THE SECRET TO INEQUALITY
It’s not complicated. Our middle and bottom cannot compete. The top still sells their services to the world. The middle and bottom increasingly less so. That’s the problem: Teacher’s unions. Monopoly school system. Federal indoctrination to preserve the union at the expense of the middle and bottom.
Source date (UTC): 2015-05-13 03:35:00 UTC
http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2015/05/walter_block_lawsuit_times.htmlEXPLAINING WALTER BLOCK’S NARRATIVE DEVICE
I have been a frequent critic of Walter and the Mises Institute that is his platform, despite knowing him personally for years, in no small part, because his technique for grabbing the audience’s attention is to use examples that are morally horrifying in order to illustrate economic, political, and moral principles.
The purpose of his parable that is to illustrate the spectrum of involuntary association.
He’s saying this: If you work voluntarily with other people to pick cotton for a living, that’s very different from picking cotton for someone else involuntarily. Lots of people in this world do horrible work. Lots of people have been, are, and forever will be poor. Likewise serving people in your business that you prefer not to, and that may be damaging to your business, is also undesirable. Just as paying taxes for things you don’t support is undesirable. Using these three data points he paints a spectrum of undesirable forced associations.
The Jewish tradition, and Jewish law, emphasizes separatism and individualism to preserve jewish group identity: ‘separate and apart’. The western aristocratic tradition emphasizes local universalism but preserves hierarchy. The western christian tradition emphasizes universalism and family. So Walter is, as are many jewish intellectuals, bringing his cultural traditions to the argument: he’s advocating in favor of separatism.
Just as there is a long tradition on the left of using parables of suffering for the purpose of illustration, there is a long tradition on the right of using absurdity in parables for the purpose of illustrating the long term consequences of everyone adopting a behaviour. The reason progressives use suffering (short term, and personal experience) and conservatives use humor (long term, exaggerated effects), is because that is our evolutionary division of labor at work: progressives perceive the short term and experience of individuals regardless of consequences, and conservatives perceive the long term consequences regardless of experience.
You will see the same thing from most popular conservatives, including Limbaugh – who specializes in this technique. For conservatives, two whom disgust is as influential a moral impulse as compassion is for progressives, these ‘horrific’ narratives are highly loaded with emotion: they are excellent pedagogical parables.
We cannot really understand each other, unless we understand that the moral spectrum evolved as an inter-temporal (across time) division of perception, comprehension, knowledge, advocacy and labor. And that one of the reasons we humans can adapt to circumstances, is that we each have biased perceptions. Some of us advocate for the short term to ensure offspring survive, and some for the long term to ensure the tribe competes against others. Conservatives can understand progressives. Libertarians understand a little of progressives and conservatives, but progressives cannot comprehend conservatives.
It’s only when we agree that we know we have made use of all available information. Because its voluntary exchange – expressed as the middle – that determines when we have made use of the entire moral spectrum, that concerns both the short (progressive nurturing), medium (libertarian production), and long term (conservative defense).
That is why centrism in democratic politics is so important, and why the middle road is so prominent an idea throughout political and philosophical history in all cultures. Those cultures did not, however, as Walter is trying to communicate, figure out that it is voluntary exchange that allows us to ‘compute’ that middle, not the wisdom of one or more rulers.
So his lesson is profound. And it is a lesson in the language; in the inter-temporal spectrum; of libertarians and conservatives who are his audience.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine.
Source date (UTC): 2015-05-13 02:18:00 UTC
http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2015/05/walter_block_lawsuit_times.htmlEXPLAINING WALTER BLOCK’S NARRATIVE DEVICE
I have been a frequent critic of Walter and the Mises Institute that is his platform, despite knowing him personally for years, in part because his technique for grabbing the audience’s attention is to use examples that are morally horrifying in order to illustrate economic, political, and moral principles.
The purpose of his parable that is to illustrate the spectrum of involuntary association.
He’s saying this: If you work voluntarily with other people to pick cotton for a living, that’s very different from picking cotton for someone else involuntarily. Lots of people in this world do horrible work. Lots of people have been, are, and forever will be poor. Likewise serving people in your business that you prefer not to, and that may be damaging to your business, is also undesirable. Just as paying taxes for things you don’t support is undesirable. Using these three data points he paints a spectrum of undesirable forced associations.
The Jewish tradition, and Jewish law, emphasizes separatism and individualism to preserve jewish group identity: ‘separate and apart’. The western aristocratic tradition emphasizes local universalism but preserves hierarchy. The western christian tradition emphasizes universalism and family, and hierarchy. So Walter is, as are many jewish intellectuals, bringing his cultural traditions to the argument: he’s advocating in favor of separatism.
Just as there is a long tradition on the left of using parables of suffering for the purpose of illustration, there is a long tradition on the right of using absurdity in parables for the purpose of illustrating long term consequences if everyone behaved as such. The reason progressives use suffering (short term, and personal experience) and conservatives use humor (long term, exaggerated effects), is because that is our evolutionary division of labor at work: progressives perceive the short term and experience of individuals regardless of consequences, and conservatives perceive the long term consequences regardless of experience.
You will see the same thing from most popular conservatives, including Limbaugh – who specializes in this technique. For conservatives, two whom disgust is as influential a moral impulse as compassion is for progressives, these ‘horrific’ narratives are highly loaded with emotion: they are excellent pedagogical parables.
We cannot really understand each other, unless we understand that the moral spectrum evolved as an inter-temporal (across time) division of perception, comprehension, knowledge, advocacy and labor. And that one of the reasons we humans can adapt to circumstances, is that we each have biased perceptions. Some of us advocate for the short term to ensure offspring survive, and some for the long term to ensure the tribe competes against others. Conservatives can understand progressives. Libertarians understand a little of progressives and conservatives, but progressives cannot comprehend conservatives. Progressivism is the most narrow moral code – a specialization of sorts.
Because of this division of advocacy, it’s only when we agree that we know we have made use of all available information. Because its voluntary exchange – expressed as the middle – that determines when we have made use of the entire moral spectrum, that concerns both the short (progressive nurturing), medium (libertarian production), and long term (conservative defense).
That is why centrism in democratic politics is so important, and why the middle road is so prominent an idea throughout political and philosophical history in all cultures. Those cultures did not, however, as Walter is trying to communicate, figure out that it is voluntary exchange that allows us to ‘compute’ that middle, not the wisdom of one or more rulers.
So Walter’s lesson for his audience is profound. And it is a lesson delivered in the language; addressing the inter-temporal spectrum; in the moral interests – of the libertarians and conservatives who are his audience.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine.
http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2015/05/walter_block_lawsuit_times.html
Source date (UTC): 2015-05-13 02:14:00 UTC
http://www.aei.org/publication/political-values-in-putins-russia-a-qa-with-mikhail-dmitriev/RARE AND EXCELLENT ANALYSIS OF RUSSIA
Source date (UTC): 2015-05-12 13:49:00 UTC
IF THEIR BAD ARE MORE CAPABLE THAN YOUR GOOD, WHAT HAPPENS?
Good atheists, bad atheists. Good christians, bad christians. Good jews, bad jews.
The problem is not that one group is good or bad; it is the aggression and capability of people within the group.
If one set of people is more capable than another, then both the good and the bad are exaggerated. This is the way to look at the influence of all groups. This is the way to look at the good and bad of all groups. More aggressive and more capable people pursue their self interest more successfully than less aggressive and less capable people.
We all pursue our self interests. I don’t criticize people for pursuing their self interests. That would be illogical. On the other hand I am happy to criticize people for not defending themselves against the bad, aggressive and capable.
It usually means that they are consuming rather than investing in defenses.
Which is the case, in this case.
Source date (UTC): 2015-05-12 11:16:00 UTC
http://www.colorado.edu/economics/morey/4999Ethics/Religion/Iannaccone1998_Edward.pdfECONOMICS OF RELIGION
Rodney Stark’s: A Theory Of Religion
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0813523303/
Laurence Ianncone’s Economics of Religion
http://www.colorado.edu/economics/morey/4999Ethics/Religion/Iannaccone1998_Edward.pdf
Iannaccone, Laurence. “Economics of Religion.” (with William S. Bainbridge). The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, Second Edition, edited by John Hinnells. Routledge: 2010, pp. 461-475.
Iannaccone, Laurence. “Funding the Faiths: Toward a Theory of Religious Finance” (with Feler Bose). The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Religion, edited by Rachel McCleary. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. 2011, pp. 323-342.
Iannaccone, Laurence R., Colleen E. Haight, and Jared Rubin. 2011. “Lessons from Delphi: Religious Markets and Spiritual Capitals,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 77, no. 3: 326-338.
BECKER
I was heavily influenced by Gary Becker’s work. And because of my work on propertarianism, testimonial truth, operationalism, and critical rationalism, I have come to see that there is merit both in deductive(rational), operational (descriptive) and empirical (correlative) work. But I think the point is that Becker succeeds in all three dimensions when he works, and caps it off with elegant charts.
The value of this deductive work (Stark’s) is that these statements can be implemented as software models.
Source date (UTC): 2015-05-12 06:14:00 UTC
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/05/why-is-libertarianism-such-a-target.htmlWHY IS LIBERTARIANISM SUCH A TARGET?
(because its immoral) (re: tyler cowen)
—It is possible to be a common sense centrist and an intellectual. The highbrow reasons for why moderate common sense positions are correct are particularly interesting to anybody with a strong desire to understand how the world really works.— Steve Sailer
I’ll echo Steve Sailer’s position a little more precisely. But, unfortunately, that requires a mildly impolitic presentation:
(a) while libertarianism (an economic preference) informs the nation’s christian conservatism (a normative preference), libertarianism is not informed by the conservatism. That’s the reason that libertarianism fails to expand its influence in the electorate: libertarianism outside of the classical liberal model is objectively immoral. That’s right: objectively immoral. And I’ll answer why, below.
(b) All three influential enlightenment movements sought to express group evolutionary strategies as universal strategies (i) the anglo empirical (Smith, Hume and eventually Darwin) – to create an aristocracy of everybody, (ii) the german obscurant rationalist ( Kant thru Heidegger) – to preserve hierarchy, and (iii) the jewish pseudoscientific: (Freud, Marx, Cantor, Mises, Rothbard) – to preserve authoritarianism and separatism. Unfortunately, all three of these movements have failed at developing a universal ethics with which to inform our politics.
(c) Politics is a moral not empirical means of decision making (Jonathan Haidt). Voting for representatives is a form of abstract aggregation. In such cases of comparing abstractions, People can do nothing else but vote their ancestral (and possibly genetic) morality. (Emmanuel Todd, David Hackett Fischer). They vote their evolutionary strategy. Monopoly decision making (majority rule) exacerbates conflict between peoples of disparate interests. And classical liberal libertarians (anglo american, empirical libertarians) have failed to produce an institutional solution that allows cooperation on means (a market) for the production of commons despite our various heterogeneous and necessary ends.
(d) Conservatives are unconsciously aware (and unable to articulate) (a) norms are the most expensive commons we create, and those high trust norms must be protected at all costs – they are our competitive advantage in this world, and the reason for our rapid ascent in both pre-history, ancient, and modern eras; (b) that policy must reflect the inter-temporal interests of families, while law must be constructed for individuals, because the family is the means of transmission of those norms for each class, and because disputes must be objectively decidable regardless of class.
For some reason it doesn’t occur to libertarians that the competitive advantage of western civilization lies in our unique ability to construct civil commons relatively free of privatization, and that we can do so because of our high trust society, and that our high trust society is possible because of all the people on this earth we generally tell the truth. And that truth telling is the most expensive commons one can produce.
People cannot vote for change that is not institutionally articulated. Asking people to ‘believe’ is for prophets and priests, not scientists. Justification is for rationalists. Scientists must construct operational definitions for us to test the truth of their propositions (that is the entire point of the Austrian method.) So until classical libertarians reform the current model, and provide an institutional solution that satisfies: the exclusion of the bottom from the benefits of production of the normative, institutional and physical commons (the left); the ability to dynamically restructure the patterns of sustainable specialization and trade, free of rents and frictions (libertarians); and the preservation of the high trust norms and the family that make the construction of our commons possible, by prohibiting their consumption and requiring universal production (the right); libertarianism will remain an immoral, selfish, utopian specialization, that advocates an obscurant form of free riding on both left and right’s the construction of the voluntary order of cooperation that we call capitalism.
Because profiting from the contributions of others (the cost of respecting property in both normative, institutional, physical commons, and in private hands, is free riding. And free riding is immoral. Because all objective moral rules are a prohibitions on free riding. And because cooperation is irrational in the presence of free riding. Thats why evolution gave us moral intuitions – despite our different self serving emphases on one part of the moral spectrum or another.
No corner of the political triangle is correct. Each simply senses some part of the reproductive division of labor: progressive=consumption, libertarian=production and conservative=saving: just as the market forms an information system, human moral differences constitute a division of perception, cognition, knowledge and labor; and voluntary, fully informed, warrantied, exchange free of negative externality is the only test of the aggregate validity of our perceptions.
We (libertarians) aren’t right. But we’re the smart ones. And productivity is our specialization. So we must find an institutional solution for everyone – (consumptive, productive, and retentive) not one for just us as specialists. It’s not that others aren’t informed. It’s that we haven’t succeeded.
( That’s enough radicalism for one post. )
Cheers
Source date (UTC): 2015-05-12 05:56:00 UTC
THE EVOLUTION OF THE TERM “GENTLEMAN”
The most basic class distinctions in the Middle Ages were between the nobiles, i.e., the tenants in chivalry, such as earls, barons, knights, esquires, the free ignobiles such as the citizens and burgesses, and franklins, and the unfree peasantry including villeins and serfs.
In its original meaning, “gentleman” denoted a man of the lowest rank of the English gentry, standing below an esquire and above a yeoman.
This category included the younger sons of the younger sons of peers and the younger sons of baronets, knights, and esquires in perpetual succession, and thus the term captures the common denominator of gentility (and often armigerousness) shared by both constituents of the English aristocracy: the peerage and the gentry. In this sense, the word equates with the French gentilhomme (“nobleman”), which latter term has been, in Great Britain, long confined to the peerage;
Even as late as 1400, the word gentleman still only had the descriptive sense of generosus and could not be used as denoting the title of a class. Yet after 1413, we find it increasingly so used, and the list of landowners in 1431, printed in Feudal Aids, contains, besides knights, esquires, yeomen and husbandmen (i.e. householders), a fair number who are classed as “gentilman”.
The British Empire begins in the 1580’s.
The clear distinction between the aristocratic and laboring classes was pervasive. After 1600 Gentlemen would not challenge men of lower status to a duel, and a challenge to (or excuse for) a duel was based on some perceived public insult to the challenger’s sense of his honour as a gentleman.
The industrial revolution starts in 1790.
In (1815), the encyclopedia britannica states: “a gentleman is one, who without any title, bears a coat of arms, or whose ancestors have been freemen.”
The Reform Acts were implemented (1832): the British equivalent of Jerrymandering was revised and the allocation of seats in parliament to boroughs (the equivalent of US counties) were adjusted. The qualification as property holder adjusted for inflation, and the electorate expanded by as much 50% – although universal enfranchisement was not yet adopted.
As prosperity expanded, and the middle class with it, the designation came to include a man with an income derived from property, a legacy or some other source, and was thus independently wealthy and did not need to work.
Then in (1845) we see “in its extended sense, a gentleman is accorded to all above the rank of yeomen.”
So the title expands to cover any well-educated man of good family and distinction, analogous to the Latin generosus (its usual translation in English-Latin documents, although nobilis is found throughout pre-Reformation papal correspondence).
And by (1856), “in its most extended sense, by courtesy this title is generally accorded to all persons above the rank of common tradesmen when their manners are indicative of a certain amount of refinement and intelligence.”
The middle classes were successfully enfranchised; and the word gentleman came in common use to signify not a distinction of blood, but a distinction of position, education and manners.
The term no longer required good birth or the right to bear arms, but the capacity to mingle on equal terms in good society.
Signaling. 🙂
In Propertarianism, a gentleman is one who pays for the cost of the commons by not only contributing in his manners, but by policing the rest of society as any good nobleman would. And as such one who does not insure the truth, the normative, institutional, and physical commons, is not a gentleman. And anyone who does so is one.
So my perception of gentleman is simply the smallest unit of nobility: a man with nothing but his actions to justify his nobility.
Source date (UTC): 2015-05-12 04:27:00 UTC
THE FUTURE OF ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY: UNNECESSARY
(from elsewhere)
The question is whether or not christian religion can function as a means of restoring western civilization. And my argument (and that of many others) is that it cannot. And for the reasons I stated: (a) that just as justification(rationalism) replaced mysticism, science(criticism) has replaced justification (rationalism), and people will not tolerate a return to primitive monotheistic mysticism. And (b) the forces that led to western success in the ancient and enlightenment world, were independent of the christian mythos – and much older. and (c) we cannot impose religious institutions, yet we can impose academic and legal institutions. (d) given that the differentiating feature of western civilization is truth, truth telling, jury, independent judges, and the common organic law, it is possible to use nothing more than the law to restore traditional values, and education to explain them.
We may need a new civic religion. But the few people who ponder that new religion all suggest that it will be much closer to stoicism, buddhism and nature worship than to christianity. And given that neo-puritanism is a christian heresy, and social democracy a christian heresy, it is certainly not a safe vehicle for the transmission of our civilization.
The germans almost exited christianity at least twice now. Had they done it in the Romantic period we might have had a chance to keep the best of old and new.
We need our churches. We need jesus as a philosopher of the poor. But Justinian imposed christianity by force and shuttered the stoic schools (the western religion), so that they could use eastern despotic central rule in the failing empire. And Caesar murdered all our Druids, to wipe out our culture, so they could impose roman imperialism. And the enlightenment was our first attempt to restoring our people to our original correspondence with nature, rather than with babylonian tyrants deified.
We have need of myth and ritual. We have no need for totalitarianism in our religion.
Source date (UTC): 2015-05-12 01:48:00 UTC
(how is apple stealing market share from samsung in china? what don’t I get?)
Source date (UTC): 2015-05-11 17:32:00 UTC