Author: Curt Doolittle

WHY NATIONS FALL

(profound) (Taleb) (cycles) (rule of law)

Food for thought, since the first political scientist (machiavelli) didn’t provide the answer:

As far as I know, states fail for a number of reasons that are obvious in retrospect.

1) Plague and starvation.

2) Weather pattern / climate change.

3) Disruption of trade routes.

4) Exceeding institutional means of organising production and controlling consumption.

5) Frigility from the inability to adapt due to accumulated rents.

6) Over extension or exhaustion from war.

7) Conquest, genocide and plundering.

8) Immigration, insufficient reproduction, and outbreeding.

Of these, except for 1 and 2, are political failures caused by the same problems we face in democracy: accumulated rent seeking instead of accumulated investment in risk mitigation.

Or what Taleb refers to as Fragility.

In other words: malinvestment.

The reason I make this argument is that there is only one institutional defense against the accumulation of Fragility: rule of law, universal standing in defence of private and commons, and the articulation in property rights of a total prohibition on free riding in all its forms: violence, fraud, free riding, privatization of commons, socialization of losses, and conspiracy; and that such prohibition enforcing against all forms of property: institutional commons, normative commons, phyical commons, private commons (corporate), personal property, body, mind, mate and kin.

Fragility is the product of the failure of the organic common law to prevent the accumulation of Malinvestment by maintaining a total prohibition on free riding.

( Hence my support of this blog.)

The western competitive advantage in economic and technical velocity lies in the rule of law, the independent judiciary, the jury, property rights, universal standing, and our unique emphasis on objective truth telling in all walks of life, because this system provides the least opportunity for the development of rents.

We can see the twentieth century as an organized effort to undermine truth telling by both the academy, intellectuals and the state.

Grammar, Rhetoric, Witness and Testimony, and with the advent of science: ‘e-prime’ and operational language, are necessary skills by which we learn to speak truthfully. Since it is not natural for man. ( It is no mystery why English speakers developed analytic philosophy, the contemporary scientific method, and computer programming.). Man evolved language to negotiate, not describe.

Westerners discovered truth.

That is the secret of the west.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev,Ukraine