Curt Doolittle

Author: Curt Doolittle

  • Macro Economic Phenomenon are Emergent and Explainable but not Deducible

    [M]acro economic phenomenon are emergent, not deducible. They are often explainable. And the discipline of macro economics attempts to explain those phenomenon. Yet many phenomenon are still not yet explainable. Although rapid increase in economics in the past twenty years has improved the field dramatically.

    Any given price for example, is often not explainable. Nor did we nor could we have deduced the stickiness of prices. Nor can we deduce the time frame of phenomenon.

    It is true for example that in the long run, money may be neutral, but that does not mean that interference in the supply of money cannot be used to create beneficial temporary advantages even if they are neutralized over time.

    It is true that unemployment will increase with minimum wages, but the reasons for this are not those proposed by cosmopolitan-Austrians. They are because people lose the possibility of entry into the work force when they are young and become permanently unemployable. Empirical evidence does not support the assumption that minor increases are statistically meaningful. Only that, say, in the french model, do we see statistically meaningful permanent unemployment.

    So, emergent phenomenon are not deducible. They are instrumentally and empirically observable. And once observed may be explained by deduction. But this is indifferent from physical phenomenon, where phenomenon are emergent.

    But to say that we can deduce all economic activity – all human action – from first principles is demonstrably false. We cannot.

    To say that we can deduce all mathematical phenomenon, logical phenomenon, physical phenomenon from first principles is demonstrably false.

    At scale, beyond our perceptions, we must rely upon empirical evidence for observation, instrumentation to obtain that evidence, and deduction to theorize the construction of those phenomenon.

    The false-flag, straw-man argument against empiricism, states that we must be able to run tests, thereby constructing data sets, rather than merely observe phenomenon and explain that phenomenon. But science does not practice empiricism. It practices the scientific method. And physical science takes this experimental approach only to discover first principles, not to analyze emergent phenomenon. Red shift is not something we need to create conditions for, it is something we must simply observe.

    Conversely, experimentally constructed evidence is LESS reliable than naturally occurring evidence. So experimentation is a means of creating conditions for observation. Observation is what is required for analysis.

    Likewise, we do not need to discover the first principles of man, but we must discover and explain the emergent phenomenon of man’s actions.

    And even in those cases where we can construct a very loose economic principle, that does not mean that we cannot take action to alter the interstitial conditions and conduct experiments upon how we can effect those conditions and for how long. The Keynesian argument is that even if the Austrian business cycle is true, the good obtained in the interim is worth the risk, because states under fiat currency – unless they overextend by war and shock – cannot fail and become insolvent.

    In any and all cases of the anti-scientific arguments put forth by the rothbardian rationalists I will easily demonstrate that each case is a straw man argument.

    Because that is the technique of Critique: the marxist and cosmopolitan device of creating a straw man argument that is sufficiently obscurant that it is possible to load, frame, and overload the average, and even above average human mind.

    It is the greatest form of deception ever constructed by man.

    While we can look back in awe at monotheism as a great deception for the purpose of imposing authoritarian rule – despite its absurdity. And while we can look back in awe at how successful the marxists were. We can also grasp that libertinism (the cosmopolitan wing of Austrian economics) is yet another instance of the same technique: create an unbelievable lie, repeat it, and defend it with straw men. Libertinism is merely cosmopolitan separatism in new dress. It didnt’ work, it wont work, and it can’t work.

    Libertines cannot hold land. And he who holds land determines the basis of law. That is an inescapable law of human action.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine

  • We Never Know Anything. We Just Try. We Learn What Works.

    [T]his is why the rationalist argument is a straw man. Critical Rationalism won. In propertarianism I focus on truthful speech as an IMPROVEMENT on critical rationalism’s narrow focus in the absence of ethical and moral constraints (imposed costs, such as creating a hazard). So operationalism is an existential test – a further criticism, on top of falsification, that is necessary when we speak of matters that may impose costs upon one another.


    I can never know that I speak the ultimate truth, but I can know if I speak truthfully (morally). I can warranty truthful speech but I cannot warrant a statement is true.


    And in publishing information into the commons I am distributing a product which may do harm or good. And I can be held accountable for unwarrantable speech, or unwarranted speech, but if I have warrantied my speech I cannot be held accountable in law for the negative consequences of it.


    Conversely, if I did, then I CAN be held accountable for it.


    So it is by these means I have tried to:

    ….(a) Extend critical rationalism by adding the additional requirement of operational description – something scientists already do but outside of psychology do not recognize as necessary criticism, and something that is necessary for all political questions, since only political questions require by definition transfers.

    ….(b) Redefine the scientific method as the method of speaking truthfully (warrantably).

    ….(c) Incorporate the principle of the voluntary exchange of property as the only test of moral action.

    UNIVERSAL STANDING

    Under universal standing each of us can protect his or her commons from lies, cheats, socialization of losses, privatization of gains, and even the use and abuse of others – we an all act as sheriffs. We cannot resort to political favoritism.

    The only problem is in creating judges. And we seem to be far better at creating judges than economists and philosophers.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine

  • We Never Know Anything. We Just Try. We Learn What Works.

    [T]his is why the rationalist argument is a straw man. Critical Rationalism won. In propertarianism I focus on truthful speech as an IMPROVEMENT on critical rationalism’s narrow focus in the absence of ethical and moral constraints (imposed costs, such as creating a hazard). So operationalism is an existential test – a further criticism, on top of falsification, that is necessary when we speak of matters that may impose costs upon one another.


    I can never know that I speak the ultimate truth, but I can know if I speak truthfully (morally). I can warranty truthful speech but I cannot warrant a statement is true.


    And in publishing information into the commons I am distributing a product which may do harm or good. And I can be held accountable for unwarrantable speech, or unwarranted speech, but if I have warrantied my speech I cannot be held accountable in law for the negative consequences of it.


    Conversely, if I did, then I CAN be held accountable for it.


    So it is by these means I have tried to:

    ….(a) Extend critical rationalism by adding the additional requirement of operational description – something scientists already do but outside of psychology do not recognize as necessary criticism, and something that is necessary for all political questions, since only political questions require by definition transfers.

    ….(b) Redefine the scientific method as the method of speaking truthfully (warrantably).

    ….(c) Incorporate the principle of the voluntary exchange of property as the only test of moral action.

    UNIVERSAL STANDING

    Under universal standing each of us can protect his or her commons from lies, cheats, socialization of losses, privatization of gains, and even the use and abuse of others – we an all act as sheriffs. We cannot resort to political favoritism.

    The only problem is in creating judges. And we seem to be far better at creating judges than economists and philosophers.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine

  • 0) That which I am unwilling to act upon 1) That which I am willing to act upon.

    0) That which I am unwilling to act upon

    1) That which I am willing to act upon.

    2) That which I am willing to warranty.

    3) That which those I cooperate with are willing to warranty.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-23 16:06:00 UTC

  • Hoppe’s Misrepresentation of Empiricism

    “This is empiricism’s central claim: Empirical knowledge must be verifiable or falsifiable by experience; and analytical knowledge, which is not so verifiable or falsifiable, thus cannot contain any empirical knowledge. If this is true, then it is fair to ask: What then is the status of this fundamental statement of empiricism? Evidently it must be either analytical or empirical.” ~Hans/Hermann Hoppe

    —“Logic is powerful enough to expose weak arguments, wouldn’t you say?”— Bruce Koerber 

    —“Curt Doolittle, can you provide a counter to this? At first glance it appears impenetrable.”— Pattern Principle

    [N]othing like asking me to answer a very hard problem in philosophy. I can answer it. But whether it is digestible or not is something else

    To begin with, It’s a straw man argument; which is why its deceptively simple. No one makes the claim that empirical knowledge is the only kind of knowledge we can possess. No one. Rather, only philosophers do, none still do, and scientists certainly don’t.  

    ACTUALLY, WHAT HOPPE ATTRIBUTES TO EMPIRICISTS IS NOT WHAT THE EMPIRICISTS CLAIM.
    One of the reasons why you are misunderstood is that you tend not to confront the topics you deal with head on.Hoppe is a justificationist and so he mines a particular weakness of justificationist empiricism. One you jettison justification, his “argument collapses”- Ayelam Valentine Agaliba
    (Worse, he equates science with empiricism, and empiricism with positivism.)

    And economists do not claim to be philosophers, they claim to be scientists. It is one thing to say philosophers (rationalists) say such a thing and another to say scientists, and in particular economic scientists, would say such a thing (they don’t).

    Instead, they say that we cannot trust our reason except in the most trivial of cases: those at experiential human scale. And the discipline of economics is by definition one beyond experiential human scale, or we would not need prices with which to coordinate our efforts, or property to provide us with incentives – we could just ‘sense it’. But we can’t.

    Instead, we say that, depending upon the domain of inquiry, we require logical(rational), empirical(correspondent), and operational (existentially demonstrable) trials to test our theories, because theories are prone to contain imaginary and erroneous information that must be held separate from causal information. In this sense, we do not create theories justifiably or reasonably, we instead come to theories however we do, and we criticize them by logical, empirical, operational, and falsificational means.

    Examples: in mathematics the means of investigation and the means of proof are nearly identical. But some mathematical deductions are not constructible, so intuitionism requires that once a solution is obtained by whatever means, we go back and explain it operationally, demonstrating that it can be actually constructed by means of possible mathematical operations.

    In economics, we can make empirical observations, but until we go through and describe them as a series of human actions each of which is sympathetically testable then we do not know that the theory is true even if it always produces correlative results.
    in physics we do not know the first principles of the physical world as we do in mathematics (mathematical operations), or in economics (rational human actions in response to stimuli), so we must describe the act of taking the measurements themselves in order to ensure that we are not adding imaginary content to our theories.

    The end of rationalism occurred when Einstein demonstrated that we cannot even take the concepts of time and length for granted in our premises. Bridgman demonstrated that the only want to know when we have crossed the limit of arbitrary precision assumed in the premises of our theories is when we operationally construct them – since repetition of the operations in the new context will expose the failure of prior assumptions. Popper’s falsificationism is an incomplete attempt to demonstrate that falsification is necessary to ‘narrow’ more parsimonious (precise) statements, and that criticism is the means of narrowing theories to ever greater degrees of precision.

    The only thing particularly interesting about economics is that because all human beings are able to cooperate by sympathy with intent, we can also judge whether incentives are rational (with very imprecise limits). As such we are able to subjectively test economic statements for rationality (decidability is the correct term).

    Now once we have stumbled upon a theory, in order to make a truth claim, we must demonstrate that some subset of this set of tests have been satisfied: in other words, we must warranty our statements in order to claim that we speak the truth.

    0) Sensible (intuitively possible)
    1) Meaningfully Expressible ( as an hypothesis )
    2) Internally Consistent (logically consistent – rational)
    3) Externally Correspondent, and Falsifiable ( physically testable – correlative)
    4) Existentially Possible (operationally construct-able/observable)
    5) Voluntarily “Choose-able” (voluntary exchange / rational choice)
    6) Market-Survivable (criticism – theory )
    7) Market Irrefutable (law)
    8) Irrefutable under Original Experience (Perceivable Truth)
    9) Ultimately Parsimonious Description (Analytic Truth)
    10) Informationally Complete and Tautologically Identical (Platonic Truth – Imaginary)

    ..yet not all theoretical systems necessitate most of these claims. In economics for example, we must satisfy 5, but in mathematics we solve this same problem by the axiom of choice (adding additional information), and in physics it’s meaningless.

    But the net is that if ‘knowledge’ refers to truth claims, and if all non-tautological premises are context dependent – a degree of precision – (they are), and if we cannot know the boundaries of that precision (we can’t), then all premises are theoretical(they are), and if all knowledge is then theoretical (it is) and the means of discovery are irrelevant (they are), and operational construction is instead the test of true statements, not the statements themselves, (it is), and if economic principles must be operationally constructed – praxeologically – (they must), yet not all emergent phenomenon are deducible (they aren’t) and the degree of arbitrary precision available to economic theories is extremely limited (it is), then instrumentation is necessary to measure phenomenon within the limits of arbitrary precision (it is), and minor actions will produce uncertain effects within the boundaries of arbitrary precision (they do), and that we can experiment within those bounds (we can and do). (In fact all human action takes place within the universe’s boundaries – which is why we can act in the first place.)

    Now that said, no scientist says that only empirical knowledge is true, we say only that man’s reason is frail and we require instrumentation to test it. It is irrelevant how we come to a theory, and irrelevant if we can justify it if it works, but it is through criticism that we progressively increase the content of a theory until it is the most parsimonious that we can manage for the context we consider, given the logical and physical tools at our disposal.

    FLIPPING IT AROUND
    Now, in Propertarianism I argue that scientists discovered the means of truth telling, and that philosophers(rationalists) did not – instead I argue -which isnt very hard given the twentieth century- most often, that philosophers are usually the best liars. And that the weakness in scientific argument is, that as producers of a luxury good, scientists ignore costs in the description of their theories. Whereas in economics we consider costs. So by adding our understanding of costs back into the scientific method, we discover that it’s the best truth-telling method in general that we have discovered. And that by struggling to speak the truth scientists made dramatic progress in all of their fields. This is why the scientific method is not a method, but a set of moral prescriptions for what we may claim to truthfully say and what not.

    Conversely, rationalism has been used systemically to create the most complex and destructive lies and pseudosciences known to man – most of which are moral, legal political and economic. Because it is profitable to create complex lies in those industries just as it is (often, not always) unprofitable to create complex lies in science. It’s just that by the time someone figures it out in economics and politics, the opportunity to correct it has passed, while in science their is no expiration date on the damage that can be done to one’s reputation (capital of scientists).

    So it is not just that we can come to knowledge by any means possible and criticize it by all necessary means available to us, but that rationalism has been used to lie and steal and murder more than any other discipline and that it is far more error prone than truth telling, and truth telling is a very hard thing to do.

    It is one thing to say ‘this works’ or “i can say this’ and it is another to say that you are speaking it truthfully: meaning scientifically. When you speak scientifically it is possible to be fairly certain your statements are truthful, and when you speak rationally we know only that they may be meaningful, but not necessarily truthful (scientific.)

    The world has adopted scientific language as the language of truth speaking in all fields, almost entirely because it is less prone to deception and error than rationalism.

    So in my work, I want to take what is useful from Hoppe: the reduction of all moral propositions to property rights – but I feel I must rescue liberty from the language of liars, thieves, mystics, and authoritarianism, and translate it into scientific language: the language of truth-speaking: science.

    Because while you may not be aware of it, the central reason for western superiority was our discovery of truth telling. No one else did it. And it is the reason the west separated from the rest.

    Truth speaking creates trust, trust reduces transaction costs, reduced transaction costs create economic velocity, economic velocity creates prosperity, prosperity gives us choices, and the greatest variety of choices means the satisfaction of the most subjective values.

    Truth is very expensive. It is the most expensive normative commons in the world.

    And that is why it is so rare.

    SUMMARY
    All non tautological knowledge is theoretical and contextual, and we determine what we can testify to by criticizing it, not by the means of obtaining it. The means of obtaining it is irrelevant.

    Economics, like all disciplines that investigate that which is beyond human scales of perception is a ratio-empirical discipline because we cannot observe phenomenon without instrumentation and measures, and we cannot test internal consistency without reason. The correct interpretation of praxeology is that all observable phenomenon must be open to rational construction by the decisions and actions of human beings. This applies to all disciplines. Without exception. The general hypothesis of Austrians is that distortionary activity is amplified and extended in time. this appears to be true, but at a very imprecise level and the current debate is over the trade-offs, which is why it remains unsettled. But the empirical investigation into economic phenomenon within that degree of precision (which is enormously imprecise) is necessary, and by any and all definitions, scientific. Interference in such an economy is immoral, but it is scientific, and investigation of interstitial phenomenon it is scientific. Not all phenomenon (regular patterns) are deducible from first principles, however, they must be explainable by means of deduction once discovered to be claimed as truthful.

    CLOSING
    I think i should have done a fair job of criticizing the straw man argument, providing the explanation for the fundamental questions of how science rather than the straw man of ‘empiricism’ operates, demonstrating the importance of it, and why I am working so hard to convert Hoppe’s rationalism into scientific argument – to protect it from irrelevant nonsense arguments and justifiable marginalization. I had only a few hours to work on this on and off, and I can probably improve it. But I promise that I am very good at what I do and if you work with it, you should find it very helpful. If not and I failed you I am sorry but I will keep trying to simplify the arguments further over time.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev Ukraine

  • Hoppe’s Misrepresentation of Empiricism

    “This is empiricism’s central claim: Empirical knowledge must be verifiable or falsifiable by experience; and analytical knowledge, which is not so verifiable or falsifiable, thus cannot contain any empirical knowledge. If this is true, then it is fair to ask: What then is the status of this fundamental statement of empiricism? Evidently it must be either analytical or empirical.” ~Hans/Hermann Hoppe

    —“Logic is powerful enough to expose weak arguments, wouldn’t you say?”— Bruce Koerber 

    —“Curt Doolittle, can you provide a counter to this? At first glance it appears impenetrable.”— Pattern Principle

    [N]othing like asking me to answer a very hard problem in philosophy. I can answer it. But whether it is digestible or not is something else

    To begin with, It’s a straw man argument; which is why its deceptively simple. No one makes the claim that empirical knowledge is the only kind of knowledge we can possess. No one. Rather, only philosophers do, none still do, and scientists certainly don’t.  

    ACTUALLY, WHAT HOPPE ATTRIBUTES TO EMPIRICISTS IS NOT WHAT THE EMPIRICISTS CLAIM.
    One of the reasons why you are misunderstood is that you tend not to confront the topics you deal with head on.Hoppe is a justificationist and so he mines a particular weakness of justificationist empiricism. One you jettison justification, his “argument collapses”- Ayelam Valentine Agaliba
    (Worse, he equates science with empiricism, and empiricism with positivism.)

    And economists do not claim to be philosophers, they claim to be scientists. It is one thing to say philosophers (rationalists) say such a thing and another to say scientists, and in particular economic scientists, would say such a thing (they don’t).

    Instead, they say that we cannot trust our reason except in the most trivial of cases: those at experiential human scale. And the discipline of economics is by definition one beyond experiential human scale, or we would not need prices with which to coordinate our efforts, or property to provide us with incentives – we could just ‘sense it’. But we can’t.

    Instead, we say that, depending upon the domain of inquiry, we require logical(rational), empirical(correspondent), and operational (existentially demonstrable) trials to test our theories, because theories are prone to contain imaginary and erroneous information that must be held separate from causal information. In this sense, we do not create theories justifiably or reasonably, we instead come to theories however we do, and we criticize them by logical, empirical, operational, and falsificational means.

    Examples: in mathematics the means of investigation and the means of proof are nearly identical. But some mathematical deductions are not constructible, so intuitionism requires that once a solution is obtained by whatever means, we go back and explain it operationally, demonstrating that it can be actually constructed by means of possible mathematical operations.

    In economics, we can make empirical observations, but until we go through and describe them as a series of human actions each of which is sympathetically testable then we do not know that the theory is true even if it always produces correlative results.
    in physics we do not know the first principles of the physical world as we do in mathematics (mathematical operations), or in economics (rational human actions in response to stimuli), so we must describe the act of taking the measurements themselves in order to ensure that we are not adding imaginary content to our theories.

    The end of rationalism occurred when Einstein demonstrated that we cannot even take the concepts of time and length for granted in our premises. Bridgman demonstrated that the only want to know when we have crossed the limit of arbitrary precision assumed in the premises of our theories is when we operationally construct them – since repetition of the operations in the new context will expose the failure of prior assumptions. Popper’s falsificationism is an incomplete attempt to demonstrate that falsification is necessary to ‘narrow’ more parsimonious (precise) statements, and that criticism is the means of narrowing theories to ever greater degrees of precision.

    The only thing particularly interesting about economics is that because all human beings are able to cooperate by sympathy with intent, we can also judge whether incentives are rational (with very imprecise limits). As such we are able to subjectively test economic statements for rationality (decidability is the correct term).

    Now once we have stumbled upon a theory, in order to make a truth claim, we must demonstrate that some subset of this set of tests have been satisfied: in other words, we must warranty our statements in order to claim that we speak the truth.

    0) Sensible (intuitively possible)
    1) Meaningfully Expressible ( as an hypothesis )
    2) Internally Consistent (logically consistent – rational)
    3) Externally Correspondent, and Falsifiable ( physically testable – correlative)
    4) Existentially Possible (operationally construct-able/observable)
    5) Voluntarily “Choose-able” (voluntary exchange / rational choice)
    6) Market-Survivable (criticism – theory )
    7) Market Irrefutable (law)
    8) Irrefutable under Original Experience (Perceivable Truth)
    9) Ultimately Parsimonious Description (Analytic Truth)
    10) Informationally Complete and Tautologically Identical (Platonic Truth – Imaginary)

    ..yet not all theoretical systems necessitate most of these claims. In economics for example, we must satisfy 5, but in mathematics we solve this same problem by the axiom of choice (adding additional information), and in physics it’s meaningless.

    But the net is that if ‘knowledge’ refers to truth claims, and if all non-tautological premises are context dependent – a degree of precision – (they are), and if we cannot know the boundaries of that precision (we can’t), then all premises are theoretical(they are), and if all knowledge is then theoretical (it is) and the means of discovery are irrelevant (they are), and operational construction is instead the test of true statements, not the statements themselves, (it is), and if economic principles must be operationally constructed – praxeologically – (they must), yet not all emergent phenomenon are deducible (they aren’t) and the degree of arbitrary precision available to economic theories is extremely limited (it is), then instrumentation is necessary to measure phenomenon within the limits of arbitrary precision (it is), and minor actions will produce uncertain effects within the boundaries of arbitrary precision (they do), and that we can experiment within those bounds (we can and do). (In fact all human action takes place within the universe’s boundaries – which is why we can act in the first place.)

    Now that said, no scientist says that only empirical knowledge is true, we say only that man’s reason is frail and we require instrumentation to test it. It is irrelevant how we come to a theory, and irrelevant if we can justify it if it works, but it is through criticism that we progressively increase the content of a theory until it is the most parsimonious that we can manage for the context we consider, given the logical and physical tools at our disposal.

    FLIPPING IT AROUND
    Now, in Propertarianism I argue that scientists discovered the means of truth telling, and that philosophers(rationalists) did not – instead I argue -which isnt very hard given the twentieth century- most often, that philosophers are usually the best liars. And that the weakness in scientific argument is, that as producers of a luxury good, scientists ignore costs in the description of their theories. Whereas in economics we consider costs. So by adding our understanding of costs back into the scientific method, we discover that it’s the best truth-telling method in general that we have discovered. And that by struggling to speak the truth scientists made dramatic progress in all of their fields. This is why the scientific method is not a method, but a set of moral prescriptions for what we may claim to truthfully say and what not.

    Conversely, rationalism has been used systemically to create the most complex and destructive lies and pseudosciences known to man – most of which are moral, legal political and economic. Because it is profitable to create complex lies in those industries just as it is (often, not always) unprofitable to create complex lies in science. It’s just that by the time someone figures it out in economics and politics, the opportunity to correct it has passed, while in science their is no expiration date on the damage that can be done to one’s reputation (capital of scientists).

    So it is not just that we can come to knowledge by any means possible and criticize it by all necessary means available to us, but that rationalism has been used to lie and steal and murder more than any other discipline and that it is far more error prone than truth telling, and truth telling is a very hard thing to do.

    It is one thing to say ‘this works’ or “i can say this’ and it is another to say that you are speaking it truthfully: meaning scientifically. When you speak scientifically it is possible to be fairly certain your statements are truthful, and when you speak rationally we know only that they may be meaningful, but not necessarily truthful (scientific.)

    The world has adopted scientific language as the language of truth speaking in all fields, almost entirely because it is less prone to deception and error than rationalism.

    So in my work, I want to take what is useful from Hoppe: the reduction of all moral propositions to property rights – but I feel I must rescue liberty from the language of liars, thieves, mystics, and authoritarianism, and translate it into scientific language: the language of truth-speaking: science.

    Because while you may not be aware of it, the central reason for western superiority was our discovery of truth telling. No one else did it. And it is the reason the west separated from the rest.

    Truth speaking creates trust, trust reduces transaction costs, reduced transaction costs create economic velocity, economic velocity creates prosperity, prosperity gives us choices, and the greatest variety of choices means the satisfaction of the most subjective values.

    Truth is very expensive. It is the most expensive normative commons in the world.

    And that is why it is so rare.

    SUMMARY
    All non tautological knowledge is theoretical and contextual, and we determine what we can testify to by criticizing it, not by the means of obtaining it. The means of obtaining it is irrelevant.

    Economics, like all disciplines that investigate that which is beyond human scales of perception is a ratio-empirical discipline because we cannot observe phenomenon without instrumentation and measures, and we cannot test internal consistency without reason. The correct interpretation of praxeology is that all observable phenomenon must be open to rational construction by the decisions and actions of human beings. This applies to all disciplines. Without exception. The general hypothesis of Austrians is that distortionary activity is amplified and extended in time. this appears to be true, but at a very imprecise level and the current debate is over the trade-offs, which is why it remains unsettled. But the empirical investigation into economic phenomenon within that degree of precision (which is enormously imprecise) is necessary, and by any and all definitions, scientific. Interference in such an economy is immoral, but it is scientific, and investigation of interstitial phenomenon it is scientific. Not all phenomenon (regular patterns) are deducible from first principles, however, they must be explainable by means of deduction once discovered to be claimed as truthful.

    CLOSING
    I think i should have done a fair job of criticizing the straw man argument, providing the explanation for the fundamental questions of how science rather than the straw man of ‘empiricism’ operates, demonstrating the importance of it, and why I am working so hard to convert Hoppe’s rationalism into scientific argument – to protect it from irrelevant nonsense arguments and justifiable marginalization. I had only a few hours to work on this on and off, and I can probably improve it. But I promise that I am very good at what I do and if you work with it, you should find it very helpful. If not and I failed you I am sorry but I will keep trying to simplify the arguments further over time.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev Ukraine

  • Hayek and Hoppe Are Wrong: Peace, is not an intrinsic good.

    [H]ayek is right that a condition of liberty can only be constructed by organically evolutionary (common) law of property. Hoppe is right that institutions can replace monopoly bureaucracy.

    However, Hayek has no solution to making such a condition universally preferable; and Hoppe has no solution to the provision of the commons, nor for constructing a condition of liberty. Neither address the influence of the family or the intergenerational means of reproductive production or the entry of women’s socialistic biases into the sphere of politics – and neither addresses the problem of the conflict between the reproductive interests of the classes. Neither solves the problem of a heterogeneous post-agrarian, and possibly post familial, institutional system. Yet that is the set of conditions that we find ourselves in.

    I think I have persuasively argued that over the long term (anyone can benefit from implementing technology that was invented by others in the sort term), high velocity economies are only possible under liberty, and that liberty is only possible under high trust, and that only law under universal standing can construct high trust and liberty, and that those most interested in maintaining this structure are those in the lower middle class and upper proletariat, who are willing to fight to un-constrain their superiors, so that they can gain the privileges of the group with the best leaders. This is why the working classes are conservatively biased – they will fall in status and material possession without the advantages given them by support – the enablement – of their elites.

    So we can look at the successes of philosophers but also look at their failures. Hoppe tries to both preserve cosmopolitan separatism and reconstruct the hanseatic league. But this is not possible without the use of violence, exclusion, and the taking of territory sufficiently advantageous to produce the incentives to join such a polity, nor the economic advantage necessary to see it persist.

    Hoppe’s solution of starting a clean polity isn’t a solution at all. It’s the equivalent of communism for libertines.

    Territory is obtained, held, informal institutions constructed, formal institutions implemented, and monuments built, by the use of violence to do so by those desirous of obtaining advantage for themselves and their people.

    Peace, is not an intrinsic good. The intrinsic good is the perpetuation of your family, tribe, and people in competition with other families tribes and peoples.

    Everything else is just a better way of getting there.

    And the alternative is conquest and suicide. Both of which we are victims of.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine

  • Hayek and Hoppe Are Wrong: Peace, is not an intrinsic good.

    [H]ayek is right that a condition of liberty can only be constructed by organically evolutionary (common) law of property. Hoppe is right that institutions can replace monopoly bureaucracy.

    However, Hayek has no solution to making such a condition universally preferable; and Hoppe has no solution to the provision of the commons, nor for constructing a condition of liberty. Neither address the influence of the family or the intergenerational means of reproductive production or the entry of women’s socialistic biases into the sphere of politics – and neither addresses the problem of the conflict between the reproductive interests of the classes. Neither solves the problem of a heterogeneous post-agrarian, and possibly post familial, institutional system. Yet that is the set of conditions that we find ourselves in.

    I think I have persuasively argued that over the long term (anyone can benefit from implementing technology that was invented by others in the sort term), high velocity economies are only possible under liberty, and that liberty is only possible under high trust, and that only law under universal standing can construct high trust and liberty, and that those most interested in maintaining this structure are those in the lower middle class and upper proletariat, who are willing to fight to un-constrain their superiors, so that they can gain the privileges of the group with the best leaders. This is why the working classes are conservatively biased – they will fall in status and material possession without the advantages given them by support – the enablement – of their elites.

    So we can look at the successes of philosophers but also look at their failures. Hoppe tries to both preserve cosmopolitan separatism and reconstruct the hanseatic league. But this is not possible without the use of violence, exclusion, and the taking of territory sufficiently advantageous to produce the incentives to join such a polity, nor the economic advantage necessary to see it persist.

    Hoppe’s solution of starting a clean polity isn’t a solution at all. It’s the equivalent of communism for libertines.

    Territory is obtained, held, informal institutions constructed, formal institutions implemented, and monuments built, by the use of violence to do so by those desirous of obtaining advantage for themselves and their people.

    Peace, is not an intrinsic good. The intrinsic good is the perpetuation of your family, tribe, and people in competition with other families tribes and peoples.

    Everything else is just a better way of getting there.

    And the alternative is conquest and suicide. Both of which we are victims of.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine

  • Value of Conservatives vs Libertines

    [W]HY ARE CONSERVATIVES MORE IMPORTANT THAN LIBERTINES?
    Because given moral justification to correct violations of purity and sanctity a sufficient number of conservatives will use violence to restore order. Only conservatives act for social good alone. Libertines and progressives act only in their self interest. Why? Because libertinism is purely a status seeking effort, and progressivism is both status seeking and dysgenic.

    WHY ARE LIBERTARIANS POLITICALLY IRRELEVANT?
    Because political systems are constructed by violence. And conservatives are willing to create an order that suppresses consumption in order to construct commons, and progressives are willing to use violence to destruct an order so that they can increase consumption. But libertarians are both small in number and unwilling to use violence.
    Violence raises the costs of non-cooperative action, so that cooperation is preferable to non-cooperative action.
    Libertines always look for discounts (freebies). There aren’t any. Order is expensive.
    For these reasons libertarians will only exist in absurdly wealthy periods of history, made possible by conservatives. Otherwise they will exist only as another rejection-cult, criticizing the fact that they are required to pay costs for norms that do not improve their status – but constrain it.

    WHY DO LIBERTARIANS ALWAYS LOSE?
    Libertinism. Meaning incorrect attribution of legal, economic, political and military value to costs of high-cost, high-trust norms. Conservatives do not make this mistake – if anything they over-value norms. Libertines discount norms. Progressives never even consider them or find prohibition on their consumption antithetical.

  • Value of Conservatives vs Libertines

    [W]HY ARE CONSERVATIVES MORE IMPORTANT THAN LIBERTINES?
    Because given moral justification to correct violations of purity and sanctity a sufficient number of conservatives will use violence to restore order. Only conservatives act for social good alone. Libertines and progressives act only in their self interest. Why? Because libertinism is purely a status seeking effort, and progressivism is both status seeking and dysgenic.

    WHY ARE LIBERTARIANS POLITICALLY IRRELEVANT?
    Because political systems are constructed by violence. And conservatives are willing to create an order that suppresses consumption in order to construct commons, and progressives are willing to use violence to destruct an order so that they can increase consumption. But libertarians are both small in number and unwilling to use violence.
    Violence raises the costs of non-cooperative action, so that cooperation is preferable to non-cooperative action.
    Libertines always look for discounts (freebies). There aren’t any. Order is expensive.
    For these reasons libertarians will only exist in absurdly wealthy periods of history, made possible by conservatives. Otherwise they will exist only as another rejection-cult, criticizing the fact that they are required to pay costs for norms that do not improve their status – but constrain it.

    WHY DO LIBERTARIANS ALWAYS LOSE?
    Libertinism. Meaning incorrect attribution of legal, economic, political and military value to costs of high-cost, high-trust norms. Conservatives do not make this mistake – if anything they over-value norms. Libertines discount norms. Progressives never even consider them or find prohibition on their consumption antithetical.