Author: Curt Doolittle

My ironic sense of humor does not come across on Twitter. 🙂

Only wanna-be nouveau’s lease Lamborghini’s. Players pay cash. Besides, car lovers drive Ferraris: better visibility and feel.

My experience is in the field is that people buy ideas, they don’t buy the effort to create them. Show up with answers. 🙂

People will be less wiling to give you money. Fashion is a proletariat industry, and symbol. Money encourages conformity.

Regarding The Wars Of Religion: The wars of religion were the result of economic power transferred from the Mediterranean to the atlantic, and the rise in germanic people’s populations which in turn resulted in their ‘revolution’ and separation from the south. Protestantism was a reaction to the political corruption of the church and the export of capital from the north to the south as taxes. The germanic monarchies wanted to keep the money in-country rather than export it to the south, and so they supported Luther. The people were simple pawns in this process, just as they were during the American civil war. The American civil war was fought between a merchant manufacturing north and an agrarian export south, over the markets created by the westward expansion made possible by the Louisiana purchase and the fact that the south could block northern legislation leading to political stalemate, and the south, as an export economy, paid for all the government’s costs, so there was a tension between the two economic and political bases. Europe’s first civil war was not over religion, it was over economics. America’s first civil war was not over slavery, it was over economics. All wars are over economics. It’s not complicated. What we are seeing today in the muslim world is similar. A combination of rapid increase in population accompanied by rapid increase in food prices, when food prices consume 70% or more of the income of these peoples. They are not ideological revolutions. They are about food. The fact that we talk about these historical events in moral and emotive populist terms is why we fail to learn from them and hence repeat them. THe USA is now going through a demographic shift, and trifurcation if not a four way split of the economy, and a political stalemate between regional cultural differences. This will eventually result in some sort of revolution or change int he political system. THere are any number of theories when this will occur. But the economic and cultural interests are sufficiently divergent that it is unlikely that the domestic empire can persist indefinitely. There are no wars of religion. There are wars of economic interest. FOLLOW THE MONEY.

“Customary Law”: See this paper, and this section “Customary Law for the Commercial Revolution”

See Hayek’s Law Legislation and Liberty if you want to understand the history and importance of common law.

You can skip the libertarian content if you want, and just read about the history of legal development.

Monarchy = Nationalism.

Develop a cohesive, written ideology and the economic justification of the ideology. Privatize the school system. Create a network of school. Teach the great tradition of western history for two generations. This line of reasoning is the best method of producing great minds – even in average people. These students will be sought by business and industry, and their social status will be something that people will seek to imitate. Create two new branches of military service: homeland maintenance (emergency preparedness), and foreign service (policing and administering), and leave the existing institutions for the sole purpose of violence. Withdraw our troops from europe and asia. Require military service of all citizens in order to vote. And in two generations you will make it possible to have a Constitutional monarchy. Monarchy is a government for nationalism – an extended family. Families have common values. Education an service make people invested. Our current form of democracy in the USA is more concerned with protecting our trade routes, disempowering white males, promoting ideological class warfare, and obtaining political power than it is in the long term health of the nation.

As Camus said, the first problem of philosophy is why we do not commit suicide. But that is followed by the first problem of political philosophy, which is not “how do we best get along?” It is “Why don’t I kill you and take your stuff?” I opt for freedom by advocating the organized application of violence against those who would take my stuff. Violence is a virtue, and the source of the institution of property. Without that violence, there is no property, only slavery to those who have either violence or property. So, property does not insure freedom. Violence insures freedom. Violence is a virtue not a vice. Property is simply a more productive use of freedom, because it allows us to develop fixed capital at lower risk, which then increases production and profits, decreases prices. Yet, once we consider that there are differences in ability between individuals, and therefore their differences in ability to create and obtain property in real time, the question remains: if we ask people to forgo the opportunity for theft, murder and plunder, how do we compensate them for their costs? All costs are opportunity costs. A man who is very powerful, or a group of weak people who by their numbers are powerful, is most free from constraints if they can rape, murder and plunder at will. Since they sacrifice this freedom in order to respect property, then what is their compensation for it? If people form a group, organization or corporation for the purpose of plunder, why should others not form a group for the purpose of preventing plunder and creating property and a market for exchange? Is that not exactly the course of development of these organizations? But once these defensive organizations are founded, and power is concentrated in them the bureaucracy forms, and corruption and predation upon the property of others replaces violence against their ‘person’, people, and things. We then attempt to regulate corruption, rather than replacing bureaucracy with market accountability. We replace violence against the barbarians with bribes so that they will respect our property: redistribution is payment for conformity to the standards property definitions of the organization which defends property. Since all costs are opportunity costs, and there is a cost born by those who respect property, each person who respects property is therefore a shareholder in the market. One could say instead, that access to the market is paid for by the cost of forgoing opportunity to rape, murder, pillage, and plunder, thieve and fraud, deceive and lie. And that might be true. But the question is, whether access to the market is SUFFICIENT compensation for the ongoing cost of opportunity paid by respecting property. And whether this is quantifiable or not, people ACT as though it is insufficient, and they rebel against the constraints. Radical individualism is a rational construct for epistemic purposes. But fundamentally, people ORGANIZE to achieve cooperative ends. Individualism is not enough of a solution to the problem of politics. In effect, propertarianism is an upward redistribution of opportunity costs from the lower to the upper classes. Anarchism is an effort to avoid paying costs of creating organizations that create property and create the market. Anarcho capitalism is a research program that has demonstrated the failure of bureaucracy, and suggested private and competitive rather than public and monopolistic means of achieving group ends. But the question then, is who are the shareholders of this organization that is so costly to implement? The answer is all that forgo opportunities for coercion. And what is their return on their forgone opportunities? I am a libertarian by epistemic method and a classical liberal by institutional method, and a conservative by social class and time preference. And I do not want to privatize the costs of others, and participate in corruption, by failing to compensate others for their forgone opportunities, from which I benefit. I simply want to stop corruption in the bureaucracy, and to privatize everything. I do not want to steal from others. Therefore redistribution of some sort is mandatory, because without redistribution, we cannot say that we respect property.

[callout] Run the government like a business network. Make it an EMPIRICALLY CALCULABLE DECISION process rather than a RATIONAL AND RHETORICAL POLITICAL DEBATE process: [/callout]

The problem then becomes how to make this process calculable. The answer is simple. Run the government like a business network. Make it an EMPIRICALLY CALCULABLE DECISION process rather than a RATIONAL AND RHETORICAL POLITICAL DEBATE process: “Loans Not Laws.” Laws are loosely calculable. Loans are narrowly calculable. Laws are rational. Loans are empirical. There is only one law, and that is property. Citizens are shareholders. And as shareholders they are due returns on their investment in opportunity costs. This is the grownup version of libertarianism. Most of which has degenerated into a Rothbardian religion supported by Friedman’s monetary analysis.

An Ideology: Any reasonably coherent set of social, cultural, moral and political ideas that can be used to obtain and hold political power on the behalf of a part of a population that perceives it has similar interests. Monarchy needs a sufficient ideological base. The people have abandoned the church. The church has abandoned christendom. Economics has replaced cultural nationalism, and empirical tools have replaced the moral sentiments. For monarchy to prevail in the post-mystical age, we must remake it’s foundations so that they rely upon economic and cultural superiorities, not desire to return to the past.

Monarchs are superior to elected ministers because they have a longer time preference, and with a longer time preference they can more wisely veto those changes which will, in the long term, harm the society – because they are not subject to the fashions of the people.

There are three basic western philosophical traditions: 1) Aristocratic and Conservative with the longest time preference. 2) Middle Class and Classical Liberal with medium time preference 3) Proletarian and socialist with short time preference. These three philosophies loosely correspond to social class sentiments and perceptions of social order. THey also loosely correspond to the Monarchy, the Senate, and House of Commons. The insight of the british model was to give each social class it’s house, and to force the houses to collaborate in order to enact laws.

This model was sufficient until the american and french revolutions attempted to break the class model and transfer full power to either the middle or lower classes. And was further exacerbated by the Russian and chinese revolutions which (regrettably) succeeded in transferring political power to the proletariat. After the world wars, Europe was broken and rejected the aristocratic model entirely. (Wrongly. Germany was right. German social order is the most economically productive yet discovered because it mobilizes the working class to produce quality exports.) Instead, governments sought solace in socialist doctrine and universal enfranchisement, while authoritarian and military control was absorbed by the Americans along with the British navy and port system. Americans used this period of economic prosperity to assert their inherited global military power to undermine communism – successfully, but is not largely bankrupt and unable to fund it’s existing military structure as well as it’s redistributionist benefit system. Instead, Americans export debt instead of taxing other countries, and they use that debt to finance the cost of running the world trade system. Unfortunately, in the process of running the empire, Americans have now become a fractured society, with race, culture and class divisions, as well as somewhere between four and ten different ‘nations’ within the USA, operating under the administration of an international imperial government. The US economy is now so dependent upon the value of the dollar, and the use of military force to determine the means by which trade is administered, that the citizenry will suffer if these obligations are reduced.

This series of events shows the danger of empire building, whether it is done on purpose as in the case of Britain defending herself from spain and france, or by accident, in the case of the USA, trying to maintain stability during and after the war period.

The optimum government must reflect the class structure of society in one way or another, so that the classes that do exist can use the government to cooperate rather than regress into class warfare.

A constitution enumerating the specific powers of the government. A hereditary monarch with veto power. A senate of commerce and banking whose members must meet rigid criteria, and who are chosen by lottery. A house of redistribution that is democratically elected. An independent judiciary operating on the common law. And most importantly, 1) issuing loans not laws – loans are calculable and forecastable. 2) the senate borrowing money from the house and repaying interest for use in redistribution to the house, 3) the privatization of all offices of government, so that a bureaucracy cannot form and seize power. 4) electronic presentation of all house legislation, and direct democratic voting on individual bills. 5) Immigration requires cultural assimilation and language adoption, as well as purchased right of entry, and accountable sponsorship of the individual. 6) The return of the majority of political power to the states, and the limitation of the federal government to money, insurance, and defense. 7) the right of nullification and secession is inviolate.

Money, Insurance, War are global but all trade and culture is local. — And that’s how people want it. Classes exist and in any society will either cooperate and prosper, or in conflict, they will undermine that society and it’s government.