Germany Moves East Germany and Russia are now more politically aligned because they are now economically aligned. Europe will have: 1) the German-Russian block, which will reclaim the eastern block countries. 2) the France and PIGS block (latins – portugal, spain, italy and greece over whom it can feel superior) 3) The UK trying to figure out if it’s part of the Anglo-american, French or German block, and becoming irrelevant unless it simply becomes the world version of switzerland -weak but trustworthy with your money. The European left-coast lost. And the USA can’t protect anyone any longer.
Author: Curt Doolittle
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Russia And Germany Instead Of France And Germany? One Can Only Hope
Stratfor has released an article today that suggests that German and Russia have more to offer each other than does the rest of Europe. Russia has intelligent labor, and resources, but it has a terrible capital structure and little technology. Germany has technology, a terrific capital structure, but needs resources and labor. Better yet, the labor can stay where it is: in Russia, rather than immigrating into Germany and further burdening its infrastructure and creating additional civil unrest. France will have little chance but to follow germany into the relationship, because it is not powerful enough on its own to unify the Club-Med states (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain (the Pigs). What I find most humorous about this pairing, especially given the pro-german position I’ve taken in the Anglo-German European civil war, is that despite being defeated by the Anglo coalition, Germany once again has proven that it is a more prosperous and hard-working and innovative culture than its local competitors. It has risen from the ashes so to speak. And left England in the distance. I can’t think of anything I find more attractive: a unified germany and russia. After all, the south and west have contained Germany for two and a half millennia. The world wars were only the most recent instance of german containment. Now, this has broader implications for Byzantine civilization. Germany and northern europe are protestant christian civilizations with a positive ethic. Byzantine civilizations are nominally christian, but have a nihilistic ethic. How will cooperation change either of these ethics? How would europe change if the PIGS are left to their own devices? Stratfor has suggested in the past that Turkey is in the likely heir to islamic power, but not byzantine power. A German-Russian alliance that built byzantine power would be superior at keeping the mandatory-ignorance of Islam at bay, and might resurrect Byzantine civilization, and restore Russia to a leadership position. This kind of talk would have been heresy during the cold war and the possibility of communism. But post-communism, in a world of universal capitalism, it seems like a win for Germany, Russia, eastern Europe, the rest of Europe by consequence, and humanity by implication.
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Payback Time? But what’s the fee?
Entitled “Payback Time”, this NYT article by Steven Erlanger states that “Crisis Imperils Liberal Benefits Long Expected by Europeans” I’d like to clarify this argument a bit with the following points: 1) It will take somewhere between 3-5% of GDP to correct the retirement funding problem given the current ratio of prices and payments. 2) The problem with any policy is in determining the degree of uncertainty with regard to the future state of production (how much the productive people in any society will earn without the historical advantage that west has had in capitalist political and economic systems.) This means that the 3-5% number could be about the same, or it could be as much as twice that amount. 3) Most of the world, Europe in particular, will need to increase military expenses as the US loses it’s ability to project the power needed to police world trade routes, and it’s citizens lose the will to do so. We do not know what this cost will be. For european countries it will likely be on the order of 10% of GDP if history is any measure, that will mean roughly doubling the wealthier countries in europe, and quadrupling the spending of the eastern fringe countries.
[callout]The fact that this economic instability is going to be caused by demographic changes, much of which will be caused by immigration of non-integrating subcultures, will remain the unspoken elephant in the room for years to come.[/callout]
4) Most of the developed world will have to increase expenses on infrastructure due to aging populations. We do not know this number. Health care in particular will need to be rationed further as the cost of prolonging life continues to climb. 5) Cost of government is increasingly expensive and burdensome as productivity declines. 6) demographic changes underway, the increasing differences between american super-regions, and the lack of integration of immigrants, and the rising racial tensions, will lead to the increasing potential for political upheaval, somewhere in the 2015 – 2025 range, which would put extraordinary financial burdens on the world as regional power vacuums forced rapid reallocation of resources worldwide. The conservative position would argue that the world system is much more fragile than we assume, and that it’s prudent to cautious in our expectations of the future. The libertarian position would be to change from speculative policies that rely on growth and government, to calculable policies that rely upon saving and productivity, and in doing so, create both security and prosperity rather than worrying about the degree of risk we’re taking on. The likely cost then, is somewhere between a low of 3% assuming stability, and a high of 15% of GDP over the next ten years. The fact that this economic instability is going to be caused by demographic changes, much of which will be caused by immigration of non-integrating subcultures combined with aging dependent generations will remain the unspoken elephant in the room for years to come.
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The New York Times Is An Organized Crime Syndicate – And Misrepresenting Libertarianism Is Fraud And Theft.
THE NYT IS AN ORGANIZED CRIME SYNDICATE Why is the NYT an Organized Crime Syndicate? Because the NYT has committed as much journalistic fraud, at a greater scale, as any of the most controlled of state run media in modern history, and has brought to market a defective and harmful product, and profited from the sale of that defective product. And that defective product has caused harm to both the long term material economy, and the institutions and habits of the citizenry, that have been dearly paid for. We are repeatedly assailed by revelations that yet another corrupt New York Times journalist has stolen from society by creating artificial myths which they bring to the market of political discourse as fraudulently misrepresented products. We are confronted with editorial bias among most of the New York media, but systemically so by the NYT who not only editorializes, but conducts systemic hiring, encouragement of, and acceptance by those editors of authors who confirm the bias of those editors, rather than those who seek to falsify it. [callout] Falsification is the only scientific method we know of. If a news media wished to be engaged in rational and scientific discourse, each would list it’s editorial biases and ambitions and then seek to falsify them, rather than confirm them. But instead we use the MARKET for news to attempt to fix this problem, thereby subjecting the POPULATION to the problem of interpreting information that they are not equipped to qualify, and forcing them into the practical pursuit of confirmation biases rather than the pursuit of political truths simply by exhausting them.[/callout] What is the difference between a corporation that brings such a drug to market for profit, and a firm that manufactures journalism and brings it to market? They are both selling defective and harmful products into the marketplace. So what is the difference? Nothing.Organized Crime Definitions of organized crime vary according to the Mission and Scope of the organizations seeking to prosecute it. In general, organized crime is a form of organizational conspiracy for the purpose of profiting from illegal activities. Illegal activities are those that profit from theft of property or service. But there is another form of organized crime, that is within the mission and scope of another organization seeking to police and prosecute it: the citizenry. The citizenry must prevent systemic and organized theft of institutionally accumulated costs, paid for not with the currency of money, but with the currency of restraint: forgone opportunity costs. These crimes may be petty, such as those of manners, they may be material, such as those of ethics, and they are most commonly moral, as in those that undermine our institutions that assist us in saving and accumulating human capital. Free Speech Free speech is a product of the republican system of government, whereby debate is a proxy for violence. It is a means of resolving conflicts between peers. Its origins are among the strong and wealthy classes. The purpose of free speech is to create a political dialog for determining the optimum solution for the advancement of the polis among share-holding equals.
[callout] [ It is ] the citizenry who must prevent systemic and organized theft of institutionally accumulated costs, paid for not with the currency of money, but with the currency of restraint: forgone opportunity costs. These crimes may be petty, such as those of manners, they may be material, such as those of ethics, and they are most commonly moral, as in those that undermine our institutions that assist us in saving and accumulating human capital.[/callout]
Free speech universally degrades into the act of persuasion for pragmatic personal political and economic ends, whenever the cost of fraud becomes too low, and it becomes lowest when taken to it’s extreme under the principle of systemic non-violence. Free speech is only possible to employ without the subjective control of violence if there is a ‘science’ by which to constrain the debate. THe field of economic science is struggling to become that method of articulating moral, political action. ie: Rational debate is a proxy for violence. irrational debate simply trades violence for deception and fraud. Violence is immediate and it is of all things, HONEST, instructive and decisive. Fraud is dishonest, prolonged, confusing and indecisive. Over time we have developed a policy of tolerating errors in free speech because we assume that the truth will prevail. We assume that wise and honest men will honestly correct the course of debate. We assume that men desire the truth rather than simply victory by fraud, ad that when presented with the truth they will acquiesce. We model debate as if we are still peers in the house of lords, rather than disparate groups of common people promoting our elites to heroic status whereby they battle in public circles by allusions, deceptions, barbs and ridicule, rather than reason, logic, and facts. We are further cautious of free speech in media because of the inequality it gives to an individual’s voice, an because it gives our group heroic elites a distorted but unchecked monopolistic voice in a system of politics developed for orators in a forum.
[callout]… conservatives desire to preserve their freedom, and keep down the cost of it, by creating institutions that meritocratically rotate the elites, and whose institutions are meritocratic and therefore privatized. Conservatives are not against change. They are against change that creates systemic corruption. [/callout]
Conservatives are particularly cautious of these elites because the conservative’s preferred method of action is individual, functional and one of material commercial action rather than the left’s preferred method of coercion by politics, media, and anarchic violence. Or more simply stated, that conservatives desire to preserve their freedom and the cost of it, by creating institutions that meritocratic-ally rotate the elites, and whose institutions are meritocratic and therefore privatized. Conservatives are not against change. They are against change that creates systemic corruption. Perhaps, they are also cognizant of, and desirous of building a society where one is rewarded for good, honest, hard working and kind social behavior, and bureaucrats whether inside the state, or inside industry, who are not subject to market conditions are not incentivized to conform to good civic behavior as was illustrated by Adam Smith. Regardless of political spectrum, we are further skeptical of media, because media is a means for institutionalizing the act of profiteering from selling class and group conflict. JOURNALISTIC FRAUD IS ORGANIZED CRIMEThe Most Recent NYT Organized Crime Syndicate Initiative Is Against Libertarianism
It was only government power that ended slavery and abolished Jim Crow, neither of which would have been eliminated by a purely free market.
No, it was a set of LAWS called the “Jim Crow Laws” that the government instituted in order to create slavery, and maintain its persistence as a social and economic structure. The STATE created slavery. The state funded and protected THE SLAVE TRADE ROUTES. The state sanctioned, protected and taxed slave Markets. The state prosecuted and pursued escaped slaves. It was the STATE that created and built slavery. In fact, in all of human history, it was the a defining property of STATEHOOD that allowed one class of people to enslave another. The Israelites returned from the desert and enslaved people. The Entire egyptian and babylonian societies were enslaved or virtually so. Hellenic and Roman civilizations were slave owning. European civilization was slave owning. Almost all civilizations in agrarian history are slave owning because farming is hard labor.
[callout]…The STATE created slavery. The state funded and protected THE SLAVE TRADE ROUTES. The state sanctioned, protected and taxed slave Markets. The state prosecuted and pursued escaped slaves. It was the STATE that created and built slavery.[/callout]
Secondly, it is the innovations in technology by the private sector that have made slavery unprofitable. And it is the insight of libertarian economists that slavery is simply LESS PROFITABLE than turning your former slaves into consumers. Because as consumers they simply have superior incentives to be productive in the market place. No, it was not the state, it was individuals, largely Christian men, who promoted anti-slavery, because as christians they saw this as un-christian behavior. It was women who took advantage of this anti-slavery momentum as a political step in getting their own vote via the suffrage movement once the industrial revolution started to free them from home-drugery. And it was politicians in Washington and the north that promoted anti-slavery, and Lincoln in particular who promoted it as a means of forcing the north to war against the south for entirely political reasons. But these people were not anti-slavery at the outset. They were agitated by the fact that the north and south produced different market products (southern raw cotton versus northern manufactured goods) and that the south was paying the federal taxes that they funded the state. The south was consuming overseas goods, and the north wanted to decrease competition from overseas for their goods, and so the north wanted to use the STATE to force the south to ‘buy american’, and needed to overtake power. Slavery was simply a rallying cry by which the state could get the Christian population to support a war. Slavery was on it’s way out the world over because it is UNPRODUCTIVE under industrialization. Slavery was not conquered because it was immoral. It was for political and economic reasons. The anti-slavery movement only accelerated the natural process of abandonment of slavery under industrialization, for purely self-serving, economic and political motivations. Slavery would have been eliminated by the free market. It was the state that interfered with the process by prolonging it. It was the state that took credit for the dissolution of slavery that was in reality, a dissolution created by the free market. This is what the DATA SHOWS. Regardless of the ridiculous public utterances and pamphleteering in the political arena, slavery was of declining productivity.
It was government that rescued the economy from the Depression and promoted safety and equality in the workplace.
No that’s not true. There is a vast body of work on this topic and it is still in dispute. So no, this is not settled science. We know that the governments created the problems that led to the great depression by creating fiat money and rapid immigration. We know that the war is what got the country out of depression. We know the post-war-era prosperity was largely due to the conversion of manufacturing and construction to war-materials (panel products). But we do not know that the government got the country out of depression and there is a substantive and arguably correct body of work that states that the government both caused the rapid decline, and by it’s policies prolonged it. Just as the policies enacted during the depressionary period are the cause of the systemic crash of western economies, which despite warnings from libertarians, are the result of converting society from “cultures of saving and increasing production to inter-generational redistribution and inflationary consumption” which thereby exposed the civilization to cumulative and irreparable risk. Libertarians warned that progress was not eternal, could not be depended upon, and that our economic tools and theories could not provide us with the insights which we attributed to them. But to no avail.
“Under this philosophy, the punishment for a lunch counter that refuses to seat black customers would be public shunning, not a court order.”
What it means is that any group should be able to ostracize what they see as anti-social behavior. And they have the right to determine what they consider anti-social behavior to be. Libertarianism states that if you want to build a homophobic, racist little town somewhere, go ahead, because you will descend into poverty by doing so. It says, quite conversely, that if you want to create a homocentric pluralistic city, that you can do so, and that economically you will benefit by doing so. Libertarianism states that it is up to the individual to choose which of those cities to live in. And that neither fantasy has the right to oppress the other. Libertarianism CELEBRATES DIVERSITY of choice, not choice-less mandated diversity. And it does so because it advocates that markets reward and punish. (( To counter argue this position no matter what angle one took, simply would require that you argue white europeans, or some other ethnic group, are a superior race. )) And any group that does engage in such economic ostracization such as refusing to seat customers of one race or another, would accomplish one of the following things: 1) go out of business by the loss of customers and the creation of competitors who serve the rejected customers 2) increase their business by the decrease in presence of anti-social behavior In fact, this is what people DO, in reality. Except in the very RAREST of circumstances in the very largest cities, in the most wealthy shopping and business districts, people congregate with people who look, and act, and speak, as they do. While this observation is trivial to any person on the street, yet escapes the Schumpeterian (( Schumpeterian Intellectual: someone who profits from selling his services as a public intellectual by criticizing the traditions of the society that made his idleness and therefore his criticism possible, and by consequence, subsidizing the bureaucratic evolution of totalitarianism. )) intellectual class, despite the data and evidence that proves uncontrovertibly that people are racist, act racist and always will act racist, and that the will do so for rational reasons: they obtain more status in-group than out of group. And business people are not motivated by social conformity. They are motivated by profitability. And RACISM IS UNPROFITABLE. Period. On the other hand bias against anti-social behavior IS PROFITABLE. And prevents the takeover via government sanction, by the act of denying businesses the right to choose customers, of the business by a market that is detrimental to the owners. Those same owners who risked their savings, retirement, homes and safety in order to buy, build, run and operate that business. And further more, ostracization is the only means by which a group in an advanced society can enforce the INTEGRATION that makes IMMIGRATION both tolerable and economically possible. Societies never have immigration problems. They have IMMIGRATION problems, and ostracization is the most effective method of enforcing integration into the social system. Limits Of The Market Libertairanism has it’s limits, because the market has its limits. It does have limits. The market has become large, far larger than that envisioned by Classical Liberals (libertarians) and too large to solve those problems of infrastructure development at scale, where the body of citizens can be served by long term investment in nuclear power plants, roads, and the electrical power grid. Even at that scale, it is a problem of financing and competing with regulation, not of execution – the market will execute better than the sate.. Liability Libertarianism would also indicate, that the use of media to make such misrepresentations, whether they be errors or deceptions for the purpose of concentrating political power, so that the violence of law and the state could be used to oppress people who seek liberty is a form of THEFT. Freedom of speech is not common to man. It is a sanction given by the nobility in a republic for the purpose of permitting exploration of the optimum set of ideas among a fraternal order of city-defending soldiers whose military tactics and military cost structure required enfranchisement of many men. But even among these people, free speech is not an unlimited right. It has it’s limits. And if we re-instituted liability laws so that one was required to be accurate in both political (fraudulent) and personal (libelous) speech, the NYT would be forced out of business, and the author of this piece, which is a cowardly and unsigned editorial, would be subject to prosecution. And it is that solution that many libertarians (like myself) would advocate. The Fully Articulated Political Philosophy Libertarianism is the MOST FULLY ARTICULATED CAUSALLY-COMPLETE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY that has ever been created by human beings. (( It is arguable that Marxism produced a volume of literature under the erroneous tribal belief in familial bureaucracy, but it is a well understood dead political and economic philosophy, if a living moral philosophy. It can be argued that classical liberalism produced a body of literature under the principles of individualism and organized public debate. However, the contract model has proven non-durable in time against the bureaucracy’s circumvention of the constitution via the judiciary. )) Libertarianism is imperfect, because all political theory is imperfect. That’s because man continues to evolve into a greater and greater division of knowledge and labor — and as he evolves, he requires deeper understanding of what it is he does, so that he can better comprehend how to resolve the necessary conflicts that rise from the speculative but rewarding human interaction in the market. LIke any fully articulated systemic advancements in human thought, libertarianism requires comprehension before criticism can be levied against it. Because as a SYSTEM, it cannot be debated piecemeal, just as any political system cannot be implemented or discussed piecemeal. Because it is a SYSTEM of interlocking processes of coordination and epistemology. And any attempt to argue it outside of systemic comparisons rather than policy comparisons, is an attempt to compare apples and oranges, and as an attempt to compare apples and oranges it is a willful attempt at FRAUD, or a silly and vain error by the incompetent. Incompetence is not something we should tolerate among those who we grant sanctions, and whom we grant the special permission of free speech in media. Curt Doolittle The NYT article is included here for reference.
Limits of Libertarianism By denigrating several of the signal achievements of modern American society, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act, Rand Paul has performed a useful service for voters who are angry at their elected officials. He has helped to illuminate the limits and the hazards of antigovernment sentiment. Many Americans are sputtering mad, believing that government has let them down in abetting a ruinous recession, bailing out bankers and spending wildly. But is Rand Paul really the remedy they had in mind? His views and those of other Tea Party candidates are unintentional reminders of the importance of enlightened government. In a handful of remarkably candid interviews since winning Kentucky’s Republican Senate primary this week, Mr. Paul made it clear that he does not understand the nature of racial progress in this country. As a longtime libertarian, he espouses the view that personal freedom should supersede all government intervention. Neighborhood associations should be allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, he has written, and private businesses ought to be able to refuse service to anyone they wish. Under this philosophy, the punishment for a lunch counter that refuses to seat black customers would be public shunning, not a court order. It is a theory of liberty with roots in America’s creation, but the succeeding centuries have shown how ineffective it was in promoting a civil society. The freedom of a few people to discriminate meant generations of less freedom for large groups of others. It was only government power that ended slavery and abolished Jim Crow, neither of which would have been eliminated by a purely free market. It was government that rescued the economy from the Depression and promoted safety and equality in the workplace. Republicans in Washington have breathlessly distanced themselves from Mr. Paul’s remarks, afraid that voters might tar them with the same extremist brush. But as they continue to fight the new health care law and oppose greater financial regulation, claiming the federal government is overstepping its bounds, they should notice that the distance is closing.
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Krugmanism Of The Day: The Debt-Slaver Strikes Again.
Latvia is often cited as an example for Greece as it undergoes a brutal internal devaluation while keeping its currency pegged to the euro….. Yes, that’s right: the oh-so-virtuous Baltics have done worse than Iceland. … But their money is sound.
Well Paul, what do you recommend instead? If not unemployment, and social reorganization and price recalculation, then what? Destruction of what little concentrated capital that there is? Enslaving the population with debt in the false hope that these countries will be able to compete well enough on the world stage that they work their way out of it? Rapid redistribution rather than rapid reorganization? The answer is undoubtably the loss of sovereignty in exchange for security, without acknowledging that people value status and sovereignty as much as they do security. That is, unless your ambition is debt slavery. Which it is, I’m sure: to replace violence and militarism with fraud and slavery. But then, to understand this, one would have to have an ancestry that could hold land, and a culture willing to die for it, as a means of maintaining freedom. Debt-totalitarianism is no different from force-totalitarianism. Personally I find it simply the difference between the honesty of violence and the fraud of debt enslavement. This is the underlying problem with all Krugmanism – totalitarianism under the guise of a false economic equality. Watch what future discipline the Baltics develop versus the Greeks. The most important institutions are those of cultural habits: behavioral institutions are paid for by the accumulation of forgone opportunities: ie: discipline.
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Understanding Greece And Germany In Terms Of The Economics Of Human Action Rather Than Moral Sentiments And Class Envy
Over on Economists View, where the left seems to hang on like dirty ruffians intent on downgrading the local bar, Mark Thoma posts a misleading article: “About That Mediterranean Work Ethic” Do Greeks work less than Germans?, which states that Greeks work a lot of hours, perhaps more than germans. Which is a pointless and false because it is intentionally misleading, because it assumes individuals are equally productive and the societies are collectively equally productive, when in fact, the term ‘productive’ means ‘the market price of stuff produced per human hour’. One of the people who leaves a comment sees through the veil and says: “These kind of statistics are not enough….”. Which is correct. They don’t tell us anything. Another who lives in Italy says “The problems here are political and cultural. It’s very frustrating to see…”. Which again is correct. Work is an individual expression. [callout] Productivity is an INSTITUTIONAL problem: people lack the institutions and habits by which to create productivity by forming capital alliances in GROUPS[/callout] Productivity is an INSTITUTIONAL problem: people lack the institutions and habits by which to create productivity by forming capital alliances in GROUPS. In Italy (like in southern california) business stay artificially small because of tax and benefit predation by the government, rather than encouraging competitive business, and taxing the very large corporations with whom the state must do business and support. Another says “Greece has crazy early retirement ages and a tax collection system that is pathetic?” Which is true. These are institutional problems. Largely political problems. But people in democracies CHOOSE their governments, now, don’t they. And Another (by a leftist sycophant who goes by the pseudonym of Paine) attempts to avoid the cultural and institutional predicament, as well as the problem of the productivity of the greek people, as well as the culture of corruption, by saying it’s all a problem of insufficient TAXATION. But WHAT KIND of taxation? Let’s look at this a bit. Yes, the chart is misleading (and so are Paine’s arguments, and in so many dimensions, per usual, that refutation is the process of tedious swatting of gnats who by virtue of their simplistic reproductive capacity put a drain on one’s energy simply by their volume.) First, the Greek problem is productivity not work hours: the market competitiveness of one’s goods and services in relation to one’s trading partners, divided by the number of human work hours necessary to produce the goods and services. The Greeks work longer hours to produce goods of lower value than that of their neighbors.
[callout]the Greek problem is productivity not work hours: the market competitiveness of one’s goods and services in relation to one’s trading partners, divided by the number of human work hours necessary to produce the goods and services. The Greeks work longer hours to produce goods of lower value than that of their neighbors.[/callout]
Second, the institutional reasons within the system that either encourage or enforce that behavior: lack of return on efforts due to a) silly cultural ideas, b) lack of education in productive information, c) lack of advanced institutions, d) private and political corruption and political impediment, e) political predation on the productivity is out of proportion to the marginal effort and risk needed to produce increases in productivity, f) cultural regression due to status impact of success on group cohesion (the urban african american versus the eastern orthodox ethos versus the jewish or protestant ethos. Third, the cooperative and competitive relationship between groups of different cultures: groups ‘fund’ shared objectives by forgoing opportunities. Forgone opportunities are a cost. Taking advantage of opportunities is a theft from those who forgo them. Since different cultures have different ambitions embedded in their habits, there is a forgone opportunity competition that permanently divides people with dissimilar interests. This is WHY people of different grope dimensions compete with one another: differences in forgone opportunity costs.
[callout]groups ‘fund’ shared objectives by forgoing opportunities. Forgone opportunities are a cost. Taking advantage of opportunities is a theft from those who forgo them. Since different cultures have different ambitions embedded in their habits, there is a forgone opportunity competition that permanently divides people with dissimilar interests. This is WHY people of different grope dimensions compete with one another: differences in forgone opportunity costs.[/callout]
Fourth, the status economy is material to people because they ACT as though it is material to them. Just as the race-preference is material to people because they ACT as thought it is material to them. Just as the creed-preference is material to people because they ACT as though it is material to them. And, precisely because of the forgone opportunity costs associated with those preferences. Most cultural differences have to do with the impact on social status of different forgone opportunity costs. People do not want to give upon their investments. Biases are NOT fanciful or meaningless: most often they directly impact mating choices, social status and therefore group-economic status. Ie: people stay in-group often because they are given better status signals in-group than extra-group. They transact across group, but they status-seek within group. Argument by emphasizing the material economy alone is a convenient way of distracting the argument from the forgone opportunity economy (discipline), and the opportunities, resources, financial, and labor costs that are required to create those institutions.
[callout]Argument by emphasizing the material economy alone is a convenient way of distracting the argument from the forgone opportunity economy (discipline), and the opportunities, resources, financial, and labor costs that are required to create those institutions.[/callout]
In the cast of Greece, it is a poor and corrupt culture that cannot create hard-working low-friction institutions that allow people to increase productivity by the process of constant creative destruction. It appears that Greek IQ is declining slightly probably due to poor urban education. And this has material impact on a society: assuming a broad enough population, people with IQ’s above 122 design machines, people with IQ above 105 repair machines, and people with IQ’s below 105 are limited to using machines. IQ distribution matters because it affects the general set of institutions that a body of people can develop. Education differences can depress IQ means by as much as twenty points. (Exactness of this is disputed but it’s certainly ten points). This mean limits the productivity of any nation, and in turn the appropriate institutions for any body of people. We are not equal in ability to comprehend abstractions, nor in our group ability to produce abstraction-producers and consumers in sufficient numbers to lather the group’s competitive advantage.
[callout]assuming a broad enough population, people with IQ’s above 122 design machines, people with IQ above 105 repair machines, and people with IQ’s below 105 are limited to using machines. IQ distribution matters because it affects the general set of institutions that a body of people can develop.[/callout]
Germany is a nearly land locked, oceanic temperate and continental temperate country of rivers and friction-able land transport that despite constant attempts of external containment has remained productively competitive for two millennia. This is accomplished by the discipline of forgone opportunity in order to create institutions that accumulate competitive advantage at a material cost to the citizens as individuals, but which is a cumulative investment of high returns for the group. Greece is a geographically advantaged, climate advantaged, port-rich country with limited agrarian potential, and a large urbanized population with few choices but to increase productivity. Institutional development costs are the HIGHEST productive cost paid by any civilization. That is why the non-corruption habits are so rarely developed in the world. (We do not yet know why some cultures have such a difficult time forgoing opportunities for gratification and developing longer (lower) time preferences. There are both biological and cultural and environmental hypothesis.)
[callout]Institutional development costs are the HIGHEST productive cost paid by any civilization. That is why the non-corruption habits are so rarely developed in the world.[/callout]
After forgone opportunity costs. The second highest cost is human capital: literacy, education and training. The third highest cost is the political institutions. The fourth highest cost is economic institutions (credit, banking, contract) And lastly comes the material cost of resources. These costs, when combined with the realities of group IQ differences, when combined with the realities of territorial resource availability, are the primary reason for development differences between cultures. We do know that Greece and spain were more productive cultures before Spain experienced new world gold, and before Greece was administered by the ottomans. So it would appear that these are not biological problems, but institutional (cultural and habitual, and political) problems. Greece is less productive because it’s institutions are poorly paid for by forgone opportunity, because their government is corrupt and bloated, because their people work in unproductive efforts, and because they have no group incentive to work otherwise – and so Greece is poorer because of its instutions. And since germans pay the forgone opportunity cost as well as the monetary cost, they are (rightfully) resentful of it. And the convenient myopia of quants is that they disregard REAL costs of action in preference for visible monetary costs simply because of the ease in which the data can be collected. A convent way of perpetuating leftist ideas – ignoring the majority set of costs in preference of the confirmation bias permitted by the data that’s easier to collect. As the right always says “we are not against taxes we are against bureaucracy”. The problem is not taxation. It’s the USE of taxes to steal the productive result of forgone opportunity costs : double taxation on the productive which only serves to limit the investment by the non-productive in the bank of forgone opportunity costs, which are, in reality, the primary cost any civilization must pay : behavioral costs. Property itself is a forgone opportunity cost. The more granular and abstract we make our definitions of property the more opportunity that people have to steal it. Objective truth telling is a forgone opportunity cost. Each forgone opportunity for deception and fraud is a high cost. One does not need to be materially wealthy to pay that cost. One simply needs to forgo opportunities to profit from deception. One does not need to be deprived of good pay as a bureaucrat, one needs only to forgo opportunities to charge for one’s services rather than render them at the lowest cost to the beneficiary.
[callout]This is the moral argument for redistribution of wealth: if you conform to forgone opportunity costs, you may receive redistribution from the results of productive ends. But ONLY if you pay your ‘taxes’ in forgone opportunity costs.[/callout]
Or put another way: the secret to the success of the pacifist monotheistic scriptural religions is that they undermine the forgone-opportunity-cost economy via redirection of opportunity costs toward the group-persistence costs of a new social institutions, and away from materially productive institutions. In other words, they are a non-participation rebellious movement, a form of economic tax evasion. (In case this isn’t clear, there are two forms of tax evasion: monetary and forgone opportunity, with the productive classes seeking to evade monetary taxation and the unproductive classes seeking to evade forgone opportunity costs.) This is the moral argument for redistribution of wealth: if you conform to forgone opportunity costs, you may receive redistribution from the results of productive ends. But ONLY if you pay your ‘taxes’ in forgone opportunity costs. In other words: conform or no redistribution. This effectively is the german argument against Greece. Or more precisely, monotheistic religions are resistance movements and they are what people like Paine advocate: the adoption of a lower cost forgone opportunity strategy that undermines the productivity of the more productive classes, making them subservient to the resistance movement. Greece needs an austerity program. It needs freedoms to compete disruptively internally, it needs to concentrate its capital on goods that are competitively productive, it needs to improve its infrastructure. It needs a broken window policy of zero tolerance (the place is a dump), it needs regulations on quality (which are underrated as a social institution), it needs better education. But most of all it needs the elimination of a predatory state whose members see their positions as personal property to be exploited rather than a public service to be rendered at the lowest cost to the population. Leftism is predation on the productive classes. Rightism is too often predation on the non-productive classes. (Productivity being different from labor hours). The issue for any culture is to reduce predation in favor of cooperation, maximizing the productivity of the group in response to other groups. Acknowledging inequality is only acknowledging rarity. we are vastly unequal in our abilities. Therefore we are vastly unequal in our productive capacities. However, we are equally productive in our ability to forgo opportunity from theft or fraud, especially theft by over breeding one’s self into permanent poverty. If you conform to these institutions, then you are PAYING for these institutions, and therefore you are EARNING some amount of redistribution. But if you are not willing to work regardless of the job (as are the Japanese and chinese) and if you are not willing to forgo drugs and violence and theft, and if you are not wiling to forgo the effort of manners and ethics and morals, then you are not worthy of redistribution of the productive gains because you have not PAID for the effort needed to create the institutions that make such productive gains POSSIBLE. We can all equally forgo opportunity. In this context, Universal egalitarianism is simply another means of predation on the productive classes. Which means predation on the society itself. Greece needs to pay it’s taxes. It needs to pay it’s forgone opportunity tax. It needs to pay it’s monetary tax on the result of productive efforts. The most important feature of taxes on productivity, is that it incentivizes the government to enforce forgone opportunity costs, for the purpose of increasing productivity. This creates cultural unity, class unity, and competitive advantage for the group.
[callout]And “it is not taxes that are paid, but unpaid” is true. It is the unpaid tax of forgone opportunity cost which is the very ‘charge’ for entering the civilized market, and becoming a citizen rather than a barbarian.[/callout]
Ie: Paine is advocating thievery, economic and social destruction here on a daily basis, by simply replacing the absurd moral arguments of monotheistic scriptural religion with the one-sided absurd argument of economics and egalitarian redistribution of productive gains in order to fund his predation on the productive classes, so that he, and others, do not have to pay the forgone opportunity costs needed to create institutions that permit productivity. Yet another silly religion that is simply a rebellion movement that justifies tax evasion. And “it is not taxes that are paid, but unpaid” is true. It is the unpaid tax of forgone opportunity cost which is the very ‘charge’ for entering the civilized market, and becoming a citizen rather than a barbarian. Hayekian knowledge is economic knowledge: it’s an institution. And it’s the most expensive institution we have to pay for.
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A Definition Of Morality
In taking a survey on liberal and conservative morality, I came across a question that asked me to define morality, and gave it an answer that I thought I would share here as part of my ongoing effort to provide conservatives with a framework for rational debate, rather than watch them continue their reliance upon tedious irrational arguments consisting of sentiments (conservatism) or legality (classical liberals) or an absurd single class state (libertarianism) or abandonment of government altogether (anarcho capitalism). Rothbard and Hoppe have given us a language, we just have to apply it to a multi-classed society wherein we hold trade routes and keep the proletariat from revolting. A Definition of Morality: In the sequence of cooperative social protocols beginning with manners ( limited personal consequences to one’s status), followed by ethics (externalized consequences of actions wherein one may be subject to retribution) , followed by morals (fully externalized consequences wherein one may steal from others unaccountably or irreversibly), Morality consists of those common habitual principles and descriptive statements by which which we codify and distribute the cultural rules of economic constraint whereby individuals pay for membership in the benefit structure of the group.In other words, manners, ethics and morals are human social general accounting principles. VIolation of moral principles is theft from those you do not know. Violation of ethical principles is theft from those who you may know. Violation of manners is petty theft from those who you do know. While these thefts may not be quantitatively measurable because of their incommensurability in units of measure, they are qualitatively accumulative in the form of decreased potential that may be drawn from the opportunities created by the division of labor.
[callout]There are habitual property criminals…[And] there are habitual ethical and moral criminals. … Moral violations are forced redistributions to moral criminals[/callout]
There are habitual property criminals. There are habitual ethical and moral criminals. Moral violations are forced redistributions to moral criminals. There is a Moral economy wherein different moral theories compete for economic dominance, just as there are political and financial economies wherein we compete for redistribution by the violent force of the state. Just as there are competitions between nations we call wars. it is our failure to articulate these actions as costs that make the political resolution of our differences impossible. Curt Doolittle – www capitalismv3 com
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Response to The Washington Post’s ‘Constitution in decline’ : Actionable Plans vs Sentiments
Joseph Postell of the Heritage Foundation, whom I admire, posts an article in today’s Washington Times entitled Constitutional Decline. Keeping the tradition of picking on your friends, because it’s simply an easier way to make a point than systematic refutation of your enemies, I respond in this posting with a sketch of a more appropriately rational solution, and a more causally descriptive one, than Joseph’s comforting but in-actionable sentiments. His proposition is:
If we are seeking the most effective means of defending – and restoring – the Constitution, we must pay attention to the rise of the administrative state and the decline of constitutional government in the United States. … The Founders confronted a basic problem: How to vest government with sufficient power to get things done without giving it the instruments to exercise tyrannical control? To protect individual liberty and rights, they established (among others) two basic principles at the center of our constitutional order: representation and the separation of powers. To assure that government operated by consent, they provided that those responsible for making laws would be held accountable through elections. Moreover, legislative, executive and judicial power would be separated so those who made the laws were not in charge of executing and applying them. …
[callout]… our problem is that we have outgrown, … the civic republican model that is based upon a separation of powers and the … process of rational debate, because our legislators are not free of the limits that socialists fell prey to: the limits of legislative incentives and the limited information necessary for economic consideration, calculation and forecasting. … Our government literally consists of a technological strategy insufficiently informed to make the decisions with which we have empowered it. [/callout]
Joseph blames the problem rightly on the corrupt bureaucracy. But does not know how to solve the problem: our model of debate is insufficient for our complexity of civilization. We have abandoned communism and socialism because of the problem of incentives and economic calculation in favor of redistributive democratic secular humanism, without understanding that conservative values and classical liberal procedural limits on power or not, our problem is that we have outgrown, by the division of labor and knowledge, and the increase in technological velocity, the civic republican model that is based upon a separation of powers and the calculative process of rational debate, because our legislators are not free of the limits that socialists fell prey to: the limits of legislative incentives and the limited information necessary for economic consideration, calculation and forecasting. Our government literally consists of a technological strategy insufficiently informed to make the decisions with which we have empowered it. Therefore it is open to abuse – not simply because of intention, but because of folly and a lack of means by which to conduct a rational argument. We must divide up the problem of governance differently – while adding computational capability and adding incentives for responsible actions to an increasing number of people – the vast majority of them citizens who are members of the private sector. In other words, the problem is one of calculation: we lack the data to make rational judgements and therefore rely on sentiments. We lack the incentives and therefore fall prey to the bureaucracy. Joseph, Your argument and your sentiments are admirable. But the institutional problem is well understood. It lies in describing the additions to the constitution such that we create alternative institutions free from bureaucratic corruption, yet which are practically implementable, and which would not require violent revolution, nor extraordinary suffering to implement. As well as a plan of implementation and schedule. Sentiments are easy. Sentiments are wishes in the wind. They are the dreams and fantasies of well intentioned men capable of nothing but exposition. They are the masculine version of a romance novel – experientially pleasant but materially vapid.
[callout]Sentiments are wishes in the wind. They are the dreams and fantasies of well intentioned men capable of nothing but exposition. They are the masculine version of a romance novel – experientially pleasant but materially vapid.[/callout]
Plans are tangible things open to action, improvement and criticism. And since Mises, Hayek, Popper, Parsons and Rothbard failed to define a rational model for the post-agrarian world, there is no institutional model by which to deliver us from evil so to speak. Our problems are non-trivial, and vastly more complex than reverting to the debate structure of the framers, wherein a small number of men simply exaggerated the city-state model of the greeks, relying upon the wisdom of platonic pseudo-philosohpher kings to make good judgment despite their representation of craftsman, merchant and farmer alike. This is too simple a form of government for a nation of hundreds of millions producing tens of millions of products and services, and a worldwide empire of trade, trade routes, and a world monetary system we treat as third party, but which, like international policing and trade routes, is the primary source of our empire’s power. Our government has expanded and corrupted into exactly what was predicted by the Iron Law of Oligarchy: We have added judicial review – legislation from the bench. We have added a state sponsored religion: democratic secular humanism. And ostracized the church. We have allowed a bureaucracy to develop that cannot be shut down. We have become an empire over distinctly different cultures with distinctly different economic interests. We have become externally dependent upon our most competitive resource – energy. We have transferred the culture from saving while productive to lend while in retirement, to inter-temporal redistribution from the productive to the unproductive. We have converted government from it’s objective of increasing productivity for the purpose of international competition to the effort of redistributing hypothetical gains at the expense of international competition – we have created the predatory state instead of the productive state. [Callout]We have converted government from it’s objective of increasing productivity for the purpose of international competition to the effort of redistributing hypothetical gains at the expense of international competition – we have created the predatory state instead of the productive state.[/callout] We have converted from a culture of integration whose problem was to enfranchise farmers for the purpose of securing our interior from external conquest, to a culture of disintegration that actively undermines integration. We have all but dissolved the states and oppress the country’s center at the bequest of the coasts. We have destroyed our currency, overextended our empire, exhausted our cultural habits of saving and the ‘Protestant ethic’. And turned our cultural majority into a cultural minority open to conquest by tribal primitivism on a scale and at a speed which would have horrified and panicked Roman citizenry. We have instituted ponzi-insurance schemes under the premise of reducing risk for the few, but in doing so created a redistributive scheme of permanent debt, and insurmountable risk for the many.
[callout ]We have instituted ponzi-insurance schemes under the premise of reducing risk for the few, but in doing so created a redistributive scheme of permanent debt, and insurmountable risk for the many.[/callout]
We have squandered a century of post-european manufacturing advantage, not to improve our competitiveness, but to export our jobs in the silly believe that the price reductions would be worth the competitive loss of jobs, as if all men in america could be rocket scientists and engineers. We have immigrated cheap labor without understanding the cost of delaying our children’s entry into the work force. We have demasculineized our military without understanding that the secret to western individualism is in the fraternal order of self-sacrificing soldiers, who by their risk gain earned enfranchisement and after such risk would not become obedient to authority. We have allowed our military to become an administrative machine, and police force only able to operate hierarchically rather than a collection of warriors capable of post-industrial defense and conquest from multiple independent angles. We have adopted silly pseudo-libertarian monetary policy and exposed our lower classes to terrific long term risk, and privatized great wealth at the expense of our working classes. We have trained two generations of children to be lifestyle pets rather than productive and competitive citizens. We have demasculinated men and made vast numbers of them abandon society for the comfort of video games or sports, and allowed feminists to take our their wrath on men rather than on the church, the state, and ignorance itself. And forced men into aged poverty in order to secure a consistent standard of living for children who have yet to become productive. We are a debt society with a predatory redistributive kleptocratic state bent on accomplishing through debt slavery and constitutional circumvention what cannot be accomplished through the proscribed constitutional rules and voluntary democratic process. But worse of all, we have vastly increased the division of knowledge and labor and become a society managed by credit rather than law or religion, but we have not updated our government to consist of institutions that act as a bank, when the credit function is primary lever of our post-religion, post-law government. We must amend our constitution for this reality. Our government must act as a bank whose duty is to issue loans and cooperate with the private sector, and socialize the profits of competitive advantage. for redistribution to the common people. It must take only calculated insurance schemes that are the product of gains in productivity earned by borrowing on the promise of the common people. This institutional change will have behavioral consequences that will remake our state as one that is competitive, and resurrect us from the simpleton idiocy of the redistributive and irresponsible state whose actions are not measured, not earned, and only stopped by near revolt at the ballot box, but inescapable once implemented as law. We must relieve the house of commons from the act of taxation ,and allow it only investment and redistribution of the profits. We must close the department of education and institute a voucher scheme. We must privatize all functions of the state and open them to competition. We must vote directly with dollars against competing published contractual budgets, rather than competing individuals whose promises are immaterial. We must restore the senate to election by the state legislatures, and limit both the volume of taxation and origin to the senate.
[callout]We must reform our lending system so that loans are not escapable by the originator, and vastly increase the number of bankers, and their quality, so that they are at the level of our lawyers, rather than at the level of our book keepers.[/callout]
We must reform our lending system so that loans are not escapable by the originator, and vastly increase the number of bankers, and their quality, so that they are at the level of our lawyers, rather than at the level of our book keepers. We must restore local banking and personal advocacy of individuals by bankers, so that we do not devolve into an class of the enslaved, as ignorant of compound interest and risk as we are of laws and due process. We must sunset all laws so that they die along with the poor fools who write them. Laws too often institutionalize silly ideas that would be destroyed by the market of daily experience. We must disallow the development of regulations outside of the legal process, and destroy the power of the bureaucracy permanently. We must separate property definitions, and abstract property definitions (like CDO’s, patents, copyrights, stocks) from the legislative process by creating registries for all legally reconcilable traded property types, and remove the ability for patents to prevent products from seeing the market. Put to practice is insufficient a test for protection: put to market is the only protection we should offer. We must change corporate law to provide the same freedom to sole proprietors and partnerships and LLC’s and SC’s and Corps so that we only have one body of law for each, and one method of taxation for all. We must change taxes such that they do not distort human cooperation, require little or no overhead, and are all based upon both income and balance sheet, so that we encourage men to become independent, but protect the people from the political class of financial predators who circumvent the market purely by the application of capital. We can have redistribution. People under fiat money are DUE redistribution, because it is they who are borrowed against and whom take the risk.
[callout]We can have redistribution. People under fiat money are DUE redistribution, because it is they who are borrowed against and whom take the risk.[/callout]
We can maintain our empire, our freedom, our way of life. But it must be calculable to be responsible and accountable. Right now it is unregulated chaos of extreme borrowing using snake oil formulae peddled by charlatan economists, snake oil mathematicians and other hucksters who are no better than entrail-readers, oracles and bone-augers and less accurate it turns out at inter-temporal prediction than the average man on the street. THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM FACING US IS THE WEAKNESS OF THE DEBATE MODEL OF GOVERNMENT IN THE FACE OF THE CALCULATIVE COMPLEXITY OF OUR CIVILIZATION. OUR MODEL IS JUST TOO WEAK. The problem of socialist calculation is still evident in the debate model of government. OUr problem is sufficient information to make decisions, and limiting decisions to where we have sufficient information, and avoiding legislation that uses quantitative, methodological and ideological charlatainism. Some of us who spend time on these theories are diligently working in back rooms, offices, academic institutions, think tanks, cars and showers to solve this problem. But it is not a problem of sentiments. It is a problem of execution.
[callout ]Institutionalizing this degree of change will not come without violence or trauma. It never has. It never will. [/callout]
Institutionalizing this degree of change will not come without violence or trauma. It never has. It never will. There are too many with vested interests feeding off the predatory state. But some of us are now more willing to take that risk than we were over the past decades. And it takes only about five percent of a population to force such a change, if that group is willing enough to act to enforce the change.
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A Response To Arnold Kling’s: The Church Of Libertarianism
Arnold Kling continues one of his themes by writing on one of my favorite topics, “The Churches Of Government”, where he laments the overlaps and conflicts between different conservative and libertarian philosophies.
You see, I think that the overlap between liberals and libertarians is somewhat suspect. The libertarian thinks that government should get out of the business of regulating marijuana primarily because the libertarian believes in limited government. The liberal thinks that government should get out of the business of regulating marijuana because the liberal doesn’t think marijuana is such a problem.
And later he explains the philosophical problem:
Still, I believe that it ought to be possible for a conservative to be in the Church of Limited Government rather than the Church of Unlimited Government. In theory, I would think that a conservative might really care about education or health care without necessarily favoring government involvement. However, in practice many conservatives went along with President Bush when he expanded Medicare and the Federal government’s role in primary education. My sense is that his approach to conservatism has few adherents at the moment.
To which I would respond, that the reason for confusion on this issue is the failure of the conservative, classical liberal, and libertarian movements, to provide an articulated alternative solution to socialism while at the same time, maintaining their long standing justification for taking power from the monarchy in order to implement a democratic republic managed by the capitalist class.
[callout]… the reason for confusion .. is the failure of the conservative, classical liberal, and libertarian movements, to provide an articulated alternative solution to socialism while at the same time, maintaining their long standing justification for taking power from the monarchy.[/callout]
And finally, a reader comments: “From a libertarian point of view, it would be inconsistent to advocate legalizing marijuana and banning trans fats.” And from there I try to use the author’s and reader’s inability to distinguish the reasons for regulating products differently as one of state intervention not of market management. Actually, the two issues are different. Marijuana The only reasons to ban marijuana are: 1) Because it impedes the mind, and therefore choice, and choice is a necessary capacity, and necessary assumption, in the libertarian model. This is a technical concept, not a practical one. 2) Because you can expose others to risk due to impaired judgement, largely while driving a vehicle. This concept is both technical and practical. Justifying the application of force must be both technical (epistemically rational) and practical (materially implementable). Epistemic applications alone are infinite and open to error. (ie: laws should be enforceable not specious.) Trans fats Foods are a voluntary health issue, not an externalized risk issue or capacity issue. The libertarian concept of freedom allows people to harm themselves. However, since it is not possible to make a rational choice over the content of goods , regulating labeling is not a question of freedom but a question of limiting fraud or accidental harm in a market. Libertarianism’s Failures Classical liberalism is an outgrowth of conservatism. Libertarianism is an outgrowth of Classical Liberalism. Rothbardian anarchism is an outgrowth of libertarianism. The only fully articulated philosophy is the Rothbardian. The Classical Liberal philosophy is analogistic, pragmatic, and contractual. But it is a practical moral philosophy, not a necessary logical philosophy. Necessity and utilitarianism are two different kinds of problems. Rothbard fully articulated his philosophy of natural law. But in doing so, by assuming the principle of non-violence, he avoided the problem of creating markets, the costs to people of having done so. And instead, by circumventing the natural law of violence ended up advocating a religion of property. Hoppe improved this line of thinking by developing private institutions that provided public goods, and reinforcing the concept of natural law, by the ARgumentation Ethic which purportedly demonstrates that property is natural to man. But these methods are flawed because they start with non-violence and trade, rather than the human capacity for violence and fraud, and the necessity of building and creating markets. In that sense, while anarchists have made innovations ( monarchic inter-temporal incentives, private insurance institutions ) they have failed to provide an answer for advances in abstract forms of property, and as such are providing solutions that are regressive as did Marx. A market is a joint stock company that was invested in by the fraternal order of soldiers who then collected fees for their service in creating that market. Merchants enter the market by registering products such that they meet the market criteria so that the shareholders experience an appreciation in value. The common people gain access to the market by respecting property, which is a material forgone opportunity cost. Everyone pays, and everyone profits from market participation. The history of economic thought is the history of demonizing monarchs for the purpose of transferring control of the market from it’s military founders, to the vendors – the middle classes. This demonization is nothing but falsehood. As it turns out, kings were kinder to their populations than are republican and democratic governments. But because of this demonization, the causal origin of civilization, of cities, of markets, of prosperity, and of western culture itself, is obscured by the rhetoric of demonizing the nobility who created this culture under which we prosper. Despite it’s variety of logical strengths, libertarian philosophy contains a number of errors, the most influential of which is in confusing the role of government as necessarily social in nature or necessarily defensive in nature, or a tool of class exploitation, versus the historical and causal origin of government as a protector and regulator of markets.
[callout]Markets are the primary social institution of post tribal man. Governments have no reason for existence outside of Markets[/callout]
Markets are the primary social institution of post tribal man. Governments have no reason for existence outside of Markets. Government IS a market function, because the purpose of government is determining the rules of the market which funds the government. Trade exists without government, but markets do not. Advanced markets for the trading of abstracts do not. All forms of property beyond portable personal property (several property) require registration, and rules for exchange in the market. The primary difference between the concept of trade and the concept of market is one of anonymity — whereby the market operator places some guarantee on the products offered so that the market’s shareholders can create a competitive advantage against other markets, and to reduce the cost of conflict administration within the market.
[callout]The difference in cultures is simply in the definition of ownership of different forms of property that they permit in their markets.[/callout]
The difference in cultures is simply in the definition of ownership of different forms of property that they permit in their markets. And these differences are material: the more granular the property the more liquidity and velocity it produces, and the greater the division of knowledge and labor that is possible. This culture of Market-Making is one of the three causal differences for western civilization versus the central and eastern models. (The other two differences being military tactics that required enfranchisement – leading to debate, reason an science, and IQ distribution mixed with resource and transport availability.). Libertarians confuse fear of abuses by the government with the necessity of constraining the government to the maintenance of the rules of the market, and the value in those rules as a means of increasing the productivity of the market and their yield from that market. Libertarians have abandoned the problem of managing the market, and therefore have become a religious institution not a political institution. That is the difference between religion and politics: the market and the absence of it. Because in large part, neither institution has been rational, only practical. Conservatives lack the ability to articulate their concepts in other than moral terms. Libertarians do significantly better. But both systems of thought are lacking in an understanding of what they argue for. Libertarians, despite being a minority selling a minority philosophy, seek to create a nation governed by a ‘religion of property’ in order to exit the influence of government. When in fact, government is responsible for making the market, and libertarians should lobby for additional rules to limit the state. Not limiting the state to social activities of dubious non-market nature, but to it’s role in regulating the market and evolutionary increases in defining the ever expanding set of objects and options we refer to as property, and which we frequently trade, so that we, as a people, maintain a competitive advantage against other markets. The problems with the anarchic movement are substantive in that they do not account for market-enhancing asymmetries, versus market-harming asymmetries. In other words, they are advocating the ‘buyer beware’ ethic of the Bazaar, rather than the ‘seller responsibility’ that is required of participants in the Market. This is not an advantage to the shareholders (citizens).
[callout title=Trade and Market Are Different Systems][anarchists] are advocating the ‘buyer beware’ ethic of the Bazaar, rather than the ‘seller responsibility’ that is required of participants in the Market. This is not an advantage to the shareholders (citizens).[/callout]
The problem with our institutions is that they do not separate redistributive efforts from market efforts. Libertarians (of which I am a member of the group of theorists) would be better served by abandoning our rhetoric of monarchic criticism, and instead develop a language and metaphysics such that we can provide an institutional response to an increasingly complex world in which we must register, trade and police a market of increasingly vast and complex products and services, so that we may maintain our competitive advantage over the rest of the world.
[callout title=Separation Of Church And State]The problem with our institutions is that they do not separate redistributive efforts from market efforts.[/callout]
And abandon luddite religions of all sorts. That includes all forms of the Church of Limited Government and Church of Unlimited Government. Instead, a rational epistemology can be applied if we simply look at the material problem of building and maintaining markets in an increasing division of knowledge and labor, where most of our inventions are abstractions that like large numbers, are beyond the ability of our perceptions. That is the one and only important function of government, after territorial defense and the policing of trade routes. And the implementation of rationalism is in separating our institutions such that redistribution is held by one house, and market regulation by another. Further, our separation of banking, including the currency, credit and interest (which has replaced both our religions and our code of laws as our primary means of maintaining social order) is insufficient for the current state of our division of knowledge and labor. That system of institutions and approach to analysis is Post-Rothbardian libertarianism. And it is the only rational alternative to encroaching socialism. Libertarianism was hijacked by Rothbard simply because Hayek, Parsons and Mises failed. And both Rothbard and Hoppe created extraordinary epistemological and institutional value with their research program. But they have failed, as did the libertarians, and the classical liberals, and the conservatives before them, to create a system of institutions capable of providing an alternative to the anti-market anti-civilization sentiments and philosophy of socialism by failing to articulate the causal purpose of government as market maker, and to create institutions that expand and evolve along with the objects that we exchange in that market. And that is your solution membership in A Church: the articulated causality of the market and it’s institutions and the purpose of government communicated by the technique which we call ‘reason’.
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Krugman Watch: On The Right’s Level Of Agitation
The right is very angry right now, even more angry than the early Clinton years. And they are only going to get more agitated. De -masculinizing the military was Clinton’s only real mistake, as the military fraternal order and its meme of group-persistence are conservative’s most agitating sentiment. Obama’s transfer of risk from the poor (unenfranchised risk creators) to small business owners and professionals (enfranchised risk takers), and his general attack in word and deed on the right’s social status and values, plus the sentiment that the ‘rules of the game’ (the constitution, which is the core value of The Classical Liberal wing of Conservatives) were violated to pass the healthcare bill over the will of the populace, have inflamed them. Furthermore, the right lives in a consciousness of the status-economy, which consists of accumulated sacrifices in order to achieve status, and status which increases the probability of opportunity, and opportunity which when combined with risk, create wealth and security. This status-economy is universal, permanent, and material, and vastly amplified in any heterogenous empire. (Conservatives don’t wear funny hats as identity symbols, everyone else wears Conservative hats in order to enter the conservative status-economy.) Just like taxes which are a cost, there is a maximum amount of wealth transfer that a group will tolerate. The political problem is no longer money. It has become a status problem in a heterogenous empire. Empires break because of such differences. (Empires break for two reasons: excess cultural heterogeneity and insufficient institutional calculability: religion and law are insufficiently marginal influences in heterogenous urban societies. No civilization has survived the transition from homogenous to heterogenous density, because it ceases to be in group interests to pay the opportunity cost of respecting institutions whose underlying causal pressure to conform to them diminishes with anonymity. And for your side, the left, it would help if one did not confuse preferences with truths. Because equality, as a value, is contra-logical to the status economy. There is no evidence that people are equal, nor that equality can persist for any period of time. There is a minimum interpersonal, and inter-class, status delta that is tolerable in any society, and the more diverse that society, the more exaggerated must be the delta. This is as much a law, as is supply and demand. And only silly people think otherwise. As for exemplary European models applied to the US, and perceived happiness thereof as a metric, the power-and-weakess discount must be applied to europeans, as demonstrated by the written record of migrants, almost all of which choose the USA model over the european simply because of decreased costs. The opinions europeans hold of their policies are not met by the opinion of european and american expatriates, who actually possess the information to make such a valuation. The popular opinion is nothing but the reversal of power and weakness postwar. Combined with the homogeneity of the germanic countries, this creates an opinion-bias that makes european opinion irrelevant to American policies. The problem for our nation, is that we are an empire that used to be 80% homogenous, becoming an empire whose cultures are increasingly at material odds. In particular the status-discount whites have been paying is reaching intolerable proportions. Why? Because there is a maximum cultural delta, not the least of which is driven by IQ variances. But primarily driven by the human preference for similar-looking and similar-acting people. That preferences is material because of the STATUS economy experienced by people who compete across racial and cultural boundaries. In other words, for the majority, there is a status advantage, and therefore an economic advantage to group identity. In other words – Cultures do not integrate when status deltas reach a cliff-effect. Instead, they hunker-down in tribes. The data is becoming quite clear that the american melting pot was a myth post-european integration. It is a myth here, and will be a myth here and everywhere. And when people do not integrate, they do not tolerate redistribution. It’s funding you’re opposition. This is the reality of human existence. As for the popularity of leftist sentiments versus conservative sentiments, the country is vastly center right. But our universities, are vastly left. Our business community is vastly right. One of these communities is an outgrowth of theology. The other operates using practical techniques. Conservatives never forget this. Liberals (the left kind) always choose to.