority is necessary. No leadership is necessary. No belief is necessary. No agreement is necessary. No ideology is necessary.

It is just true, insufficient to know, or not true, and that is enough.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

L’viv Ukraine

MISES’ PRAXEOLOGY AS THE FAILURE TO DEVELOP ECONOMIC OPERATIONALISM

(important)(profound)

I have been working to reform anarcho capitalist arguments by translating them from troublesome Kantian rationalism, into the transparent common language of science: ratio-empiricism. And, at least for the past few months, I’ve been struggling to develop a narrative structure that would allow me to easily demonstrate the solution to the promise of praxeology as a failed version of the same problems addressed by Intuitionism, Operationalism and Constructivism in mathematics and science.

Mises’ work was another example of the multi-disciplinary failure to provide a solution to the common intuition that there is a problem with science and mathematics, and our application of science and math to other fields – particularly to economics and ethics. That is the conclusion that I have come to – it’s the logical positioning of Mises’ praxeology in the development of 20th century thought – albeit he was even less successful in economics than peers were in physics, math, logic and psychology. They were able to identify the solution but not able to convince peers to implement it, because it was burdensome.

This narrative, positioning Misesian thought as a failed attempt at Operationalism in human cooperation, provides a vehicle whereby I can describe Misesian arguments in the same context as those in physics, psychology, logic and mathematics. All of them as failed experiments in operationalism only because the authors did not and possibly could not look across disciplines and discover that they were merely adding or removing the properties desirable or not for their field of inquiry – but that while they were seeking a logical solution, that they were all making similar arguments – ethical arguments: And that the problem they intuited, that Poincaré criticized them for, was an ethical one: recreating mysticism through the use of verbalism to obscure causality that they did not understand.

All the major disciplines went through a somewhat failed transformation and only psychology, which was most in need of reformation, fully adopted operationalism as “operationism”. And the result was a wealth of research in experimental psychology and the success of experimental psychology versus the pseudoscience that dominated the field before hand.

Why is this important? Because the requirements for construction and operational language, are not only logical but ethical. And while ethics has limited place in mathematical principles, and physical laws, it has a great significance to the promise that one is advocating a truth in mathematical and physical propositions – and therefore not ‘polluting’ the intellectual domain with fallacies that might impact others’ work. But in the logic of cooperation we call ethics it is inseparable both from the promise that one is advocating a truth AND in the articulation of its principles and the laws that enforce those principles.

If we had discovered operationalism in ethics first, then perhaps, we would have had an easier time justifying the additional burden that operationalism places upon physics, science, psychology math and logic – and we might have saved a century of pseudoscientific inquiry, just as Bridgman worried; and just as we have seen in a century of fallacious and immoral economics. As Bridgman noted, the only reason Einstein was innovative, was because he operationalized the problem of measurement of bodies – something that had we done earlier would have saved a generation or more of wasted effort in science – just as we have wasted a generation or more in the pursuit of a logic of cooperation leading to liberty.

The issue for us, in economics, politics and in ethics, is that the problem of arbitrary precision in the construction of general rules – hypothesis, theories and laws – affects only the precision of economic laws in time, but not our ability to state those laws. However, unlike say, mathematics or logic, we never run into decidability in the logic of cooperation, because all phenomenon are reducible to human actions that are open to subjective testing (sympathetic experience). Unlike axiomatic systems such as math and logic, we are never short of information necessary for decidability. Humans are marginally indifferent in their preferences – which is why we can experience shared intent, cooperate, and empathize. As such we can always decide. Buridan’s Ass never starves. Information is always sufficient. It may not be sufficient for the choice of preference, but it is sufficient for rational choice. Again, arguments that someone versed in mathematical philosophy might have understood. Although, with decades of computer science, we have learned that it’s computer science that is more trustworthy than mathematics, because computers are constrained by operational rules of necessity, and unlike mathematics we cannot use imagination and ‘fudging’ obscured by verbalism. Operations must be open to performance and results must be computable.

To counter the problem of imagination adding information to arguments, and the problem of using verbalism to obscure ignorance, under operationalism and constructivism, **truth is replaced by (algorithmic) proof as a primitive notion, and existence requires demonstration of constructibility.** This statement is possible to translate into the axiom that moral (ethical) propositions must be reducible to a series of human actions, open to subjective testing (sympathetic verification).

This is the argument that mises was looking for, and could not construct, possibly because (a) he lacked sufficient understanding of mathematics, (b) he lacked a demonstrably insufficient understanding of the terms ‘scientific’ and ‘logical’, because he conflated them with abandon, despite their opposite properties, and (c) because an ethical constraint was insufficient to provide an authoritative response to the moral arguments of statists and socialists alike. Whether he understood the ethical constraint not the logical one was all that a solution to praxeological analysis would provide, or simply, like most cosmopolitans, because preferred an authoritarian, verbalist, and pseudoscientific argument is something it is impossible to answer in our era. Since Marx, Freud, Cantor, Mises and Rothbard all make the same error of constructing verbal pseudosciences, it’s hard to imagine that it’s intentional rather than a cultural bias or strategy. (Something I have written about elsewhere under the heading of competing uses of truth.)

The problem I face, and the work I must do, to help others understand Mises’ position in intellectual history, and his failure, and then to construct a logic of cooperation, where Mises mistakenly tries to construct a logic of ‘action’ is to enumerate examples of axioms and laws in different fields and thereby demonstrate the problem of the sufficiency of information for deduction under arbitrary precision in the construction of hypotheses, theories, laws, and axioms; and then placing Mises’ work in the context of all fields struggling with the definition of truth (as ultimately performative – and therefore ethical). So positioning economics and ethics using performative truth, operationalism and constructivism will help demonstrate the concept across ALL domains of inquiry, rather than just within economics, ethics, physics, psychology, mathematics and logic. And thus eliminate the objections to performative truth, intuitionism, constructivism, and operationalism by demonstrating that all philosophical and logical disciplines rest upon the action that one claims to have demonstrated a an action that he can testify truthfully to have observed (rather than imagined, or used verbalisms to obscure that he has not.

Unfortunately, we didn’t discover ethics first – perhaps had Mises solved the problem in ethics, other fields would have grasped the significance. Although, other fields have addressed ethics with softer variants of operationalism and construction – particularly science. They have never reformed ’truth’ as performative: as testimony, or ‘true witness’, as evidenced by that which is operational and constructible. At least in the discipline of law, strict construction, original intent, and deliberate modification of law is an understood if not obeyed principle. Operationalism may allow us to make truthful testimony, and truthful testimony is the only truth that humans are capable of creating. All else is imaginary, as is infinity.

But whether we retain the approximation of classical reasoning as a practical matter of utility, or adopt construction and operation as a requirement for attestable truth in other disciplines really doesn’t matter as much as it does in ethics, politics and law. Physics, science, psychology, math and logic are luxury goods and rarely involve involuntary transfer and provide an incentive for conflict. But, cooperation is a necessary good. Politics and law are necessary goods. Strict construction is necessary and beneficial since it permits the rational resolution of conflicts, and as such prevents them. Strict construction makes it impossible to use empty verbalisms to advocate involuntary transfers as ‘moral’. Operational definitions make it much harder to lie, cheat and steal.

Under operationalism, performative truth, constructivism, the field of ethics, including the domains of criminal, unethical, immoral and conspiratorial, and conquest prohibitions, can be described as an objective uniform logic as Mises suggested it might be. We can construct a formal logic of cooperation – ethics. And, we can do it using ratio-scientific language, via operational and constructive means. We can do it in the common universal and transparent language of science using hypothesis, theory and law, and model our laws using axioms constrained by correspondence to this empirical laws. We do not need false authoritarianism, pseudoscientific obscurant terminology, or a cult or obscure continental language to do it. An irony perhaps that Mises did not grasp that he was justifying the logic of human action, which is by definition operational and constructive in an argumentative structure that was not operational nor constructive. In hindsight this approach is either humorous or tragic.

While we are not sure yet, it is possible that Popper was correct, and that we can never know if we possess the most parsimonious description of any phenomenon – what we call ‘truth’ or ‘ultimate truth’ – we can, instead of spending our lives in a quest for the non-existant and logically unknowable, instead, publish recipes that we can testify truthfully to the construction of, and performance of, as correspondent with reality. This is the difference between european commitment to always speaking the truth, and producing many, many technological successes, versus academic publishing a welfare queens, never responsible for our words, and never accountable for the consequences. This is the difference between anglo empirical truth, and cosmopolitan pragmatic truth.

The 20th century’s failed quest for a definition of truth, is the narrative structure that I’ve been searching for. Until recently, I just couldn’t find a way of talking about Mises’ work in the broader context of intellectual development. He clearly intuited the problem, as did those in other fields, but besides having the Jewish obsession with words-as-reality, and the German obsession with authority, he did not understand math and science well enough, and certainly had no exposure to computer science and the problem of computability. Why he proceeded onward and constructed an elaborate nonsensical pseudoscience in the Cosmopolitan tradition is something that only he could answer. And why subsequent generations have created a cult out of this pseudoscience, complete with typical cosmopolitan saturation of the informational commons with propaganda supporting of the pseudosicence, including heroic figure worship, and heaping unworthy praise at every opportunity, is up to those still living to explain.

It is worth noting that Popper too largely relied on narrative verbalisms, such as his ‘three worlds’ hypothesis, and we know that he resorted to Krugman-like distortion of facts in his criticisms of the left. And we know that Popper’s real purpose was not about science it self, but his agenda to undermine scientific certainty, much as did Mises, by rendering truth in to platonic form, removing responsibility from the scientist for true testimony, and casting cosmopolitan Critique, originated in hermeneutic interpretation of scripture, as the means of scientific social organization, rather than the previous anglo saxon and german requirement for truthful testimony.

ALl these thinkers failed to stem the tide of marx’s socialism, rothbardian libertinism, and Straussian neoconservatism, because all tried to counter pseudoscience with pseudoscience, and empty verbalism with empty verbalism. However the manner of correcting those people was always available to us, and had been for centuries if not millennia: a requirement that we tell the truth, and persecution under law for not doing so.

As Hoppe states, Hayek failed as well, both to make this connection with performative truth as a means of social order, and to move from the classical liberal and therefore psychological school of thought to the calculative rigor of logic by identifying property as the first and necessary object or unit of commensurability. He did understand the law and the common law, clearly, as the institutional means for resolving conflicts – better than anyone else as far as I know. But he did not grasp the difference between legal REASON (approximation necessary for discovery) and logical CALCULATION (precision necessary for truth). Nor between knowledge of use (correspondence as truth) and knowledge of construction (truth in existence). (Although I’m willing to admit that I might be one of the few people who currently does.)

Later in life Mises appears to waffle a bit, if not reverse himself. But because of what appears to be his fascination with Kantian a priorism, he didn’t see the parallel between his (inarticulate) argument that economics was both empirical and logical, and reverse mathematics, in which one constructs necessary axioms one can testify to as extant, after using empirical and logical means by which to approximate the solution to a problem.

My original goal was to provide conservatives a vehicle for argument using what I saw as libertarian rationalism. Conversely, I wanted to make it impossible to conduct deceptive arguments in the religious, progressive and postmodern forms, but in doing so I found an answer to a century or more old conflict in the history of thought.

And I think I can rescue Mises and Hoppe from the ‘fruitcake fringe’ of rationalist argument. Which is helpful. Since I want, like most, a plan to obtain liberty in my lifetime. And while any value Mises had has been already incorporated into economic thought, only fringe groups have incorporated Hoppe’s criticism of democracy and use of competing private insurance organizations to replace monopoly bureaucracy in the production of regulation.

Unfortunately, Hoppe appears too entrenched and committed to praxeology as pseudoscience, the fallacy of aggression which is merely a means of licensing fraud by verbal means and creating a parasitic class immune from both physical and legal punishment. And has merely adopted the marxist ‘commune’ as his model of rebellion. Which just because we desire liberty, is just as economically impossible as it is if we desire communism. Wishful thinking is not action. Its wishing others will do the work for you.

Liberty was created only by europeans, because of rare ancient circumstances, whereby warriors granted one another insurance against theft of their property obtained from their cattle raids, and required equality of one another because of their battle tactics requiring independent financing, action and maneuver, at high risk. These people built an ethic that would give birth to science, reason, property and liberty, because it forces man to use his mind in terms which accurately correspond to reality: Tell the truth, and only the truth. Fulfill your commitments at risk of life. Construct a brotherhood of property owners two whom familial trust is extended. And force all free riding out of society so that all persons must participate in production, and none can resort to parasitism. Liberty is obtained at the point of metal object, by denying others access to power. Everything else is merely wishful thinking, or an attempt to free ride on the efforts of those who do construct liberty. The natural aristocracy is not created by a small population. It is created by every living soul willing to bear arms to prevent the accumulation of sufficient power to deny others sovereignty over their property: For one and all, to deny one and all, access to the property of one and all by other than voluntary, fully informed, warrantied, exchange free of externality.

Cheers

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

LINKS

Constructive Mathematics:

Mathematical Intuitionism:

Operationalism:

Praxeology

MISES POSITION IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY?

Mises Human Action as Cosmopolitan Stoicism.

He was almost right. If Rothbard and the Rothbardians had not damaged his legacy so severely, he would not be ostracized by the main stream intellectual community. At present any mention of his name associates a public intellectual, an economist, or philosopher, with the pseudoscientific lunatic fringe.

Praxeology is a failed attempt at Operationalism, sure – but no one ELSE came close to developing economic operationalism but Mises. I only did it because I have the luxury of a century of additional development in computability (especially Turing), and because it’s clear now that the analytic program (attempt to convert philosophy into a science) has been a failure, and that the success in reforming both science and psychology has almost entirely been because of Operationalism.

Had Mises joined with Brouwer and Bridgman, the three of them might have saved us from a century of pseudoscience. But without a philosopher of ethics to unify them, Popper in the philosophy of science, Mises in Economics, Brouwer in mathematics, and Bridgman in physics all failed to come to the correct conclusion: that they were not in fact articulating logical constraints – because there is no logical constraint to theory-development. The logical constraint is only in the statement of promise (that you are telling the truth) that such a theory can be expressed existentially, as a sequence of operations (actions) or operational measures of observations. And as such, one’s theory, in any discipline, is free of content that was added by error, imagination, or deception. Man can testify to observation in the execution of recipes – all else is imagination. As such the practice of the sciences (or rather, the practice of *disciplined testimony* which the sciences developed, but which consists of nothing unique to the physical sciences) is a moral one, with ethical constraints.

As such, praxeology, mathematical intuitionism, operationalism, operationism, Popper’s critical preference, and the scientific method, as well as the discipline of science as currently practiced, are moral constraints, not logical ones. One can intuit a theory by whatever means possible. One can believe whatever he wishes to justify. But one’s promise of testimony to the actions that did or may produce consequences is a moral one, not a logical one.

As far as I know, the only meaningful reason to study economics for use in ethics and politics, is to justify the rule of law (Nomocracy), under the single rule of property rights, where property rights is as defined under Propertarianism, as property-en-toto (demonstrated property). And where that body of law suppresses sufficient involuntary transfer of property-en-toto, that the formation of a Nomocratic polity is possible. And where the formation and perpetuation of that polity is possible, because transaction costs are sufficiently suppressed that a rational choice for Nomocracy is possible, over a rational choice for statism. And that the normative preference of nomocratic rule over statist rule is maintained by the constant exercise of that body of law in daily life, rather than a phillosophical-rational, religio-moral, pedagogically-instructional, or normatively-habituated means of persistence.

If we look at his human action as an attempt to develop an economic version of stoicism – a mental discipline – I think it is probably a better frame of reference for his work than as economics or analytic philosophy.

As such I see him as creating a Cosmopolitan version of stoicism (economic/intellectual character) rather than western (Aryan if you will) stoicism (political/craftsmanship character).

Both forms of stoicism are early attempts at operationalizing philosophy for disciplinary action as an individual member of a complex division of labor in which we possess fragmentary information.

Since I quote him endlessly for his analysis of money and fiduciary media, which again, he (“a sequence of human actions” = “operational observations”) correctly uses operational analysis to isolate and articulate the causal rather than normative properties – I am clearly an advocate. But I am not an advocate of the misuse of Mises’ errors – his failed attempt to develop economic operationalism – to justify Rothbardian libertinism – an outright assault on the production of both high trust, and the commons – both of which are the primary competitive advantages constituent in the western indo-european (Aryan if you will) evolutionary strategy.

I walk by Mises’ childhood home every day. It has tempered my criticism. I see him making natural errors of Cosmopolitanism – as Hayek said “a victim of his upbringing”. Just as the Germans have made endless errors in conflating religion and philosophy to preserve their hierarchy and duty as a group competitive strategy. Just as British (Anglo/Irish/Scots if not the Belgae) have fought to preserve their island universalism despite the necessary suicide that results from universalism outside of their island (or the american island, or the Australian island.)

I will venture this post is one of the more important things that has been written about Mises in recent history, and my arguments, if not my criticisms will assist us in RESCUING Mises from the lunatic fringe, and RESCUING his work for use in intellectual discourse – as the first attempt at saving Economics through operationalism, the way that science and psychology (if not also mathematics and logic) have been saved by operationalism.

**I see myself as rescuing ALL of the Misesian/Hoppeian program from the fruitcake fringe: by laundering German, Jewish and British enlightenment fallacies – the attempt to universalize local evolutionary strategy – rather than simply adopt scientific epistemology (operationalism) as the only neutral tool for the use of studying group evolutionary strategies.**

Although it is, I am sure, somewhat difficult for those religiously devoted to immoral, libertine, Rothbardianism to either understand or accept.

I am quite sure I do not err in this analysis. A statement which I am aware further taunts libertines. But which my fellow aristocrats (libertarians-proper) both understand and expect from me as a promise. Because the anglo-empirical model of truth telling, quite opposite from the cosmopolitan, is that truth is the name for testimony. And as such I testify that to the best of my knowledge my statement is true. And that I bear the reputational consequences of my promise that this statement is true. This is the polar opposite of the Popperian, Analytic, and Cosmopolitan version of true: that truth is the unknowable province of god alone, and as such we can only ‘do what we can’, and as such are unaccountable for our words.

This ethic, this definition of truth, as performative – as operational, is what Kant was searching for, but could not find. And it is why both Jewish and German philosophy are dead ends. And it is why english philosophy became lost through its influence by the germans and the cosmopolitans.

We lost a century of philosophy to cosmopolitan pseudoscience in economics, politics, ethics and logic. Germans lost centuries to pseudo-philosophical religio-moralism. Mises can be seen in context as the most successful – if still failed – attempt to rescue german and cosmopolitan thought from its religious constraints.

– Cheers.

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev Ukraine

THE STRUGGLE TO PRODUCE A MORAL ECONOMIC SCIENCE

THE BRANCHES OF AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS

The German branch of Austrian economics offered an alternative proposition: that we can and should pursue inquiry into economics as a means of discovering how we may improve our institutions while preserving moral principles of cooperation. This position favors kin selection without encouraging parasitism.

The mainstream (anglo) position is instead, that we should pay the cost of immoral actions via our institutions if the aggregate benefits are justifiable. This is a philosophical bias that ist he result of the heavily outbred culture of the anglos who for all intents and purposes function as kin, and operate under the principle of kin selection. This position encourages parasitism.

By contrast, the Jewish branch of Austrian economics attempted, and failed, to cast this argument as one of science(instrumentalism and empiricism) versus logic(axiomatic deduction), while at the same time naming this axiomatic argument a ‘science’, despite not relying upon the scientific method – thus constructing a pseudoscience (meaning: using the term science for credibility without relying on the scientific method to establish credibility). This position seeks to make both parasitism and contribution to the commons impossible.

Just as universalism is common to the English, and duty common to the German, this attempt to create a pseudoscientific authoritarian philosophy was a result of the cultural bias of Judaism which itself relies upon authoritative law and contractual agreement rather than the european aristocratic egalitarian cultural demand for testifiable truth regardless of circumstances. Contract is a sufficient substitute for truth in low trust polities. But it is not a substitute for truth in high trust polities.

A TALE OF THREE CULTURES

Of these three positions, the German was the optimum: scientific, rational, and moral actions to achieve moral ends.

The anglo position uses science and aggregates and accepts immoral actions in order to attempt to achieve moral ends.

The German position uses science, reason and individualism in order to preserve moral conditions while achieving economic optimums.

The Jewish position relies upon pseudoscience to achieve individual optimums but ignores morality and commons altogether – because judaic law is constructed contractually, not on principle (truth telling), and as a diasporic culture, it does not require contribution to the commons as do land holding social orders.

Each of these cultural strategies is beneficial for island dwelling anglo universalists(truth), continent-dwelling german martial culture (duty), and disasporic un-landed jewish culture (contract).

However, if we separate the pragmatism of cultural group evolutionary strategy from that which is true independent of those cultural strategies – cultural definitions of true – only the German model survives scrutiny as containing the full suite of properties: truth, duty, commons, individual and collective morality, under science and reason.

THE PREFERENCE FOR THE AUSTRIAN MODEL IS A PREFERENCE FOR A MORAL DICIPLINE OF ECONOMICS

Had not the world wars disrupted the Austrian school and destroyed german civilization in a fractious civil war, this debate might have evolved and been completed earlier, instead of devolving into mainstream half-moral anglo aggregate morality, and a discredited heterodox school.

But at present the Austrian vision of a moral economics constructed for nations, preserving kin selection, preventing parasitism, preserving both individual and aggregate morality, preserving the commons, requiring truth-telling, and operating under ratio-scientific methods, is displaced for two reasons:

The post-war dominance of (dysgenic, suicidal) anglo universalism justified under Keynesian socialism and Rawlsian ethics. A suicidal strategy only possible under the unique conditions of western altruistic punishment. (See Wiki) Westerners are the only people to develop universal high trust and to break the familial cycle of corruption. However, this appears to have created a weakness in that we extend this trust suicidally and ignore the reproductive and evolutionary importance of the family, tribe, and nation, and in creating that high trust society in the first place.
The marginalization of the Austrian ambition for a moral economics because of the adoption of marxist ideological and propaganda techniques in advocating the pseudoscientific Jewish Austrian program – in no small part by the Mises Institute (without whom, and the use of the new medium of the internet, the pseudoscientific branch would likely have been extinguished.) As such the term Austrian is categorized under pseudoscientific and anti-scientific, rather than as the german branch originally evolved: the institutional means of improving moral cooperation in the pursuit of prosperity.

ADVANCES IN SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

Mises’s praxeology is a failed attempt at developing economic Intuitionism and Operationalism. Economics is of necessity, like all scientific investigation, a ratio-empirical methodology for the study of phenomenon beyond our direct perception. In his failure he attempted to create a pseudoscience to justify his authoritarian preferences.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

SCIENCE IS THE DISCIPLINE OF SPEAKING TRUTHFULLY – IN ALL DISCIPLINES

———————————————————————————-

Science is a moral discipline wherein we criticize our ideas, so that we can speak them truthfully:

— We test our reasoning with logic for internal consistency.

— We test our observations with external correspondence.

— We test existence of our premises with operations.

— We test the scope of our theory with falsifications.

Once we have tested our theories by these means, then we can say that we speak truthfully – and as such do no harm.

The central argument regarding truth:

… that humans in order to cooperate, humans evolved sympathy for intent – and are marginally indifferent in their judgement of intentions. This allows us to sympathetically test most human incentives if subject to the same stimuli (information). It is also why juries can functions, since this sympathetic testing of intentions is the criteria by which juries render decisions.

… that we cannot however sympathize with the equivalent of intentions (first principles) of the physical universe. So while we intuit and and can test man’s intentions, we cannot measure and test the universe’s first principles. As such, the best we can do is testify to observations and measurements of those phenomenon until at some point we know those first principles – if that is ever possible.

… but our observations must also be reduced to stimuli that can be sympathetically tested by others, and insulated from our deception, bias and error.

… we call this process ‘science’, but the practice of science is little more than a set of moral rules that instruct us as to how to eliminate deception, bias and error. The scientific method then, is merely a moral discipline: the means by which we struggle to speak the truth, as truthfully as we may possibly accomplish given the frailty of our reason.

… that giving witness to one’s observations, is testable by reproduction of a set of operational definitions. That operational definitions produce the equivalent of names, just as positional numbering provides quantities with names. Such names are insulated from deception, distraction, loading, framing and overloading. Theories are not. While we cannot demonstrate the absolute parsimony of a theory (that we know of), we can demonstrate that we truthfully conveyed our observations. In other words, we can testify truthfully to an ordered set of facts, even if we cannot testify truthfully to parsimony of a theory.

….that it is possible to state instead that all outputs of scientific investigation are true, if they are truthfully represented – where ‘scientific investigation” refers to the use of the scientific method, regardless of field of inquiry. But that we seek the most parsimonious statement of a theory, and we can never know that we have obtained it, we can only develop consensus that we cannot cause it to fail. This is, as far as I know, the best non-platonic description of truth available. Everything else is a linguistic contrivance for one purpose or another – possibly to obscure ignorance, and possibly to load ideas with moral motivation. Scientists load their contrivance of truth, and mathematicians load their contrivance of numbers, limits, and a dozen other things – most of which obscure linguistic ‘cheats’ to give authority to that which is necessary for the construction of general rules. (ie: the problem of arbitrary precision).

… that Popper did no investigation into science or the history of science prior to making his argument, and that as yet, we do not have a systematic account of the history of science. However, what history we do have, both distant and recent, is that science operates by criticism upon failure, where failure is demonstrated by via overextension of the theory.

…The reason for overextension rather than criticism as the operational preference being that it is economically inefficient (expensive) to pursue criticism rather than to extend a theory to its point of failure then criticize it. And as far as we know, this is how science functions in practice, and must work, because it is how all human endeavors must work. Because while a small number of scientists may seek the ‘truth’ (or whatever a platonist means by it), what scientists try to do is solve problems – ie: to manufacture recipes for useful cognition.

… Popper’s advice was merely moral given that the scope of inquiry in all human fields had surpassed that of human scale, where tests are subjectively verifiable. (I think this is an important insight because it occurred in all fields.) Einstein for example, operationalized observations (relative simultaneity for example) over very great distances approaching the speed of light using Lorenz transformations. And as Bridgman demonstrated, the reason Einstein’s work was novel was because prior generations had NOT been operationalizing statements ,and as such, more than a generation and perhaps two were lost to failure of what should have been an obvious solution. (See the problem of length, which I tend to refer to often as the best example.) I addressed this in a previous post, and what popper did was give us good advice, and while he made an argument that appears logical, like most rational arguments, unsupported by data, it is not clear he was correct, and in fact, it appears that he was not. The question is not a rational but empirical one.

… Popper unlike Misesian Pseudoscience, or Rothbardian Immoral Verbalisms, was engaged in a moral attempt both in politics and in science, and perhaps in science as a vehicle for politics, to prevent the pseudoscientific use of science – particularly by fascist and communists, to use the findings of science as a replacement for divine authority by which to command man. What popper did, particularly with his platonism, was to remove the ability for the findings of science to be used as justification for the removal of human choice. Popper, Mises, and Hayek were responsible for undermining pseudoscientific authoritarianism. Of the three popper is perhaps less articulate (possibly to obscure his objective), but certainly not wrong, so to speak. While mises’ appeal to authoritarianism (which is part and parcel of jewish culture) was entirely pseudoscientific, by claiming that economics was deductive rather than empirical, and justifying it under apriorism, instead of as I’ve stated, understanding that he was merely trying to apply operationalism to economic activity, which would merely demonstrate that Keynesian economics was immoral and deterministic, not unscientific.

But Popper, Mises, Hayek, Bridgman and Brouwer, did not find a solution to restoring the western aristocratic conditions for public speech.

They too were a lost in platonism a bit. Bridgman and Brouwer did understand that something was wrong, and were very close,b ut they could not make the moral argument. We have had a century now of attacks by verbal contrivance and we can demonstrate the destruction of our civilization by way of it. So the moral argument is no longer one of undemonstrated results. WE have the results. And we have a generation of men, myself included, trying to repair it.

One must speak truthfully, because no other truth is knowable. Intellectual products that are brought to market must be warrantied just as are all other products that are brought to market, and the warranty that you can provide is operational definitions (recipes, experience), not theories (psychologism, projections). And if you are not willing to stand behind your product then you should not bring it to market. Because you have no right to subject others to harm.

Intellectuals produce ideas (myself included), that is our product. We are paid in measly terms most of the time, for our product, but that is what we do. But it is no different from hot coffee or dangerous ladders, or defective gas tanks.

And given that one particularly prolific group of people has created marxism, socialism, postmodernism, libertine-libertarianism, and neoconservatism, it is about time we stopped allowing them to ship lousy products into society.

And rather than regulate them by government, the common law and universal standing will allow punishment of those who bring bad products to market.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

MORAL CONSTRAINT FROM LAW THROUGH MATHEMATICS

I hope that this spectrum: law, economics, assists us in understanding the position of praxeology in the list of moral constraints that require operational and intuitionistic tests of propositions, prior to making truth claims.

LAW: STRICT CONSTRUCTION

Strict Construction is an abused term where the courts instead use the terms Textualism and Original Intent. But under propertarian property rights theory Strict Construction refers to requiring that any law passed be accompanied by argument showing that such a law is specifically authorized by the constitution. In other words, laws constitute the permissible legal operations. And none of them can violate property rights. This is important because otherwise, if discretion is required, then judges can insert deception, imaginary content, bias and error into the body of law. (As they have done, circumventing the legislature, the constitution, and property rights.) As such the principle of Propertarian Strict Construction (as opposed to textualism’s strict construction) requires that we operationally define the construct of all any law. This principle is important because laws have the greatest affect on a polity – and often the greatest unintended effect upon individuals and the polity.

ECONOMICS: PRAXEOLOGY

Intuitionism (praxeology) in economics is important because manipulation of the economy causes redistributions, gains and losses. As a moral constraint, it is only slightly less influential than law.

PSYCHOLOGY: OPERATIONISM

Operationism in psychology was important in the recent transformation of psychology from a pseudoscience, to an experimental discipline, and because psychologists do produce, and did produce negative externalities – harm, to others. Not the least of which was multiple generations suffering from illnesses cast as cognitive problems.

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/199/1/operat.htm

MEDICINE: PROTOCOLISM (MEDICAL OPERATIONALISM)

Medical treatments and tests are discussed as protocols.

PHYSICS: OPERATIONALISM

Operationalism is physics was important because it demonstrated that we expended a great deal of time and money by NOT practicing operationalism and that Einstein’s innovation should have been much earlier and could have been if we had practiced it.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/operationalism/

MATHEMATICS: INTUITIONISM

Intuitionism in mathematics was less important because there are few if any externalities produced by classical mathematical operations other than the psychological fallacy that there exists some separate mathematical reality.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intuitionism/

ECONOMIC INTUITIONISM/OPERATIONALISM IS MEANINGFUL

Therefore the HIGHEST moral requirement for demonstration of construction is in the domain of economics wherein the greatest externalities are caused by economic policy.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/750292715060100/

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

RATIONALISTS JUST HAVE IT BACKWARDS – JUSTIFICATION RATHER THAN CRITICISM.

“The Silver Rule Wins over The Golden Rule Too – for the same reason.”

Macro economic phenomenon are emergent and non-deducible even if they are explainable. As such economics is no different from any other constructed upon laws : theories of arbitrary precision open to constant reformation. For economic theories to be testified as true, we must demonstrate that they are open to construction by sympathetic tests.

As such, just as the golden rule is backwards, and the silver rule is correct, Mises just has praxeology backwards, it’s that we can’t claim something is true unless we can explain it as rational actions, but that does not mean we cannot rely upon observations and instrumentation to help us observe and criticize emergent phenomenon. Empiricists claim that other than some intrinsic simple intuitions (grammar, intention, status signal, and empathy etc), all knowledge is gained from sense experience, and this includes all deductions (cognitive science agrees with this hypothesis). This is obvious to people educated after 1980, when cognitive science began to replace psychology, and accelerated after 2000, when pinker restated cognition.

Instrumentalists argue, correctly, that phenomenon must be reduced to stimuli open to human sense experience and comparison. This is also obvious.

But then how do we test our hypothesies? We cannot subjectively test physical phenomenon, nor can we reason with the first principles of the universe – we don’t know them.

So for physical phenomenon we must create experiments to test our hypothesis, where in human phenomenon the same test results are obtained by introspection: if subject to the same stimuli would a reasonable person come to the same conclusion? We could not judge intent or trust others if we did not have this ability so we are marginally indifferent in our ability to judge intentions if possessed of similar (symmetric) knowledge. (This is why informational symmetry is so important.)

So in matters of human action where we know the first principles, all phenomenon, whether deducible or emergent, must be explainable as a sequence of rational human actions each of which is subject to subjective testing by means of information and sympathy – or it cannot be true. Just as all measurements (observations) of physical tests must be possible to perform in order for the claims of the test to be true. (Bridgman). Just as all mathematical proofs must be open to construction via basic mathematical operations for them to be true. Just as any propertarian law must be constructed from productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfers free of negative externality.

So all scientific disciplines are identical in dependence upon empirical (sense experience) instrumental (reduction to sense experience) operational (existentially possible) constraints.

THE COUNTER-PROPOSITION

No one disagrees that if economic phenomenon are not explainable in rational terms that the theory cannot be true.

The question of economic science is how we can take advantage of emergent phenomenon to bring forward productivity and consumption (wealth) as a means of improving the commons. This is the purpose of credit and interest. But this principle can be applied in hundreds of permutations throughout the economy.

The moral (German Austrian) implication, is that this study must eschew immoral manipulation (thefts) and work only to improve the institutional means of moral cooperation without the conduct of thefts.

The immoral (anglo empirical) implication is that this study should seek Pareto optimums (Rawlsian ethics) by reframing ‘harm’ by discounting loss of choice by some to redistribute choice to others.

I agree with the German thesis, and expressly disagree with the anglo universalist fallacy which has gotten us to this state entirely because anglos were able to seduce the germans into the world war.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev Ukraine

JUSTIFICATION VS CRITICISM : WARRANTY IN NORMATIVE CONTRACT VS WARRANTY IN EXPLORATION INDEPENDENT OF NORMS

First, what do we mean by “knowledge”, and of those things we mean, what is merely allegory, and what is necessity?

Little of the universe is absent regular patterns. However, some are very noisy and difficult to find. Some are very subtle and hard to find. Some are either too large or too small to observe without relying upon instruments, and others must be deduced using logical instruments. We call these regular patterns ‘information’.

Humans can modify the real world in a variety of ways, leaving information behind. We can do this as simply leaving evidence of passage through a forces or field, or in archeological evidence. We can do this intentionally with cave paintings and writing. And we can do it with our architecture, monuments and earth works. We can do this by the memories that we transfer between generations through repetition of experience, advice and story.

A computer must run a program to create the experience we see before us when using it. Information must mix with memories, to create the experience we call ‘knowing’.

Knowledge is reconstructed from information by mixing with existing memories, just as meaning is transferred by the use of analogies to transfer properties. So information exists without a knowing subject. And that information may be very good, or very bad at producing the experience of knowledge in a subject.

But in colloquial language we seem to have an intellectual bias that wants to separate untrue knowledge from true, or at least tested, knowledge thereby conflating QUALITY of knowledge and EXISTENCE of knowledge. We can forgive philosophers this common error, since they are concerned most often with the persuasive quality (truth) of propositions.

And if we look carefully at the discussion of ‘knowledge’ we find philosophers conflating (a)existence/awareness, (b) risk/willingness to act, (c) truth content.

And moreover, truth content consists of two additional properties: (c.i) persuasive power assuming an honest participant, and (c.ii) parsimonious correspondence with reality (what we mean by ‘true’).

The reason that discussion of knowledge is problematic is that this term is a sort of catch-all for these separate properties. And so like many concepts, argument is a problem of conflating properties, each of which exists on a separate spectrum.

“Knowing” could mean ‘awareness gained through experience’, or ‘given what we know from experience, I am willing to act upon it’, or knowing could mean ‘through experience we believe this is true’.

So I think that the only POSSIBLE meaning of the category ‘knowledge’ is ‘awareness of a regular pattern that allows us to predict something, even if it is only to predict in the sense of identifying something as part of a category – the most simple prediction possible.

And then we have the persuasive power of knowledge in convincing the self or others, first to state something is possible, then second to state something is worthy of action (risk).

For example, no one ‘knows’ how to build a computer (or a cheeseburger for that matter) in the sense that they possess knowledge of construction of the constituent parts. So some knowledge can never be centralized except as a hierarchy of abstractions – trust in one another’s claim to actionable knowledge.

For these reasons (the number of causal axis in the category we call knowledge), I think we cannot improve upon casting knowledge as:

(a) awareness (existence) of a regular pattern combining information and memory to create an experience, which we then also remember.

(b) all knowledge is theoretical, and open to revision (no premises are certain)

where theoretical propositions contain both:

(d) truth content(parsimonious correspondence with reality).

JUSTIFICATOIN VERSUS CRITICISM = CONTRACT VS TRUTH

So I my problem is that ‘justified true belief’ is not false under the test of risk, but is not meaningful under the test of analytic truth. In this sense, it depends upon which thing we are talking about: willingness to act (justified true belief), willingness of others to insure actions (contractual justified true belief), and analytic truth (parsimonious correspondence with reality).

If a man gives witness in testimony and later on we find a video of the events, and it turns out that he is wrong, but that it is easy to understand how he was mistaken, we do not consider his testimony false. We only warranty what rational man is capable of warranting.

In science we warranty that we have done due diligence: we have criticized our own arguments. We testify that we have done due diligence – we have criticized our own position.

In this sense both justified true belief is necessary for contractual propositions, while critical rationalism (warranty) is the only epistemological possibility we can rely upon.

The fact that argument evolved out of law (debate in the polis) probably explains the origin of conflation of contractual justification according to the norms of the polity, with the pursuit of analytic truth in epistemological exploration.

The fact that most human action is contractual, and very little of our lives epistemic, explains the persistence of both the contractual (justificationary),and epistemic (critical scientific) as method, and the conflation of the term knowledge as a general term covering both contractual and epistemic uses.

Norms guide most human actions. Norms are habituated and therefore reduced to intuitions to function. The norms are contractual (justificationary – so that we avoid blame). Science by contrast, produces not actions but testimony. The problem is inverted. In science all we produce is testimony regardless of normative rules. In normative relations we produce actions that we justify as according to the normative rules of society.

So we testify that we were justified according to norms in contractual relations, and we testify that our statements are free of norms, imaginary, error, bias, habituated deception and outright deception, in science.

This is why science is a luxury good: it’s terribly expensive, and scientific testimony is terribly expensive. Justification allows us to use scientifically tested or evolutionarily tested general rules in real world actions – contractual relations.

And must. We cannot create general rules out of justificationary testimony, only out of critical testimony. For this reason, both justificationary and critical testimony will persist forever. While our warranties must be given by critical means, our testimony is forever justificationary. (I think that is fairly profound).

As far as I know, albeit in brief, this is the most accurate statement of our extant understanding of the question of knowledge, and why it has been so troublesome a concept.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

SCIENCE AS TRUTHFUL SPEECH – GERMAN RATIONALISM AND JEWISH COSMOPOLITANISM AS IMMORAL INFORMATION DISTORTION EQUAL TO THE INFORMATION DISTORTION OF KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS.

Occam’s razor:

Is it more likely that German rationalism and Jewish cosmopolitanism, both of which were intentionally designed as obscurant anti-scientific deceptions to re-impose their culture’s authoritarianism as a replacement for the faith needed to maintain group competitive evolutionary strategy, are correct in their classification of economics as an axiomatic logic (logically operational system), and that such a discipline is somehow not subject to the same moral and epistemological constraint in demonstrative method, as are all disciplines that claim to construct laws?

Or is it more likely that all disciplines – economics and mathematics included – seek to produce laws from which they can construct models – and that the hypotheses, theories, and laws within those models, require the same moral constraints in demonstrated method regardless of discipline – logical(internally consistent), experimental (externally correspondent), operational(existentially possible), intuitionistic (subjectively testable), and moral (constrained to voluntary transfers) – BUT (and that BUT is important) that each discipline requires only some subset of such properties given the domain of inquiry?

In other words, do not the moral rules developed in science constitute a universal method of moral inquiry into the production of true statements, regardless of discipline? Or are there no universal laws of moral inquiry for the purpose of developing truthful statements?

Is it more likely that more complex systems require greater moral constraint (testing) prior to making truth claims, and less complex systems less moral constraint (testing) prior to making truth claims, and that whether we require more or less constraint prior to making truth claims, depends upon the properties from which any given system of reasoning is constituted?

COMPARISONS

So lets compare the different approaches on just a few axis:

Some economic laws are deducible VS Economic Regularities are explainable by deduction, and thus those hypothesis obtain the status of theory, and when all marginally impactful permutations are identified, these theories can be claimed truthfully as laws.
All economic laws are deducible VS Some economic laws are deducible perhaps, but that does not they are not empirically based (obtained through observation). It means only that no instrumentation other than human-sense-perception is needed to make those observations and deductions. While most non-trivial economic phenomenon and the hypotheses theories and laws we use to describe them are ONLY instrumentally and empirically observable. But once observed, with the assistance of further empirical observations, they are also explainable by deduction using sympathetic testing.
Economic laws are deterministic VS Economic Laws are imprecise general rules of arbitrary precision, that demonstrate the greatest variation in outcome, of all general rules of arbitrary precision in all systems dependent upon the operational use of regular patterns (other than language), in all the logics (identity, mathematics, physics, economics, and language) with the least (precise) determinacy of the logics; because:

(a) humans act to bend such laws constantly, for personal gain, and;

(b) humans attempt to mitigate determinacy (equilibrium) by constructing various permanent disequilibrium that they can continue to extract benefit from, and;

(c) because causal density (opportunity) is so high, any equilibrating effect can be offset by any other equilibrating effect, and often function in combination, and;

(d) because non-regular events, outside the normal distribution (shocks/black swans) are more influential and less predictable than regular patterns.

that economics is unique methodological area of inquiry VS economics benefits merely from the fact that we can subjectively test first principles, whereas in physical science, as yet, we do not know the first principles, while in identity, naming, mathematics, we do. Even if we do not know it *yet* in physics, economics, language, and imagination. If we know the first principles of any system, we can in fact, explain all phenomenon using those first principles. Even if we cannot imagine or deduce or hypothesize all consequentially emergent phenomenon. And since we cannot deduce all economic phenomenon (there are many unsolved problems of economics, as well as mathematics, and certainly of science). It may be possible that in any complex system we will never exhaust all emergent phenomenon (although this certainly seems unlikely if the universe is deterministic).

UNDERSTANDING ARBITRARY PRECISION IN GENERAL RULES

(note: this sequence is a particularly interesting new idea)

The meaning of “arbitrary precision” across disciplines must be understood:

(a) The predictive precision of Identity (laws of categorization) remains tautological no matter what we do.

(b) The predictive precision of naming (laws of numbering) remains operational and tautological no matter what we do.

(c) The predictive precision of Mathematical laws (laws of relations) remains constant independent of physical scale. But since mathematics is an axiomatic system, we cannot take action to alter the consequences of mathematical systems (grok that for a second).

(d) The predictive precision of Physical laws (laws of causality) currently varies dependent upon physical scale because we do not know the first principles of the physical universe – yet. And we can alter the course of physical events and benefit from them – in fact the purpose of human action is to predict and alter the course of physical events in order to benefit from them.

(e) The predictive precision of Economic Laws (laws of human cooperation) varies considerably, and we constantly alter the course of events to benefit from them, by attempting to outwit the altered course of events.

(f) The predictive precision of Linguistic laws (laws of communication/negotiation) are extremely imprecise,demonstrating extraordinary variability, with only a few general, and somewhat deterministic rules such as the evolution toward song, or tonal speech, which requires less effort from the speaker, but the meaning of such speech appears both functional (increasing in information density while gradually losing earlier meaning).

(g) The predictive precision of Laws of Imagination (laws by which we can imagine things) is unknown, but at least if operationally limited, appears to be FUNCTIONALLY unlimited. (A function is the name for collection of mental operations reduced to a general rule that obviates the need for performing more primitive operations – a mental habit that we can trust.)

(h) The predictive precision of Inverse Laws of Imagination (laws by which we can describe categories that we cannot imagine), even if we can ever construct such a set of laws, is nearly useless except as a check on our claims of Laws of Imagination. This is because functions (general rules of arbitrary precision constituting deterministic results of complex operations) even if we cannot conceptualize the content of those functions (cannot operationalize them), appear at present to be infinitely scalable even if decreasingly precise.

This is the problem with economic laws – they are extremely imprecise compared to physical laws, although possibly more precise than linguistic, imaginary and inverse-imaginary laws. Predicting the future location of water and gas molecules in real world phenomenon is almost impossible except at very loose degrees of precision. Predicting the future actions of man in real world scenarios is even less precise. We can explain, historically, what man accomplished, but we cannot predict what any individual will experience.

Because of the time and complexity of human phenomenon, just as in physical phenomenon, we can act to alter the course of events to some degree, within the bounds of those imprecise laws.

Now there may be consequences to these actions: saving and interest have positive cumulative consequences, and expansionary credit has negative cumulative consequences. But that is not to say that we cannot distinguish between those actions that we can take to alter the course of events that produce positive and negative consequences. And that we cannot act to profit from the positive, and avoid actions that are negative. Banking and interest are economic actions. Weights and measures are positive economic actions. Laws that suppress free riding in all forms are positive economic actions. States as Insurer of last resort appear to produce a mix of positive and negative but overwhelmingly positive results. All these institutional actions constitute good policy – the production of beneficial commons that facilitate cooperation and prosperity.

Furthermore, the extension of organized suppression of free-riding into the bureaucracy, and into the system of representation, by eliminating the monopoly bureaucracy, and eliminating political representation, and eliminating legislative law, might be an additional institutional improvement that would facilitate human cooperation and prosperity.

Now we can argue that the Keynesian attempt to distort the monetary information system by involuntarily increasing everyone’s risk through ‘lying’ about demand, and therefore increasing employment and consumption is a terrible means by which to interfere with the economy. It is only slightly better than the destruction of the information system by which we cooperate in the economy by socialist and communist folly. But we may not say that there are other economic institutions that we could experimentally construct that would provide improved means of cooperation, and prosperity that would not constitute lies, any more than credit and interest constitute lies.

For example,

– To create an urban market, members (shareholders) must suppress the profitability of raiding and conquest of their market by those who are not shareholders.

– If tribal raiders and herdsman want to participate in an urban market then they must eschew theft and raiding for entry into the market. That is a voluntary exchange.

– If farmers work the land, and want to participate in the market using their excess production in order to buy goods that they cannot produce themselves, they must obey the rules of buyers and sellers set by the shareholders of the market.

– If people wish to abandon self production, and work entirely within the market they must adopt the behavior of shareholders and defend the exclusive means of their sustenance.

– If people no longer can work in self production, nor can they work in the market in order to obtain their sustenance, then they have no means of survival so continuing to participate in the shareholder agreement is no longer a rational exchange.

– If people who cannot work in the market are willing to work to maintain the shareholder agreement for shareholders (maintain the commons, including the commons of property rights, which makes the voluntary organization of production possible) then it is rational to pay them to construct the voluntary organization of production and to return to being consumers within that market – their contribution being not the consumption, but the production of the voluntary organization of production itself. However it is also rational to limit those people to one child so that they both can reproduce, but not commit the immoral act of imposing costs upon those who are productive, by generating additional offspring. This then constitutes a voluntary exchange and productive work, even if those people are not participating in the production of goods and services, they are participating in and being paid for the effort of constructing the voluntary organization of production.

So to say that it is not rational or scientific or necessary to experiment in the economy, or that such experimentation is not empirical (open to observation and measurement), is clearly false. It is merely that there are moral and immoral means of doing so, and that monetary policy as we currently practice it is immoral – and not very intelligent. It produces the predicted results. So it is clearly scientific and ‘true’. But that does not mean it isn’t immoral and harmful. And the cumulative effect of this policy is empirically genocidal by all extant measures.

SO BACK TO OCCAM’S RAZOR:

Isn’t the purpose of Rationalist and Cosmopolitan arguments of the heterodox so-called, Austrians, merely convoluted verbal justification for rebelling against political experimentation in the manipulation of the economy for the purpose of producing commons? Isn’t all their obscurantism just pseudoscientific justification for the desire to justify non-contribution to the commons? Isn’t it just an elaborate excuse for free riding?

Isn’t the more simple answer that each logic that we have developed was developed to test certain subsets of properties, and that each subset of properties requires testing against error, bias and deception. And that as the complexity of the phenomenon increases we must test or not test those properties intrinsic to the system that we seek to test?

Isn’t our fascination with the rules of mathematics simply because the means of deduction and the means of explanation are nearly identical: mathematical operations? Whereas mathematical discovery, all conclusions are assumed in the axioms and state-independent, whereas the result of human cooperation is determined more so by externalities than by the general rules? And that for any individual, events they experience are kaleidic and economic laws are only predictive in the aggregate?

Isn’t all the information necessary for prediction in an axiomatic system present at the definition of the axioms, while limited and insufficiently predictive information is present in economic laws? Aren’t economic laws the equivalent of bell-curves, rather than demonstrated tails? Isn’t the information necessary to predict tail events many orders of magnitude higher than predicting events in a regular distribution?

So the demonstrated evidence in the history of rationalism, the obvious incentives of rationalists as authoritarians, and the logical conclusion we must come to, is that deductive reasoning is non-predictive. Because deduction did not produce general economic rules, and it cannot identify candidates for general rules. It can only test whether general rules are true regardless of their origins, and explain those general rules as a set of operations.

Because we are not scientifically testing, experimenting with, those laws of human behavior, but we are scientifically testing the interactions of those various laws of human behavior in kaleidic action, and taking advantage of altering those phenomenon of human activity just as we take advantage of altering the course of events of physical phenomenon. We are not testing first principles but the interaction between emergent phenomenon caused by the use of those principles in real time.

The laws of the physical universe and of man, appear to be trivial, but the emergent phenomenon of those simple rules appears to be infinite and unpredictable, even if they are explainable.

The physical universe and man, may in fact, follow predictable regular rules. Those rules are only interesting and useful in so far as we can learn how to bend them, and break them, for our use.

Property rights for example, bend and break human behavior. Credit and interest for example let us bend and break human behavior. Monogamous marriage lets us bend and break human behavior. The extension of property rights and the prohibition on inbreeding bent and broke the human behavior that made high velocity economies possible. First principles of human behavior may exist but novel means of manipulating it for the production of prosperity are always available to us.

THE PURPOSE OF TRUTH IS TESTIMONY – OUR INFORMATION SYSTEM

Just as we may not interfere with the monetary system because of the cumulative effect of ‘lies’ created by informational distortion, we may not interfere with the ‘truthful’ information system created by verbal error, bias, distortion and deception, because of the cumulative effect of ‘lies’ created by error, bias, and deception.

There is no reason we must hide our group evolutionary strategies, other than for the purposes of parasitism – lying. And if we wish to understand the law of human cooperation, it is that cooperation is only rational in the absence of parasitism, and that only truthful, fully informed, productive, warrantied, voluntary exchange free of negative externality constitutes ‘true’ information. And that all else is, just as monetary information is,

THE QUESTION IS NOT WHETHER SOMETHING IS EMPIRICAL OR RATIONAL, BUT WHETHER IT IS TRUE, TRUTHFULLY STATED, AND WARRANTED.

And there is but one universal moral principle:

(a) truthfully stated

(b) fully informed

(d) warrantied

(e) voluntary exchange

(f) free of negative externality

And there is but one universal moral warrant: that any statement is:

(a) internally consistent (logically tested)

(b) externally correspondent (evidentially tested as meaningfully predictive and/or explicative)

(d) existentially possible (operationally defined)

(e) moral(independent of immoral transfer)

As such, since German Rationalism, and Jewish Cosmopolitan Rationalism is not warranted, truthful speech, and cannot constitute a moral, voluntary exchange, and is equal in immorality to economic disinformation created by distortion of the money supply.

It’s not that Keynesian economics is unscientific it’s that it’s immoral. It’s not so much that German Rationalism and Jewish Cosmopolitan rationalism are not simply a backwards-expression of intuitionism and operationalism under empiricism, despite it’s inability to produce insights and only explain them. It’s instead, that the rationalist position is an attempt to intellectual outlaw investigation into emergent economic phenomenon – which is the purpose of scientific investigation, just as much as experimental psychology is the discipline that investigates first principles – and which has discovered the reason for our long list of cognitive biases that produce non-rational actions not anticipated by the classical model.

There is no need for German and Jewish dishonest Rationalism, any more than there is a need for Keynesian dishonest economics. Liberty is possible under science, because science is the language of morality – of truthful speech free of involuntary transfer, by fraud. Liberty is a synonym for objective morality.

Our solution is neither British Keynesian immorality nor German and Jewish immorality, nor anglo-american pseudoscientific immorality (neo-puritanism), but truth speaking, and moral, voluntary exchange across peoples with different evolutionary strategies.

Truth, Science, and Morality are synonyms.

And we would all be better off without all the immorality, pseudoscience, rationalism, and lying.

Voluntary exchange is enough.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

THE REFORMATION OF WESTERN THOUGHT

Science as we understand it is an attempt to create a discipline of truthful speech.

Science as we understand it does not ‘recognize’ this attribute of science.

Science as we understand it does not include those properties we call costs.

Science as we understand it does not include those properties we call moral.

Science as we understand it can be extended to include those properties we call costs and morality.

Science as we understand it can then be restated as the discipline of constructing moral truthful speech.

Science then is identical to epistemology in philosophy, and philosophy en toto as a discipline is begun, as its first purpose, with ethics (morality), not metaphysics.

Law can now be scientifically constructed.

Truth, science, law, morality are now identical.

All else currently masquerading as philosophy, is no longer categorizable as philosophy, but as theology, psychology, or deception.

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev Ukraine.

TRANSLATING KANTIAN RATIONALISM INTO SCIENTIFIC AND TESTIMONIAL SPEECH

Lets translate Kantian Rationalism into scientific and testimonial speech.

I’m going to teach epistemology by using economics in order to repair much of the damage that has been done to epistemology by the Platonists(mathematics), and the Rationalists (Kant etc), and the Analytic Philosophers (Just about all of the 20th century).

*Reality consists of a limited number of actionable dimensions and by using economics we are able to include all of them, and therefore avoid the errors that the platonists, rationalists, and analytics have introduced into philosophy.

“DEFINITIONS AND SERIES”

1) Empirical:

Based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic. “From Observation”.

2) A Priori:

“independent of observation.”

There are three dimensions to claims of a priori truth claim:

i) Aprioricity vs A posteriori,

ii) Analyticity vs Syntheticity, and

iii) Necessity vs Contingency

Therefore we can produce at least the following spectrum of a priori claims.

(a) Analytic A Priori: tautological: 2+2=4 and all deductions thereof.

(b) Synthetic A Priori : Increasing money increases inflation.

(d) Contingent Synthetic A Priori: “all other things being equal, as a general trend, increasing demand will increase supply, although we cannot know the composition of that supply in advance, we can identify it from recorded evidence.”

This produces a an ordered spectrum of declining precision:

(a) Identity(categorical consistency) – Analytic A Priori

(b) Logical:(internal consistency) – Nec. Synthetic a priori

(d) Existential: (operational consistency) – Cont. Synth. a priori

Which corresponds to the testable dimensions of numbers.

(a) identity (numbers)

(b) logical (sets)

(d) existential (constructible)

(e) time is unaccounted for in the a priori model.

Which corresponds to dimensions of physical reality

(a) point

(b) line

(d) object

(e) time (change)

Which corresponds to a subset of the dimensions of actionable reality , the full set of which we express in fully express in Testimonialism as:

(a) Identity(categorical consistency)(point)

(b) Logical:(internal consistency)(line)

(d) Existential: (operational consistency)(object)

(e) Volitional: (rational choice of rational actor)(change)

(f) Reciprocal: ( rational exchange between rational actors)(changes)

(g) Limited: (Limits: At what points does the description fail?)

(h) Fully Accounted: (Have all costs and consequences been accounted for – defense against cherry picking and special pleading.)

Which together account for the totality of actionable reality (by man) that we currently know of (and its quite hard to imagine anything else is possible).

DEDUCTIBILITY FROM A-PRIORI PROPOSITIONS

Ergo, while one can claim the tautological truth (the Analytic A Priori), and one can claim the ideal(logical) truth (the Necessary Synthetic A Priori), one cannot ever know the non-tautological(identity, The Synthetic A Priori), non-ideal(Contingent Synthetic A Priori ) truth, because we rarely possess sufficient information to do so.

What does this mean? It means that we can deduce from Analytic A Priori and Necessary Synthetic A Priori, but we cannot deduce from General Synthetic A Priori, or Contingent Synthetic A Priori Statements because we cannot know if such deductions are true (for specific cases).

So the problem with making a priori claims in economics is that you can say statements about statements but not about consequences in reality. You can only say ‘all other things being equal’, we should observe this effect. You cannot say, “we will always observe this effect’. Why? Because we don’t always observe such effects, and economics is rife with examples, the most commonly cited being unemployment does not necessarily increase, and prices are sticky – and for good reason.

(NOTE: Now that’s sufficiently complicated that I almost confused myself, and I might need a day away from it to make sure I didn’t screw up what someone might read into those last two paragraphs, but otherwise it’s correct.)

The innovation that menger brought to the table was to bring the principle of relative change from calculus to economics. The principle contribution of hayek was to transform transform the use of materials to the use of information as the model for all social phenomenon. The principle contribution of Popper was to bring the information model to philosophy, and in particular the philosophy of science and to model scientific investigation on a market. This followed the transition in physics from the use of electromagnetic fields to that of information. Which then brought physics and mathematics into full correspondence.

What Hayek and popper and the classicals and the keynesians all missed and brouwer in math, bridgman in physics, and mises in economics, and the entire analytic and continental movements missed was that man cannot make truth claims.

For example, we did not think the ideas of time(velocity of change), length(distance), and space(volume) varied. Einstein’s discovery was the same as mises’, brouwer’s and bridgman’s: that all our pretense of axioms are false. If our idea of length and time can be false, every other idea that is obvious to our senses and reason can be false.

The difference between economics and physics is in :

(a) volition vs determinism

(b) reciprocity vs transformation

THE SCIENTIFIC (UNIVERSAL EPISTEMOLOGICAL) METHOD

“DEFLATION”

(0) The purpose of the scientific method is to eliminate ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, fictionalism, and deceit from our statements about reality.

“DIMENSION”

(1) We can make:

(a) statements about experiences(metaphysical), or

(b) statements about statements(ideal), or

(d) statements about existential cause and effect(change).

(e) statements about volition

“CLOSURE”

(2) No test of any dimension can be completed without appeal to the subsequent dimension. (ie: godel. this is profoundly important. no dimension can provide a self-test.) Ergo, all speech is deflationary.

“CRITICAL RATIONALISM”

(3) All descriptive propositions of existential cause and effect (change) are contingent.

“CRITICAL PREFERENCE”

(4) The only method of decidability between two or more non-false cause and effect propositions(change) is cost. This is a clarification of Occam’s razor. And appears to be true, for the simple reason that nature cannot but choose the least cost method, and man generally chooses the least cost method – even if we cannot know the full causal density of his considerations.

DUE DILIGENCE AGAINST IGNORANCE, ERROR, BIAS, DECEIT

(5) The only method of making a truth claim is to perform due diligence in each dimension of reality (a ‘premise’ of the consequential dimension) applicable to the cause and effect phenomenon. (ie:physical world can’t engage in rational choice, or voluntary exchanges)

Again, those dimensions are:

(a) Identity(categorical consistency)(point)

(b) Logical:(internal consistency)(line)

(d) Existential: (operational consistency)(object)

(e) Volitional: (rational choice of rational actor)(change)

(f) Reciprocal: ( rational exchange between rational actors)(changes)

(g) Limited: (Limits: At what points does the description fail?)

(h) Fully Accounted: (Have all costs and consequences been accounted for – defense against cherry picking and special pleading.)

“DARWINIAN SURVIVAL OF IDEAS”

(6) All propositions (facts, propositions, theories) must survive the markets for criticism at the observer-mental-testing, observer-action testing, market application testing, and market survival testing. In other words, the universal epistemological method follows this lifecycle:

(a) observation

(b) *Free association* (F -> observation)

(d) *Hypothesis*

(e) Perform Due Diligence (a-h) above. (F -> free association )

(f) *Theory*

(g) Publish to the market for application

(h) Survival in the market for application(F ->observation – of failures )

(i) *Law*

(j) Survival in the market for refutation (F-> observation – of failures)

(k) *Habituation into metaphysical assumptions*

“SPECIAL CASES”

This universal epistemological process is universal despite the fact that various results can be identified with it. Because just as we find prime numbers largely by trial and error we find special cases of statements by trial and error. But when we find these statements we have to ask ourselves what is it we are finding?

(a) Sensations: statements about experiences(metaphysical), or

(b) Logic(analytic): statements about statements(ideal), or

(d) Theory(Synthetic): statements about existential cause and effect(change).

(e) Morality: statements about volition

(f) Testimony: statements about the fully accounted change in state of a given instance of the statement we are making (I have a credit card report that shows John Doe, on 1/1/2018 at 4:06:32 exchanged $2.00 for a hershey’s candy bar at Don’s newspaper stand then existing on 225th and Main in Cityname.”)

EXAMPLES

The most common special cases that we find are those that are impossible to contradict at the same dimension. (a,b,c,d,e) above.

(a) Sense(Metaphysics): we cannot sense a ball is green and red all over at the same time.

(b) Logic: If I issue credit on fractional reserves, I will increase the supply of money.

(c) Fact: The differences between commodity money and note money include but are not limited to: liquidity, demand, exchange fee or interest gain, portability(weight/volume), reserve risk, vendor risk.

(d) Theory: All other things being equal, if we increase the supply of money, prices will eventually increase accordingly and lower the purchasing power of payments against debts.

(e) Morality: All other things being equal, when we force majoritarian decisions on the polity by using representative democracy, we create a monopoly out of the market for the commons, and eliminate the possibility of cooperating on means even if we pursue different ends.

“ECONOMIC LEVERS”

Polities can generally use this series of levers to affect the economy.

-Near Term-

(a) Monetary Policy

(b) Fiscal Policy (Spending)

-Medium Term-

(d) Regulatory/Legislative Policy (also includes price controls etc)

(e) Immigration-Deporation policy / Expand military, WPA etc.

-Long Term-

(f) Human Capital Policy (Education policy)

(g) Institutional Policy (laws, regulations, bureaucracies, institutions, banks)

(h) Strategic (military) Policy

“SCHOOLS OF ECONOMICS”

The schools of economics reflect the culture and class of their origins. These groups do not acknowledge that their strategies and biases are as I”ve stated them here but their research evidence states the contrary. So I have tried to provide a general Spectrum of the institutions by what I understand is their culture/class bias.

a) “Austrian / Rothbardian” (“Jewish”, Separatist) : Rule of Credit, Parasitic Optimum, Separatist / Anarchism.

+Financial Class Bias. Anti-Commons Bias.

(As far as I know, no university teaches the Jewish Austrian method.)

b) “Mason-ism” (“Anglo Libertarian”, Right ) : Optimum Rule of Law, Nash Optimum, Minimal State / Christian Monarchy

+Entrepreneurial Class Bias.

(the only University I know of using this program is George Mason.)

The “Mason-Libertarian” school places greater emphasis on maximizing the voluntary cooperation of individuals and organizations through reduction of impediments to ethical and moral cooperation.

c) “Classical” (“Chicago”, Anglo, Center Right), Rule of Law, Insured Nash Optimum, Parliamentary State / Classical Liberalism.

+Middle classes bias. (I would argue ‘not biased’)

All other things being equal, the Chicago school places greater emphasis on policy that insures against error and failure by seeking formulas and rules that investors, businesses, and consumers can predict, thereby preserving rule of law, and maintaining the prohibition on discretionary rule.

d) “Mainstream” (“Saltwater”, Center Left) : Mixed Discretionary Rule, Pareto Optimum, Social Democracy

+Working Class Bias, Consumer Bias, Female bias(anti-male bias). Minority(anti-white) bias. Underclass Bias (anti-entreprenurial bias).

All other things being equal the mainstream seeks to optimize consumption at all times, using every lever available, and favors abandoning rule of law, and adopting rule that is increasingly empirical, reactive, and discretionary.

e) “Left Mainstream” (“Saltwater”, “Jewish left”) : Authoritarian Rule, Anti-Aristocracy(War), Extractive Maximum (Predatory), Socialism/Communism

+Underclass (outsider) Bias.

This is the Krugman/Stiglitz/Delong club of leftist economists maximizing both consumption and financial extraction as a means of undermining western aristocratic civilization and western norms and traditions and rule of law.

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS

–“…performative…”

You keep using terms that I don’t think you understand, which is why Kant invented those terms: to conflate the empirical and the rational. He was afraid of the anglo empirical revolution. For good reason.

—“…morality…”—

Correct. Morality (reciprocity) requires inter-agent action. So does all economic activity. Economic activity can consist of moral (reciprocal) and immoral (unequal, irreciprocal) actions. We can make a claim that statements about irreciprocal (involuntary) actions in economics are immoral or we can claim that they are false. Whether you understand it or not, Mises is saying that its false not immoral, when he says ‘it’s not economics’.

—“That you can verify something in reality doesn’t mean you need to empirically test it.”—

We cannot solve the problem of ‘all other things being equal’ in order to understand why predicted phenomenon either vary widely, or do not exist.

The neutrality of money does not appear to exist, because relative changes can propagate into various niches that absorb those changes, just like pennies being lost in landfills (so to speak).

—“I can observe that two plus two equals four but I don’t need to design an empirical test to prove it.”—

Yes but then it’s a tautology, whereas the nearly all economic phenomenon are only general rules.

—“Likewise, I can observe that minimum wages increase unemployment all other things being equal, but I don’t need to conduct an empirical test to prove it.”—

That’s just the thing, we aren’t trying to prove that it should increase unemployment, only that it turns out it that a lot of the time it doesn’t. Or rather, that the consequences of it are externalized and invisible. So where does it go? Well first it increases prices to consumers in the case of minimum wage workers it maintains employment but it prevents rotation of new workers into the economy. And the question is, is that a net gain or a net loss for everyone? Well, it’s immoral to both conduct the test, and the consequences are immoral. But does that mean the those consequences are not empirically measurable and therefore whether the policy is net beneficial? That is what economists measure.

Secondly, if we think some good is achieved through raising the minimum wage, how can we accommodate the externality of lower rotation through the job pool? For example what if raising the minimum wage prevents least common denominator service economies? (Racing to the bottom). Is that something people prefer? In other words, would you rather have better service and higher unemployment (and greater subsidies for non-performers?)

The underlying question is this: if prices are increasing profits can we capture more of that increase for hourly employees than we do for management, owners, and investors (or creditors)?

So there is no difference between increasing the supply of money in order to temporarily increase consumer purchasing power at the expense of debt-holders, and increasing the minimum wage in order to capture a rise in prices for laborers at the expense of owners and investors.

Or stated even more simply: given that economies are always changing velocities, can we redirect changes in state between participants without ‘killing the goose’ (destroying the system of production).

Well the answer is a moral one, not a logical or empirical one.

And the reason to claim otherwise is to use the false pretense of ‘unscientific’ or ‘logical positivism’ or ‘a priori’ or ‘logical contradiction’ to create a straw man as a means of preventing investigation into the science of economic immorality: economic manipulation by the forcible involuntary transfer of property between individuals.

(Which is exactly what mises and rothbard were doing: shaming via straw man using obscurantism by overloading even well intended people with half truths that when fully expressed are false.)

That’s the question people ask with these issues. No one questions if it will increase unemployment. They question the limit before it increases negative unemployment. The same as taxation. No one questions that taxation will produce declining revenues. But empirically, what is the maximum taxation that they govt can achieve before that happens – and what are the consequences.

CLOSING

Now you probably have no idea how profound this bit of text is. And I suspect you could spend a few months integrating it into your thought process. But that’s in large part, the state of the art in epistemology.

THUS ENDETH THE LESSON.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

WHICH IS MORE LIKELY THE CASE: A PURPOSEFUL DECEPTION OR THE POSSIBILITY OF ANTI-SCIENTIFIC RATIONALISM?

That people “do things for reasons” tells us precisely nothing about the emergent effects of economic phenomenon, nor how to manipulate the economic information system such that we shift production and consumption forward.

That people do things for reasons tells us precisely nothing about the temporal relations between cause and effect, and whether we can manipulate conditions to mitigate effects or change time.

That people do things for reasons tells us precisely nothing about how to deduce emergent phenomenon. Scientists were borne out and praxeology abandoned: praxeology was unfruitful as a means of exploration. And it was unfruitful because the information necessary to perform a deduction (which what a deduction requires) does not exist in the axioms. THIS IS NON ESCAPABLE DEFECT OF AXIOMATIC PRAXEOLOGY – which is why Mises and Rothbard both had to admit that economics was both rational and empirical. One cannot deduce true conclusions from false premises. And incomplete premises provide insufficient information for the construction of deductive truths.

So what is more likely? That instrumentalism empiricism, operational definitions and intuitionistic testing are necessary in economics just as they are in all fields? Or that economics is somehow “unique”, and that rationalism is just another authoritarian program with a deceptive hidden agenda masked by obscurantist language?

Even if both propositions were demonstrably equally fruitful, which one is warrantable? In other words, if you will be put to death for being wrong, in a choice between a rationally deduced justification and a ratio empirically criticized definition, which do you choose to bet your life upon? It is one thing to make a statement of faith, another to review the history of rationalist thought, and particularly of cosmopolitan rationalism, and concluding that it has been and remains a failed enterprise.

Mises only wants to ban government interference in the economy so that he can persist in non-contribution to the commons, and systemic parasitism. All his work is a justification of that separatist ambition.

Mises suggests we create a model out of economic laws, but admits that we must use empirical evidence to identify those laws. So just as we create a model of physical reality without nowing first principles, we create a model of cooperative economic reality knowing first principles. But just as we may never deduce the full compliment of permutations and emergent phenomenon from simple physical rules (see Fractal logic) we may never deduce the full compliment of permutations and emergent phenomenon from simple behavioral rules. This is the nature of complexity. As such, while we can explain emergent phenomenon we cannot deduce it. And without instrumentation we cannot observe it.

I think the entire intellectual world has explained sufficiently that the promise of praxeology is nonsense. I think that we now understand the anglo, german and cosmopolitan errors. I think it is obvious that praxeology is a defense of cosmopolitan separatism – an attempt to prohibit the production of an economic commons that is inescapable by free riders.

I think the whole intellectual world has demonstrated convincingly that economics is practiced as a science, and must be practiced as a science, and that all insights of the German Austrians were added to mainstream economics, and the jewish Austrian movement was abandoned as unscientific (untrue). It is only recently that we know the motivations for creating an untrue proposition – or at least an unproductive pseudoscientific resistance movement. Just as marx, cantor, and freud were cosmopolitan pseudoscientific reactionaries, mises and rothbard were cosmopolitan pseudoscientific reactionaries.

I am trying only to demonstrate the libertine movement, like all three cosmopolitan movements, is an obscurantist and dishonest one, so that in the future others can outlaw all obscurantists attacks on high trust civilization by mystical, rationalist and pseudoscientific means.

I originally meant only to criminalize Postmodernism, until I understood that socialism, postmodernism, libertinism, and neo-conservatism had the same objective – the destruction of the western high trust ethic, and the western competitive advantage of creating commons, by preventing the construction of commons, licensing parasitism on any commons, and forcing the people to pay the costs of adventurism that is against their self interest but within their moral dispositions.

As such, all libertine arguments, like all cosmopolitan arguments, are either lies by their originators, or vectors for lies by unwitting fools.

As such it is necessary to construct an honest, truthful, scientific institutional model for the construction of a condition of liberty by the only means possible: expansion of property rights to prohibit all such forms of fraud and theft by obscurantist deception.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

THE ANTI-ROTHBARDIAN CANON

(intellectual arms dealing) (retaking the brand of liberty from the lunatic fringe)

Rothbardians are relying upon and spreading numerous fallacies: (a) the fallacy of the NAP/IVP as the moral and legal basis for an anarchic polity, (b) the fallacy of aggression rather than the necessity of trust, (c) and the fallacies of the origin of property rights as either intrinsic or augmentative, (d) and the fallacy that economics is aprioristic rather than empirical and operational.

And because of these fallacies, all Rothbardians – and in practice, all anarcho-libertarians who subscribe to these fallacies – expend politically wasted effort themselves, distract from more productive efforts of others, perpetuate ideas that have been demonstrated to fail in the market for political preference, materially harmed the brand of liberty, and hindered our possibility of obtaining liberty by confusion, misdirection and delay. Rothbardian ethics are objectively immoral under rational analysis, and the market has deemed them immoral by experience, consideration and intuition. All forward motion on liberty has been toward classical liberalism and classical liberal ethics, and decidedly against rothbardian ethics – contrary to the claims of rothbardians.

Since libertarian leaders have worked for and achieved a cult language and cult status that is insulated from criticism and innovation by faith in these principles; then the only alternative is to make rothbardian and misesian arguments intellectually embarrassing, and argumentatively impossible to use in public discourse, by arming opponents with the means to defeat them.

At the very least this will limit the damage that they can do. But it will also cleanse the liberty movement, and the brand name ‘libertarian’ of its acquired continental and cosmopolitan absurdity, and allow classical liberals, aristocratic egalitarians, and private government advocates, all of whom advocate for high trust societies, to return the discourse on liberty to rational, empirical, and historical grounds.

CONTRARY TO ROTHBARDIAN AND MISESIAN COSMOPOLITAN FALLACIES:

FREE RIDING

-free riding vs natural rights-

Upon agreeing to cooperate, one takes upon the moral hazard of free riding. Free riding is an logical antagonist to cooperation. If free riding is present, then it is not logical to cooperate. Property emerged prior to economic production as a prohibition on free riding prior to the division of labor and most likely as monogamy. The property rights constitute a precise, positive legal articulation of the general negative necessity of preventing free riding such that cooperation is a rational choice.

MINIMUM RIGHTS

– minimum necessary set of property rights-

The minimum necessary prohibitions on free riding include both the criminal and the ethical, with the option for negotiation on the moral. Otherwise transaction costs are too high for the rational choice of an anarchic polity over an authoritarian one. No ingroup polity of any kind exists without inclusively criminal, ethical, and moral prohibitions. It is possible to construct a federation of polities, as the medieval monarchies demonstrated, wherein cooperation between factions is limited to low trust – enforcement of merely criminal prohibitions – but it is not possible to form a voluntary polity without prohibition of at least criminal and ethical, if not some modicum of moral prohibitions. People demonstrate that they will demand an authority to suppress immoral action, or to mandate universal moral behavior, if the common law does not provide a means of preventing immoral behavior. (Where immoral behavior constitutes an involuntary transfer of costs by moral hazard, most commonly in the form of free riding.) In other words, the jewish quarter and the transient gypsies can only survive if they constitute small minorities at the will of an omnipotent host ruler – which we saw under both byzantine, muslim and aristocratic european societies. That is not liberty. That is merely a form of tolerance used to reduce costs.

INSUFFICIENCY OF NAP

– the NAP/ISV is insufficient in scope for the formation of a voluntary polity –

The NAP under ISV only prohibits criminal, but not unethical or immoral or conspiratorial, or conquest behaviors. For this reason it is insufficient basis for the discipline of cooperation: ethics and morality, and as basis for the institution of law: the definition of property rights.

Instead, property rights must address all ethical and moral conflicts that are necessary to eliminate market demand for authoritarian intervention. And since all objective moral arguments and corresponding property definitions, consist of involuntary transfers that violate the prohibition on free riding, we can construct no libertarian argument against it.

Unless the scope of prohibitions on free riding is sufficient, transaction costs render demand for the state preferable to demand for liberty.

IGNORING TRUST

-the degree of trust determines economic velocity: wealth-

Secure, and extensive Property rights, that suppress free riding, such that all are required to contribute to production, rather than survive off of parasitism, create trust: the ability to take risks, and to increase the velocity of production and trade, by reducing transaction costs.

The level of trust corresponds directly to the degree of suppression of free riding created by the scope of prohibition of property rights, enforceable under law.

The economic velocity of an economy corresponds directly to the degree of trust formed in a polity by the legal enforcement of property rights.

FAILED CONSTRUCTIVISM

-Mises’ legacy is that he failed to produce a constructivist argument-

During the late nineteenth century a movement to prevent a newly emergent form of logical mysticism (platonism) emerged under various names: intuitionistic and constructivist mathematics, operationalism in science, various linguistic movements in logic, and misesian praxeology in economics.

All of these movements correctly intuited some problem with the emerging platonic concept of truth, but failed to accomplish it. This is because, constructive proof, correspondent proof (testing) and correspondent hardening (falsification) were not understood as ethical prohibitions on truth claims – and that truth was performative. That the act of testimony required demonstration of construction (internal consistency) demonstrating knowledge of construction, in addition to correspondence (external correspondence which demonstrates knowledge of use), and attempted falsification (demonstrating knowledge of durability).

Mises intuited correctly, like intellectuals in other fields, that something was erroneous with the work of positivist (correlative, but not causal) economists. But he failed to grasp that praxeology was a problem of empirical observation, reduction to operations, testing those operations by sympathetic experience, before one could make a truth claim about any economic phenomenon.

Mises simply failed. He failed worse than the advocates of operationalism and intuitionism. Who only failed to overcome objections. But his failure was compounded by the fact that had he correctly identified the problem of performative truth – that the constraint upon economic statements was one of testimony (truth telling), rather than deduction from first principles, it is possible that the leaders of other fields would have understood their predicament, and correctly distinguished between performative truth, constructive truth, correspondent truth, and ultimate truth.

ETHICAL AND EMPIRICAL NOT LOGICAL

-praxeology is both an empirical, and an ethical constraint-

As such, praxeology, whether we constaint it to action (rational action), cooperation (ethics), or economics (the voluntary organization of production) is a scientific process like all other epistemic processes, where we make observations, construct a theory, test it for proof of correspondence, falsify it for proof of durability, test our knowledge of construction for proof construction, and testify that we have proofs of correspondence, falsification, construction, and therefore possess the ethical right to make a truth claim. Once we have made such a claim we have a theory. If we, as all specialists, cannot find a means of falsifying it, then we have a law.

All empirical concepts must follow this process. All technological innovation must follow this process. All acts of production must follow this process. All pursuit of knowledge must follow this process.

(Note: I am not sure if falsification is a test of parsimony or not. I think that may be the correct terminology – or something close.)

CONFLATION OF THEORETICAL AND SCIENTIFIC

-Conflation of Theoretically Descriptive Science with Axiomatically Prescriptive Logic-

The conflation of theoretical systems which are limited to their correspondence to reality, and axiomatic systems which are limited only to their statements. Theoretical systems consist of descriptive statements constrained by reality, and axiomatic systems consist of *prescriptive* statements, not constrained by reality. Mises claim that economics is both aprioristic, axiomatic and scientific is by definition a pseudoscientific statement, since the definition of a science is that which adheres to the scientific method. Models may be constructed by axiomatic declarations, but any correspondence with reality requires that we accept that those axiomatic declarations, constitute analogies to theoretical descriptions whose basis is always empirical.

FALLACY OF A PRIORISM VS EMPIRICISM

-Analysis of human behavior is an empirical pursuit-

Praxeology (the study of action) , The Logic of Cooperation (the study of ethics), and Economics (the study of the voluntary organization of production) meet the criteria for empirical sciences, under which, through observation, we can reduce to hypothesis, theory and law.

And with these laws we can construct axioms, for use in models, which function as logical instruments that allow us to contemplate what our limited cognitive abilities cannot contemplate without the use of various logical instruments: language, narrative, Operationalism, logic, numbers, mathematics.

We can then test the truth of these axioms operationally and attempt to deduce whether it is possible for rational actors to perform according to the hypothesis, theory and law. If we cannot operationally describe those actions, and validate them through sympathetic experience as being rational, then they are not true. (This is the technique used in intuitionist mathematics.)

-constancy of relations vs arbitrary precision-

While cooperative relations are inconstant, and arguably each action is unique, patterns of relations are not inconstant and unique, and because of chaotic distribution of information, information, incentives and actions (changes in state) organically distribute (evolve) at different rates. Therefore we can predict trends of patterns, but not individual actions, any more than we can predict the position of any given physical entity at the subatomic level.

That we cannot predict anything other than as a probability over a given period of time, does not render something unobservable, or unscientific. We need only be able to demonstrate that in fact, regularity exists at some given level of precision over some period of time. That is what determines whether a deductive statement is expressible as an hypothesis, theory or law: whether we can determine some regularity at some **scale** – some level of precision. Infinite precision is not possible, but the standard of precision is determined by the maximum utility we can obtain at the minimum level of regularity we can observe and describe.

This constitutes “the problem of arbitrary precision”: General rules (theories) require us to adopt the available level of precision. Pure mathematics uses completely arbitrary precision, which is why it scales infinitely. But once we apply any general mathematical rule, to any particular description of reality, we include the necessary level of precision in the context. Machining valve, sawing a 2×4, navigating a ship, navigating an interplanetary satellite, and measuring the distance to the farthest observable object require different levels of precision, and we can only achieve certain levels of precision. That does not mean we cannot perform those operations using the same mathematics. It merely means we must apply contextual precision.

-the scope of newton’s laws-

Newton’s laws for example, and geometry for that matter, remain constant at human scale. But at very large and very small scale, due to the problems of velocity and immeasurability these rules fail. There are no universal statements expressible as operations that are not reductio fallacies. All hypotheses, theories and laws are subject to increases in precision or loss of utility by replacement with other hypotheses theories and laws.

-the unpredictability of gasses-

We cannot predict the course of any particular molecule when releasing a gas, but that does not mean that we cannot predict the overall distribution of molecules upon their release, and the rate of its dispersion.

-the neutrality of money-

We argue that money is neutral, but only over long and unpredictable periods of time. Is that an empirical question, or a logical one? We can deduce it, and it appears logical, but is our evidence sufficient to consider it a Law, Theory or Hypothesis. At present it is merely an hypothesis. But it is certainly not a law.

-the minimum wage-

We argue that minimum wage increases unemployment. Is that a logical or empirical question but it does not increase unemployment for all of those employed, and it occurs over unpredictable periods of time.

-emergent phenomenon: the stickiness of prices-

We did not deduce that prices would be as sticky as they are. We discovered it empirically – by observation. Is the stickiness of prices sufficient to meet the standard of hypothesis, theory or law? At present it is a theory that is widely accepted.

-the non-deducibility of emergent phenomenon-

We cannot deduce nor have we deduced emergent economic phenomenon. We can validate economic propositions deductively by reducing them to a series of actions, each of which is subject to sympathetic experience, and as such open to a subjective test of rationality. But that too is an empirical test. We observe and sense our reactions.

ARGUMENTATION (I don’t state this well enough yet)

-The fallacy of argumentation ethics-

Argumentation Ethics are fallacious because the choice of the strong is always between the use of violence to obtain what one desires, or the value of voluntary exchange, or boycott of worthless interactions.

Human choice is always ternary: violence, cooperation or boycott, and never, under any condition, reduced to the binary choice of cooperation or boycott – argumentative contradiction is a fallacy since and agreement to temporarily cooperate on a given scope is merely utilitarian, and conveys nothing beyond the matter in question.

Whereas, a contract for cooperation consists of a gamble that long term cooperation will be more beneficial, even if it results in various profits and losses. Numerous authors have stated similar arguments in non operational means. But Operationalism tells us that argumentation is empty – because we never surrender our violence, and as such never enter into a contradiction, merely demonstrate a preference.

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev Ukraine.

A LIST OF HANS HERMANN HOPPE’S ERRORS

I consider my work as a restatement of Hoppe’s aprioristic justificationary rationalism in ratio-scientific terms.

Hoppe’s errors are natural for a German philosopher who was trained by Marxists. And while the errors are substantial by today’s standards, they are limited to errors in construction (justification), with his conclusions from his justifications surviving. This is important. From Hoppe’s earliest work onward, his deductions from incentives are correct.

– We justify moral actions within a normative system of evolved rules, and we criticize truth propositions to test whether the theories survive. We do not find truth in justification – we find permission. We find truth in survival against all known criticism. Justification translates to “I can get away with saying this so you cannot say I violated the rules of cooperation: morality or law” while truth propositions under ratio-scientific criticism translate to “I have done due diligence to determine if this argument survives all known attempts at failure, regardless of preference, morality or law.” Hoppe confuses legal justification (excuse making), with truth (survival from all competition). As Mises discovered but failed to understand, truth propositions including human choice require the possibility of constructing a sequence of rational choices AND the survival from categorical, logical, empirical falsification. Truth propositions survive competition.

– Possession demonstrably (empirically) exists prior to cooperation, and property exist after an agreement to cooperate. Scarcity exists prior to cooperation. But scarcity is imperceptible. Cost is perceptible. The origin of demonstrable property is in the cost to acquire. Scarcity explains why things are costly, but not the origination of possession nor the origination of property.

– Different sets of Property rights evolve in communities due to the disproportionate returns on cooperation at the given level of division of ability, knowledge and labor – and the necessity of preserving those returns by prohibiting parasitism. Property rights do not originate in scarcity of goods, they originate in the scarcity and disproportionate return on cooperation. We pay for cooperation by forgoing opportunities to use or consume that which others have already invested in using and consuming. Man like other animals retaliates against the imposition of costs upon that which he has himself born costs with the intent to inventory. The universal demonstration of altruistic punishment (disproportionately costly punishment of free riders, parasites, predators) demonstrates the evolutionary necessity and value of cooperation as the most costly and scarce good. (thus upending libertarianism’s attempt to suggest cooperation can be obtained for free, or that it is the natural bias of man or animal. instead, man and animal are rational. we cooperate when possible, parasite when possible and prey when possible, depending upon costs.)

– Argumentation****and non-contradiction originate in legal justification post-cooperation, not in constraints prior to cooperation. The first question of cooperation is ‘why don’t I kill you and take your stuff’, and only once we enter into an agreement do we justify our words and deeds within that agreement – thereby relying upon internal consistency (non-contradiction). Prior to that factm no cooperation and nor moral constraint exists – it is only desired. Moreover, the logic of cooperation is not binary. We live in an amoral world of violence, theft, conspiracy and deception, and while we can construct cooperation, we construct cooperation at will given the costs and returns. And our choices at any time are to:

(a) preserve the options of violence, theft, deception and conspiracy until opportunity avails to use it,

(b) agree not to aggress but not to cooperate either

(d) cooperate whenever possible, expecting the same,

(e) cease any level of cooperation and retreat to a prior level.

So, contradiction is a test for a judge in matters of dispute resolution. It is not a necessary property of cooperation. We can test violations of reciprocity (cooperation) during disputes but no such dependence upon internal consistency exists prior to establishing a agreement (contract) for cooperation.

– The minimum scope of property necessary to construct a reciprocal exchange, in order to provide minimum incentives for the rational formation of a voluntary polity is property-en-toto, or what we call “demonstrated-property” (demonstrated defense of that which we have paid costs to acquire), and the minimum scope of property is not IVP: intersubjectively verifiable property – (property that is epistemologically easy to test if we transfer). Hoppe and Rothbard misapply separatist ethics between polities (between states) as sufficient for the formation of a polity. (Ghetto Ethics.) Arguably Hoppe suggests that IVP is merely a minimum criteria and that all other properties must be arbitrarily constructed upon it. However, this means that IVP is an insufficient criteria for a basis for law. Whereas Property in Toto (demonstrated property) is a sufficient criteria for the basis for law. In other words, physical property is insufficient for the formation of a polity, it is merely sufficient for cooperation between states (organized polities).

– The formation of a voluntary (anarchic) polity requires that local transaction costsare low enough to limit demand for authority to either prevent retaliation for violations of property in toto, and to provide sufficient incentives to join such a polity rather than say, a democratic humanist polity. The reason is we must choose between high local transaction costs with low political costs that prohibit economic velocity, and low local transaction costs that encourage economic velocity with high political costs. Humans rationally choose government over anarchy unless anarchy provides the lower transaction costs. This means that anarchy is only possible under high trust. High trust is only possible under property en toto with it’s total prohibition on deception (cheating) rather than intersubjectively verifiable property with its tolerance for deception and cheating. A rational anarchic polity can only form under property en toto, not IVP.

– Those arguably voluntary anarchic polities that have existed, on the few occasions that they have existed, because larger states have used squatters and settlers and given away territorial rights in borderlands in order to hold it from competitors cheaply, without having to invest heavily, but still giving them an excuse to conduct war if attempts taken against it. If those have evolved for other reasons, they have been the target of extermination by neighbors. Because the only reason to seek a low trust polity is some variation of parasitism: gypsies on the low end, pirates in the center, and financial predators (moral hazards) on the high end.

– The formation of a voluntary polity (anarchic) will only be possible under western aristocratic martial egalitarianism (a militia) and the independent common law, prohibiting all parasitism against demonstrated property (what we bore costs for and defend), whether that parasitism is by violence, theft, extortion (blackmail, racketeering), fraud, (fraud by obscurantism, fraud by moralizing, fraud by omission), externality, (free riding, privatization of commons, socialization of losses), or conspiracy (statism, conversion, immigration, conquest, war and genocide).

– Mises was, like many of his contemporaries, trying to solve the problem of his era, and incorrectly cast operational testing by subjective analysis of rational incentives (praxeology) as a positive means of exploration sufficient for the investigation of cooperative and economic phenomenon, instead of a test of existential possibility of claims. Economics is empirical as any other of the science and only differs in that we know the first principles of cooperation (rational incentives on the positive side and non-imposition of costs – parasitism- on the negative side.) Whereas the first principles of the physical universe are as yet unknown to us. And where the first principles of declarative systems (logics) are matters of our discretion. (This is a rather difficult subject for all but those of us who specialize in epistemology.)

I could go on a bit, but Hoppe’s insights have been in the perverse incentives of bureaucracies – even under democracy, and the exposition of all moral and legal argument as reducible to property rights.

All his justificationary argument is pure Kantian,Cosmopolitan and Marxist nonsense. We do not justify truth propositions. Truth propositions survive attempts to refute them.

I love the man, honestly. But he was a product of his time and place just as I am a product of mine. Science wins. Rationalism loses. Not only because science is necessary for the provision of truth, but because PHILOSOPHY HAS LARGELY BEEN USED TO LIE.

Rothbardian libertarianism is just the extremism of the Marxist prohibition on Private Property inverted into an the extremism of a Marxist prohibition on Common Property – despite the fact that property rights can only exist as a commons, and no polity can survive competition for people and trade, and against competitors without providing commons as the multipliers necessary to do so.

I hope this is of some value to you.

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine (Tallinn, Estonia)

LIBERTARIANS ARE JUST COMMON PROPERTY MARXISTS.

Libertarians get it wrong every day, multiple times a day.

If you’re objective is an anarchic polity, you must eliminate demand for the state – wishing it away is not only ineffective but childish.

The judicial state as we understand it, evolved everywhere, to suppress retaliation cycles between individuals, families, clans, and tribes by standardizing punishments, and prohibiting further cycles of retaliation. The universality of this historical fact contradicts all libertarian dogma both about the nature of man, the state of man, and the process of resolving disputes.

To eliminate demand for the state, one must eliminate demand for aggression (suppress opportunity) AND, eliminate demand for retaliation (provide a means of resolution of differences) and eliminate retaliation cycles from forming (insure against retaliation). People are never happy with the outcome of court cases, they merely fear retaliation by the insurers.

Whenever we have used competing insurers, they have devolved into feuding insurers. Feuding insurers are more dangerous than individual, family and clan feuds because they profit from it. Organizations seek dominance (a monopoly) and this is where states of all sizes originate: as monopoly insurers of last resort sufficient to hold other insurers (states) at bay.

This is the historical narrative and counters the private-property-marxist dogma (socialism), and the common-property-marxist dogma (libertarianism).

(I hope you saw what I said just then. Because that is the uncomfortable truth.)

Libertarians opine (give opinions) on what constitutes aggression, and despite *decades* of hot air failing to define it, they never seem to determine that it is not the actor who determines but the victim who will sense a violation of his investments and retaliate and therefore determine the scope of property. And it is the community of insurers (the polity) that prevent retaliation cycles (feuds). And it is a monopoly insurer (the state however organized) that prevents it.

The state overreach arises from discretionary regulatory power (legislation), discretionary tax power, and discretionary rent seeking power, rather than from it’s function as a monopoly insurer. So, the problems of the state originate in discretion and in full time employment of services organizations, rather than direct economic democracy, and subcontracted employment.

As far as I know rule of law eliminates regulatory discretion. As far as I know direct democracy eliminates discretionary taxation. As far as I know subcontractors delivering services are superior to bureaucrats. As far as I know a judiciary can function independently. And all that is necessary is a monarchy as a judge of last resort, and a military as an insurer of last resort. In other words, the ancient monarchies ran the best ‘companies’: private estates. As far as I know there is no model superior to rule of natural common law, an independent judiciary, a hereditary monarch as judge of last resort, a set of houses for each class with differing interests used as a market for the production of commons, and direct economic democracy such that individuals who are enfranchised and contributing to the taxes make choices as to their allocations.

Conversely, Libertarianism (jewish diasporic separatism) is another product of marxism and marxist history. And it does nothing but license immorality while prohibiting retaliatory violence against it.

There is only one source of liberty: an armed militia, an independent judiciary, a monarch as judge of last resort, and the natural, common, judge discovered law, as the sacred political religion of all of them.

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine (Tallinn, Estonia)

THE ONLY MEANS OF ELIMINATING THE STATE AND CONSTRUCTING LIBERTY

The only way to eliminate the state, is to eliminate demand for the state. To eliminate demand for the state, we must construct institutions that provide the services of the state, without the free riding endemic to the state.

The state provides just these services:

…1) an allocation of property and property rights, and means of transfer.

…2) a means of resolving all differences that lead to conflict.

…3) a means of constructing and protecting commons from free riding.

…4) a means of exclusion of competing allocations, means of resolution, means of construction.

The only means of providing these services without the state, is to construct institutions that do not require a state.

…1) the law of non-parasitism positively expressed as Property-en-Toto, the common organic law, an independent professional judiciary RATHER THAN an independent professional bureaucracy. ie: the fourth wave.

…2) a market for commons consisting of houses of common interest in the commons, in which non-monopoly contracts are negotiated for the construction of commons.

…3) a universal (or near universal ) militia, caretaking, emergency and rescue, in order to participate in the market for commons – participation must be earned, even if protection from parasitism need not be.

A bureaucratic state then, is an evidence of the failure to construct institutions necessary for the provision of services that allow groups to compete against other groups.

Fukuyama has not identified the alternative to social democracy, nor has he identified the transitory nature of monopoly institutions, as necessary for the construction of a commons prior to the development of a competing market for the provision of those commons. He failed to grasp the difference between research and development of expensive common institutions, and the conversion of those monopoly institutions to non-monopoly institutions that exclude conflicting institutions, while competing on the efficient provision of services.

The end of history is quite different from that which Fukuyama imagines, and what the academy (as a profiteering church) advocates and desires. There is an alternative to monopoly government, if not an alternative to a monopoly of property rights articulated as property-en-toto. He is a product of the academy and history despite his honest intellectual interests – because he is not a product of economics and law: political economy. He is forgivable as are most students of history, of looking backward at patterns, without understanding the causal properties of human cooperation and the necessity of increasingly complex means of calculation.

As advocates for liberty, it is our function, our mission, to provide these superior solutions to the problem of cooperation at scale that we call “government” by the invention of, advocacy of, demand for, and rebellion in pursuit of, formal institutions that prohibit tyranny, and preserve our unique western rate of innovation, by prohibiting all parasitism (rent seeking) in all walks of life, at all times.

…1) The universal requirement for productivity and it’s obverse, the prohibition on parasitism.

…2) The institutionalization of that rule as property rights encompassing property-en-toto.

…3) The common organic law, the independent professional judiciary, universal standing, the jury, truth telling, restitution, multiples of restitution, punishment and ostracization (imprisonment).

…4) The nuclear family (and perhaps not the absolute nuclear) as the first commons in which gender competition is resolved outside of the production of commons.

…5) An hereditary monarch (a head of state) with veto power, but without positive power.

…6) A set of houses representing the classes, populated by random selection, who act as a jury, in the selection of contracts proposed for the annum and specific prohibition from the construction of law….7) The inclusion of the informational commons in property rights and therefore (a) the requirement for truthful (‘scientific and Propertarian’) speech in matters of the commons.(b) the requirement for operational language, (c) the prohibition on pooling and laundering (d) the prohibition on intertemporal and transferred commitment, and (e) the liability of jurors (representatives and voters) for their actions on behalf of others.

The only defense is requirement for production, the common law, the jury, the truth, universal standing, universal liability, and competitive markets. This produces the least opportunity for rent seeking and privatization and forces all into the market for the production of goods and services in order to survive and reproduce.

Insurance of one another against error and failure, and a limit of one child to those who are unproductive solves the problem of charity without the problem of eugenic immorality.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

“Reforming Mises, and the Jewish*(Ukrainian)* Wing of Austrian Economics.”#

A RECONSTRUCTION OF PRAXEOLOGY AS ECONOMIC INTUITIONISM FULLY COMPATIBLE WITH RATIO-EMPIRICAL SCIENCE#

#

YES, REFORMING AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS IS NECESSARY#

WHY ARE YOU REFUTING MISES, ROTHBARD and HOPPE IF YOU ADVOCATE AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS?#

MISES’ PRAXEOLOGY AS THE FAILURE TO DEVELOP ECONOMIC OPERATIONALISM#

MISES POSITION IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY?#

THE STRUGGLE TO PRODUCE A MORAL ECONOMIC SCIENCE#

#

#

SCIENCE IS THE DISCIPLINE OF SPEAKING TRUTHFULLY – IN ALL DISCIPLINES#

MORAL CONSTRAINT FROM LAW THROUGH MATHEMATICS#

RATIONALISTS JUST HAVE IT BACKWARDS – JUSTIFICATION RATHER THAN CRITICISM.#

JUSTIFICATION VS CRITICISM : WARRANTY IN NORMATIVE CONTRACT VS WARRANTY IN EXPLORATION INDEPENDENT OF NORMS#

SCIENCE AS TRUTHFUL SPEECH – GERMAN RATIONALISM AND JEWISH COSMOPOLITANISM AS IMMORAL INFORMATION DISTORTION EQUAL TO THE INFORMATION DISTORTION OF KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS.#

THE REFORMATION OF WESTERN THOUGHT#

TRANSLATING KANTIAN RATIONALISM INTO SCIENTIFIC AND TESTIMONIAL SPEECH#

WHICH IS MORE LIKELY THE CASE: A PURPOSEFUL DECEPTION OR THE POSSIBILITY OF ANTI-SCIENTIFIC RATIONALISM?#

THE ANTI-ROTHBARDIAN CANON#

A LIST OF HANS HERMANN HOPPE’S ERRORS#

LIBERTARIANS ARE JUST COMMON PROPERTY MARXISTS.#

THE ONLY MEANS OF ELIMINATING THE STATE AND CONSTRUCTING LIBERTY#

*“Reforming Mises, and the Jewish**(Ukrainian)* Wing of Austrian Economics.”

A RECONSTRUCTION OF PRAXEOLOGY AS ECONOMIC INTUITIONISM FULLY COMPATIBLE WITH RATIO-EMPIRICAL SCIENCE

YES, REFORMING AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS IS NECESSARY

WHY ARE YOU REFUTING MISES, ROTHBARD and HOPPE IF YOU ADVOCATE AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS?

MISES’ PRAXEOLOGY AS THE FAILURE TO DEVELOP ECONOMIC OPERATIONALISM

MISES POSITION IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY?

THE STRUGGLE TO PRODUCE A MORAL ECONOMIC SCIENCE

SCIENCE IS THE DISCIPLINE OF SPEAKING TRUTHFULLY – IN ALL DISCIPLINES

MORAL CONSTRAINT FROM LAW THROUGH MATHEMATICS

RATIONALISTS JUST HAVE IT BACKWARDS – JUSTIFICATION RATHER THAN CRITICISM.

JUSTIFICATION VS CRITICISM : WARRANTY IN NORMATIVE CONTRACT VS WARRANTY IN EXPLORATION INDEPENDENT OF NORMS

SCIENCE AS TRUTHFUL SPEECH – GERMAN RATIONALISM AND JEWISH COSMOPOLITANISM AS IMMORAL INFORMATION DISTORTION EQUAL TO THE INFORMATION DISTORTION OF KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS.

THE REFORMATION OF WESTERN THOUGHT

TRANSLATING KANTIAN RATIONALISM INTO SCIENTIFIC AND TESTIMONIAL SPEECH

WHICH IS MORE LIKELY THE CASE: A PURPOSEFUL DECEPTION OR THE POSSIBILITY OF ANTI-SCIENTIFIC RATIONALISM?

THE ANTI-ROTHBARDIAN CANON

A LIST OF HANS HERMANN HOPPE’S ERRORS

LIBERTARIANS ARE JUST COMMON PROPERTY MARXISTS.

THE ONLY MEANS OF ELIMINATING THE STATE AND CONSTRUCTING LIBERTY