Author: Curt Doolittle

http://research.tdameritrade.com/public/markets/news/story.asp?docKey=100-249b3012-1&clausesAscentium Acquires Cactus Commerce. 🙂

Republican behavior: starving the beast.

I suppose my doctor is going to say ‘…that’s really bad’. But ever since the deal closed my body is a very different place: colors look brighter and my blood pressure is so low that I’ve had to cut the prescription dose by a third in order to keep from getting dizzy. …. I think that means I was under too much stress.

http://academy.mises.org/courses/murphy-smith/I love Karl. He’s a good man. But he didn’t have a chance. 🙂

(Someone asked me over fb chat to address this issue due to high activity. Here it is.)

RE: Separation of Church And State.

1) It Is a rare in history – and very questionable. Why? Because religions propagate the norms. Norms are ‘costs’ you and I pay by forgoing opportunities to do something we would do if there were not such norms. Norms form dependent networks. These norms are economic principles. Competing norms are effectively theft from one group to another. In effect religions and norms create competing sets of ‘laws’ and competing ‘economies’. Christianity is very ‘special’. The west is ‘special’. it is special because it’s early battle tactics required warriors to provide their own equipment and retinues, and to follow cooperative and individualist battle tactics. As populations grew, they needed to increase the number of soldiers – enfranchisement of more and more people. In trying to keep the ‘east at bay’ the ‘poor minority’ in the west created the ‘fraternal balance of power’ model. From that balance of power, came debate among equals. From debate among equals came logic and rhetoric. From rhetoric philosophy and from philosophy science and the politics of the balance of powers – in effect individualism. From individualism came property rights. From property rights came economic prosperity. That’s why the west is special and is propagating capitalism all around the world. Capitalism means “mass participation in mass production for mass consumption”.

2) The purpose of Christian Monarchies was to allow the church to unite the germanic tribes so that the (evil) East could be kept ‘at bay’. Christendom is a means of preserving european independence from eastern conquest. The average westerner does not understand this reason and attacks christianity on logical rather than utilitarian grounds. The post medieval monarchies were ‘private governments’ that had public institutions – and they relied upon the balance of powers and the gold standard for self regulation. THis appears to have been the best form of government invented by human beings to date. (I can argue this on very technical grounds if I need to.) It may not be clear that the western church was always poorer than the eastern church and that the west really fell because of the mohammedans (islam), when they conquered byzantium, disrupting mediterranian trade, and creating a shortage of coinage. The plagues prior to this period were no help either. THE WEST is an attempt for individuals to keep the decadent (mystical) east at bay.

3) The enlightenment purpose for separating church and state was enacted for two reasons. a) because the colonies did not want to ‘weaken’ religiosity with a diluted and dispassionate state religion. Their purpose wasn’t to keep the church out of the state. It was to prevent the state from weakening the moral and religious structure of society. b) when the industrial revolution started in the 1700’s, and people moved to factory-cities, the churches combated alienation, and provided social services that were needed due to dislocation and disenfranchisement. The thinking at the time was that the state needed all these little sects to make people feel at home – a community center – and that the state was incapable of providing the service. So supporting multiple CHRISTIAN SECTS was desirable. There is absolutely no evidence that the framers were anything other than devout – in the sense of the time – which prior to Darwin, mean that mythology was a thing, and science was a thing, and they’re just ‘different things’. Fundamentalism (including state fundamentalism – the religion of state worship) is a reaction to darwinian attacks on mythology.

It is very likely that everything you currently think about your existing government and the governments that came before it, consists of intentionally created and distributed political propaganda that was used to discredit the monarchy and the church so that the middle and lower classes could take over the government and use it to profit from the newly discovered north american continent. It was a profit seeking land grab. Constitutional, Multi-house, Monarchies were the best form of government ever invented by man. Because they reflect the social structure of society, and they force the social classes to cooperate rather than compete for spoils of self destruction.

Democracy is the god that failed. It is an even worse god than the monarchic one.

I hope this helps with the discussion.

The inequality argument is a fraud.

http://jalopnik.com/5836525/this-is-what-its-like-to-be-shot-at-with-an-ak+47Viral ad of the day. It doesn’t get much better than this for do it yourself. 🙂

(Friends and Family: Big announcement coming this weekend regarding our business. Lots of work by lots of people over the past year. Tremendous effort over the past few months. Can’t wait to talk about it. Very exciting.)

Something profound for economists

Libertarians are smarter than liberals. Republicans are smarter than democrats. Libertarians the thought leadership of the conservative movement. Liberals and progressives have the space on the curve below libertarians and below conservatives. In other words, liberals are the thought leadership for the proles and the working class, and libertarians and classical liberal conservatives are the thought leadership for the middle classes. Statistically, liberals are a minority (less than 18%), and libertarians are a minority (less than 10% but climbing). If conservatives and libertarians (the individual spectrum) are compared to progressives and liberals (the collective spectrum) the numbers are in the conservative favor. It’s the fact that libertarians do not self identify as conservatives, yet vote Republican that skew the numbers. This is one of the reasons why Republicans test smarter than Democrats – because libertarians vote republican not libertarian, just as liberals vote democrat not ‘socialist’ – because it’s not in their interest as a minority to waste their vote. The republican economic program, which is a combination of conservative sentiments and libertarian economics and philosophy, simply appeals to more, smarter people. Libertarians promote individual achievement. Liberals promote redistribution of other people’s production. Liberals tend to be verbal (and female) and conservatives tend to be spatial-temporal (and male). Liberals tend not to be historians, but exerperientialists, and conservatives tend to be historians. This reflects research into Time Preference, in which liberals have a shorter (higher) time horizon, and conservatives nave a longer (lower) time horizon, and these conflicts are immutable. In Jonathan Haidt’s work, which expands Machiavelli’s and Pareto’s works, liberals only consider two of the five social sentiments, while conservatives value all five equally. To some degree this is an expression of the ancient battle of the sexes. The reason for the survey data’s (correct) conclusion that many very bright people develop redistributive and authoritarian philosophies was developed by Schumpeter, who said that these people PROFIT both materially and in social status by giving away that which they do not produce. They’re today’s church. Schumpeter said that Marx was wrong: that totalitarianism would not be brought about by the proletariat, but by ‘intellectuals’ who would use their privilege to undermine the system of capitalism that made their privilege possible, and that they would do it in exchange for social status. The change in political tenor in the country is due to three factors: 1) immigration first of catholics, then of the third world. 2) the concentration of these people in urban areas where urbanites perceive a lower cost of production due to low opportunity costs. 3) the south’s abandonment of it’s civil war era bias against the republican party, changing conservative democrats into republicans. The parties had more philosophical breadth during the southern ‘rejection’ but now that the parties are roughly ideologically opposite, it is not possible to create a compromise position. Now, this whole discussion tends to ignore the moderate but conservative-leaning majority who actually determine the outcome of elections. And it should be noted that no civilization in history has survived urbanization and immigration. (The reason is too complicated for a blog posting.) A fact that is OK with liberals and horrid to conservatives.