Curt Doolittle

Author: Curt Doolittle

  • THE VIRTUE OF MONARCHIES Monarchies, or “private governments” denied access to p

    THE VIRTUE OF MONARCHIES

    Monarchies, or “private governments” denied access to political status to all but the family, and those few hired by the family.

    The remainder of the population sought status signals in the market, and within their identity groups. These societies were ‘diverse’. Sections of each city were dedicated to the cultural expression of their members, and signals within those sections served to convey status without the need for political power to convey such status.

    Under representative democracy, heterogeneous societies compete for the political power necessary to alter their status in relation to other groups. Instead of using the market, and market behavior to signal status. IN other words, we harm cultures by giving them access to political power.

    The answer is not how we share power. It is how we have no ability to use the violence of the state to create signals that are only mutually beneficial if they are manufactured do to the most important community service we can deliver: market participation.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-13 18:18:00 UTC

  • A QUESTION FOR THE LEFT: IF IT MEANT THAT IT WOULD BE POSSIBLE TO PRODUCE A FAR

    A QUESTION FOR THE LEFT: IF IT MEANT THAT IT WOULD BE POSSIBLE TO PRODUCE A FAR MORE MATERIALLY EQUAL SOCIETY, PERHAPS THE MOST MATERIALLY EQUAL IN THE WORLD, WOULD YOU THEN CEASE DENIAL OF INEQUALITY OF ABILITY, INEQUALITY OF RACES, AND THE IRRECONCILABILITY OF GENDER PREFERENCES?

    I think you would. And you should. Because that is what it will take for you to have a heterogeneous society that includes redistribution.

    Propertarianism solves the problem of politics.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-13 18:06:00 UTC

  • Untitled

    http://direct.mises.org/misesreview_detail.aspx?control=215

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-12 22:28:00 UTC

  • I WOULD LOVE TO HELP CONSERVATIVES WITH MESSAGING STATEGY If I could find one sm

    I WOULD LOVE TO HELP CONSERVATIVES WITH MESSAGING STATEGY

    If I could find one smart enough to talk to about it. (sigh)

    I realize that we are supposedly the thought leadership for the conservatives.

    Unfortunately we provide all the thought and they provide all the leadership. 🙁

    ( I think I made a rare bit of humor there. Ironic humor. Sad humor. But still humor. )

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-12 17:23:00 UTC

  • ARGUMENTS AGAINST SOMETHING AREN’T ALL THAT USEFUL UNLESS YOU ALSO HAVE ARGUMENT

    ARGUMENTS AGAINST SOMETHING AREN’T ALL THAT USEFUL UNLESS YOU ALSO HAVE ARGUMENTS FOR SOMETHING ELSE.

    This is libertarianism’s problem. A failure to provide a solution to the problem of institutions both formal and informal.

    Without formal institutions you have a religion. Not a replacement for the state.

    Institutions create norms.

    Property is a norm.

    Property was created by the application of violence.

    Propertarianism gives us the tools with which to create formal institutions in heterogeneous populations.

    Propertarianism completes libertarianism.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-12 17:12:00 UTC

  • SHE CAN COOK TOO. I thought it was a lost art. :/ It looks like the majority of

    SHE CAN COOK TOO.

    I thought it was a lost art. :/

    It looks like the majority of women here in Kiev are pretty good cooks.

    In no small part due to the absence of the kind of false dietary propaganda produced in the USA for the past hundred years.

    The fashion in the states is to use fresh food quickly prepared but to combine tastes from multiple cuisines. Its good. But it’s very expensive.

    Ukrainian food is still old fashioned meat and vegetables with fat supplying the sweetness. Although heavy on potatoes ( which along with corn syrup, wheat, pasta and MSG are terrible for your waistline and chance for diabetes) the locals are fit and trim.

    Eat paleo. Hug women who cook paleo.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-12 17:05:00 UTC

  • A BUDGET FOR SCOTCH? So I don’t have a car here in Kiev. That’s a savings. A big

    A BUDGET FOR SCOTCH?

    So I don’t have a car here in Kiev. That’s a savings. A big savings. Cell phones fees are half of what they are in the states.

    But, we have gone thru four liters of scotch in one week.

    Not ourselves. With guests.

    At this rate, a car is cheaper. 🙂

    Ukrainian alcohol tolerance and all.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-12 13:55:00 UTC

  • Illustrating The Meaning Of Liberty From A False Dichotomy 🙂

    A Facebook friend asked this question.

    “What is your definition of liberty? Penniless in a free world, or wealthy in a corrupt one. Those are the choices that I give you. Without deviating from those two choices, what is your response?

    I dont understand the question yet….

    First reply to your definition on liberty. Then reply to my questions within that context.

    [H]mmmm….. Ok. Lets define liberty: LIBERTY:a) Sentimentally: liberty is the desire to conduct individual experimental action from which we gain stimulation, knowledge, understanding, or temporal or material gain. b) Historically: it is an allegory to the sentiments of sovereignty in aristocratic egalitarianism. c) Politically: Liberty is the ability to use your property, defined as your body, and your possessions obtained by free exchange and homesteading, as you see fit, as long as you force no involuntary transfers from others by doing so. d) Praxeologically: a set of property definitions which are monopolistically bounded, absent new invention, as norms. THEREFORE [W]ithin the context of that definition of liberty, I can’t address the next dichotomy. SO I will try to deduce the cause of that dichotomy from the two statements and see if I can come up with an answer. ANSWERING THE QUESTION [Y]our question might mean “would you prefer to be penniless in a free world or wealthy in a corrupt one”. The phrasing could also mean “you can only be penniless in a free world and wealthy in a corrupt one”. Which I think is illogical, so I’ll have to assume that’s not correct. Or it could mean that “is it just that there are penniless men in the free world and wealthy men in the corrupt world?” I am going to assume that you mean the first, but might also be suggesting the third. I’ll answer them in that order. I would rather be the wealthy person in the corrupt world of course. However, if I am a penniless man, I would prefer to be in the free world, where it is possible to change my state. To answer the third question, the world is not just because justice requires the possession of knowledge within a limited domain that is available to individuals. ie: the family or tribe, and the family or tribal economy. However, for a division of labor to form, we must possess the knowledge that only money and prices can provide us with. And since none of that knowledge is ‘owned’ and much of it is noise, and the value to the market of scotch tape is much higher than the value of another Beethoven, then whomever ends up wealthy is a matter of the lottery effect and not much else. It’s random. Therefore there is no such thing as output-justice. We have a market precisely because it is created by a lottery effect. if the outcome were known , no one would play in the market. The market is a lottery. It is not just. The only justice is that as a byproduct of that market, goods and services are subject to constant decline in prices and increases in choices. SO the market economy is not a question of individual justice, but of aggregate justice with huge temporal variation among the individuals in the distribution we call the population. And any question of social justice is illogical – at least until you get to my next point: The Propertarian answer to the third question is that if you respect property rights, whatever those rights might be, you have paid for those rights, for yourself, and for others, by forgoing opportunities for involuntary transfer, fraud, theft and violence. As such you are a shareholder in that market. Some might argue that respect for property is just the cost of access to the market. But the cost to the poor of those property rights is far higher than the cost to the wealthy, and as such, those rights are unequaly paid for. So, others, including myself, argue that shareholders not only have the right of access to the market, but we also have the right to whatever distributions (profits) that the market wherein those property rights are defined, produces, in compensation for that variance in costs, and unless we compensate for those variations in costs, then those with property are conducting an involuntary transfer from those who pay a very high price for respecting property. (ie: we have the right of variable redistribution if we adhere to property rights.) (Of course this would also requrie that you did not vote for privileges and redistributions.) This is undeniable praxeological reasoning. There is no alternative to it. Redistribution is warranted. And therefore you will never be a penniless man, even if you are a poor one, unless you have very poor judgement. Propertarianism is based upon the universal human demonstrated preference for a prohibition on involuntary transfer. It is not, like libertarianism, based upon preference, natural law, or any other artificial construct.

  • Fixing A False Criticism: Libertarianism, Anarchy and Somalia

    THE PROBLEM OF DEFINING PROPERTY RIGHTS WHERE THEY DO NOT EXIST IS STILL OPEN. [T]o start with, definitions help us communicate clearly. And they both force us to be honest, and prevent others from making false arguments against us. 1) Liberty is a sentiment. It is a minority sentiment. It is a sentiment held by some percentage of the people that favors the ability to obtain new experiences without external constraint, as long as they harm no others in doing so. (see Haidt) 2) Libertarianism is a political bias. That bias favors various forms of minimal government. It eschews the concentration of power, and the loss of sovereignty. It is a sentiment that is embedded in the western tradition. That western tradition is the egalitarian union of aristocracy. That Aristocratic Egalitarianism is a social adaptation to early Indo-European battle tactics which required independent but coordinated action by self-funded warriors. This social strategy allowed a professionalized minority using advanced weapon technology to conquer or fend off conquerors with much greater numbers. (see Duchesne) 3) Libertarianism it is a philosophical framework authored by Murray Rothbard. This framework argues that all possible rights are reducible to articulated property rights. It contains errors. (Which I have discussed elsewhere). Those errors are significant in that they are morally, and therefore socially and economically regressive. However, the fundamental insight that human actions can be reduced to property rights remains valid, and the errors in Rothbard’s incomplete ethical framework are repairable. Rothbard was unable to solve the problem of institutions, so his framework describes little more than a secular moral religion of opposition to the state. Hoppe solved the problem of cooperative institutions, but did not correct Rothbard’s (or Mises’) initial errors. He did not solve the problem of heterogeneous societies which we live in. So for these two reasons he has described small governments. (I have tried to repair Mises and Rothbard’s errors, and use Hoppe’s insights to create solutions for the problem of heterogeneous and therefore large governments consisting of voluntary institutions which preserve the aristocratic egalitarian ethical system of property rights. But my work is incomplete and not yet available for analysis and criticism.) 4) Anarchy is a) a state of disorder – an inability for humans to organize. Propertarians argue that this means little more than an absence of homogeneous property rights. b) Anarchy is a Utopian idea of an ordered society without any articulated form of order other than human instincts.5) Property is a form of establishing order – the ability of humans to organize. It is a very simple rule that matches, with some significant variation, the human moral instinct, while allowing us to cooperate in a vast division of knowledge and labor, the result of which is lower prices and increased choices. Since a) property can vary from the purely private to the purely common, and since b) the utility of property at any point on that spectrum is different for those with different abilities, and c) since the genetic bias of men and women has shown us a demonstrated preference for different points on that spectrum, which better suit the reproductive strategies of each gender, therefore, the preferred monopoly of property rights varies by class and gender, as well as, perhaps, race whenever a population is heterogeneous. 6) Anarchism is a philosophical research program the purpose of which is to find institutional solutions (organizations, processes and rules) that are an alternative to a monopoly power that we grant to the state, when we create a government in order to institute some set of property rights, and therefore establish order.

    [callout]But in no case do Anarchists or Libertarians suggest there is no ‘governance’. A set of articulated property rights and a judiciary that resolves conflicts over property, is a government. It is just a reactive government. A government or rules. It is the rule of law. [/callout]

    DISCUSSION [S]ince our invention of politics, we cannot seem to limit the republican or democratic state to the functions that preserve our aristocratic egalitarian order: a) the defense of those property rights, and b) the concentration of capital for shared investment at the same time. And by doing so, force people to cooperate in the market, instead of by violence, or the proxy of physical violence we call politics. So, because of that failure of democratic institutions, the anarchic research program seeks to use competition for services to eliminate the corporeal state’s monopoly on power, while maintaining a monopoly on the articulated enumeration of some set of property rights within a geography. The a) libertarian sentiment, b) Libertarian history (the classical liberal model) and c) the libertarian philosophy (all of which are different things) do not answer this problem. The anarchic research program has attempted to. And any attempt by libertarians to state that we have solved this problem is either a failure to understand the state of our intellectual development, or an intentional misrepresentation of it. But in no case do Anarchists or Libertarians suggest there is no ‘governance’. A set of articulated property rights and a judiciary that resolves conflicts over property, is a government. It is just a reactive government. A government or rules. Judges under the common law cannot make law. They can discover it. And they can be overruled by other judges through market competition. But they cannot proactively make law. As such, there is a government under all libertarian models that have been articulated to any degree. The problem remains only in how we first establish a set of property rights. In the west this is not as difficult as elsewhere because those property rights are native to the framework of thought that we inherited with our Aristocratic Egalitarianism. Anyone who is enfranchised (fights) has a right to property which is not abridge-able by his peers. We extended the requirement to fighting, first to those who demonstrated nobility through service of any kind (chivalry). And third to those who demonstrated nobility through exchange and trade. But the principle of property is fundamental regardless of which means one earns his enfranchisement. When anarchists say that they advocate anarchy, it means that they eschew the concentration of power to alter the set of property rights involuntarily, since it breaks with the Aristocratic Egalitarian ethics. Ethics which allow each of us who is enfranchised to experiement and add value to ourselves and society as long as we commit no involuntary transfer from others who are enfranchised. CREATING THAT SYSTEM What anarchists and libertarians of all stripes have failed to do is describe how we create a monopoly definition of property rights without the application of force to do it. In the west, the aristocracy created it out of habitual necessity. And they did it by force. Rome in particular was a powerful machine that mandated a set of property rights and then defended them because it was simply profitable to do so. CRITICS AND ADVOCATES Critics are wrong in the sense that libertarianism will not work in somalia. But they are right in that libertarians and anarchists have not provided a means by which to institute a monopoly of property rights without it first existing. FILLING THE HOLES IN ANARCHISM AND LIBERTARIANISM As I’ve stated above, we are less than a century into our research program at articulating our ancient system of cooperation that we call the libertarian sentiment, but which is more accurately termed the political system called Aristocratic Egalitarianism with its dependency on property rights. While I have filled the hole in our ethics. The hole in our institutional process of implementing a monopoly of individual property rights by other than organized violence is still in need of filling. And we should ask our critics to help us answer that problem, rather than deny we have it.

  • Propertarianism As The Solution To The Problem Of Ethics

    VS ROTHBARD: ARISTOCRATIC VERSUS GHETTO ETHICS [T]he aristocratic egalitarian ethic requires all able men capable of bearing arms, deny access to power, to anyone and everyone. I usually refer to this (erroneously) as the warrior ethic, since it originates with the Indo European warrior caste. The ethic of the bazaar or ghetto (incorrectly referred to as the slave ethic), requires only that we fail to engage in trade with those who would seek power. It is a form of ostracization. Rothbard returned to his cultural history to develop his ethics when he could not sovle the problem of institutions. And in doing so, he regressed ethics into that same ghetto by ignoring the aristocratic ethical requirements of a) symmetry of knowledge, b) warranty that provides proof of that symmetry of knowledge, and c) a prohibition on external involuntary transfer.

    [callout] Propertarianism is the solution to the problem of the incompleteness of Misesian and Rothbardian praxeology, and explains the causal property of Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics, rendering it descriptive, not causal.[/callout]

    All three of these ethical constraints are necessary to create the high trust society. Yet they are also insufficient. The fourth constraint appears to require d) outbreeding by forbidding cousin-marriage. Outbreeding creates a universalist ethic, which in the west we call ‘christian love’ but which means treating all humans regardless of family origin with the same ethical constraints as you would the members of your immediate family or even tribe. [T]his is why libertarianism under Rothbard failed to gain the same level of traction that it has gained under Ron Paul. Ron Paul is promoting Aristocratic Egalitarian Ethics (even if he does not know how to articulate such a thing) while Rothbard was promoting the ethics of the Bazzaar and ghetto (even if he did not understand his actions in this context.) Humans are not terribly bright when it comes to rationalism. But we can sense moral patterns and status signals and ‘feel’ positives and negative moral reactions due to those patterns whether or not we can analytically separate and articulate those moral instincts and reactions. Propertarianism allows us to articulate these moral instincts as reducible to different concpets of property rights. Propertariansm makes moral differences commensurable. If you can grasp that idea, you may eventually understand that Propertarianism is the solution to the problem of the incompleteness of Misesian and Rothbardian praxeology, and explains the causal property of Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics, rendering it descriptive, not causal. This explanation then, in turn, provides us with the tools to solve the 2500 year old problem of politics that the greeks, and the english, and the americans failed to solve.