Curt Doolittle

Author: Curt Doolittle

  • The Institutional Solution: A Solution To Current Socialist Sentiments And Incrementalism

    Mark, over on CARPE DIEM quotes Mises, who said:

    The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but a subordinate clerk in a bureau. What an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight!

    [callout title=’Conservatism’] “…. liberals are too conservative to embrace capitalism.”[/callout]

    And to which he recieves a number of interesting comments, but one that deserves an answer:

    “Aren’t some rules necessary? Aren’t some goals the proper purpose of government?”

    Of course, rules of the market are necessary. The purpose of government is to administer markets. Without markets there is nothing to defend, so defense is a subset of market activity. Without markets there is nothing to redistribute, so redistribution is a subset of market activity. Without contracts and property there are not disputes to resolve so the judiciary is a subset of market activity. Without types of property to register, to codify, and to determine the properties of, there is no reason to legislate. Government, in the sense that we have a military force, we make and adjudicate laws, and redistribute some income, is unnecessary without a market. In fact, there is only one form of government: a government that administers a market. All abuses of government are abuses of the definitions of property for the purpose of reverse redistribution from the common to the authority by use of force. Government itself is a MARKET ACTIVITY. Otherwise it is just organized theft or fraud. In this sense, I am not sure that redistribution is a government activity, or if it should be separated from market governance. This is, actually, the underlying problem with our form of government: it is based on the city-state history of europe, and the simplicity of those states. Parliaments took over from kings. Multi-houses took over to balance power. But we did not develop houses for separate purposes. Instead, they all must agree on solutions that can be universally proposed, rather than each devoted to proposals limited to their scope of knowledge and influence. In three different pieces today I’ve tried to convey the idea that the market and property in themselves are institutions that were created by ‘regulation’. This does not mean that we have full power over the market, it means that the market is a deliberate institution, not an invisible hand, that has been paid for. And by following the chain of causation we can both understand it’s costs, and understand it’s limits, and in understanding it’s limits, understand how and when to increase regulation of the market: we can increase it along with the abstractions that are traded in it. Because all forms of property are defined by different ‘properties’. Life, real property (land), Improvements (immovable property), several property (movable property), opportunities, commitments, abstractions (patents and trademarks), and cooperative tools (morals and ethics), and to some degree metaphysical abstractions such as funding the implied costs hidden in our social conventions. If we can ACT on it, then it is a function of trade, exchange, cost and cooperation. Property is just a subset of market activities that require physical resources. However, the majority of trade is made in lower cost people’s actions and people’s forgone opportunity to act.

    [callout title=’Foregone Opportunities Are Costs’] “… civilization’s institutions are built almost entirely out of the cost of forgone opportunity.”[/callout]

    In fact, civilization’s institutions are built almost entirely out of the cost of forgone opportunity. The minority of our costs go to institutions like buildings and monuments and roads and bridges. The majority of social costs go to forgone opportunity, the respect for property, ad the maintenance and definition of different kinds of property, and the institutions we use to register and account for property of all kinds, from Cars, and Houses to Marriages and Trademarks. If you grasp this concept of the forgone opportunity economy, libertarianism as it is currently constructed by the Jewish arm of the movement (Rothbard and Friedman) fails for ethical, economic, and rational reasons, while the Christian arm of the movement (classical liberals and Hayekians) fail because of their failure to articulate their movement in something other than historical analogy and post-religoius moralism. Despite being right (in both senses of the term) they cannot articulate why they are so. And the problem is worse for conservatives who rely on unarticulated habits so old they have been reduced to sentiments and invective. I don’t make those errors. I’m trying to give conservatives a language for competing with socialists, who have been developing a form of articulated argument for a century and a half, despite achieving massive murder and destruction. But back to the current state of affairs: I think socialists are just moving gradually, at the extremes via incrementalism. they are able to make these incremental violations by taking advantage of the limited ability of human memories to sense change in time, and they can do so because we have not institutionalized the government such that we can isolate market legislation from redistributive legislation. This is effectively the corruptive influence on our government. I refer to this form of corruption as ‘pooling’. That is, institutions cannot have mixed purposes without MIXING those purposes. The socialist movement has abandoned it’s pursuit of control over the means of production as technique for achieving redistribution and focuses instead on direct partial redistribution wherever they can find an opportunity. But they have not abandoned Ponzi schemes that confuse insurance, which is a probabilistic cost, with redistribution, which is a certain cost. Social security was a probabilistic insurance scheme when few people lived to collect it. But it’s a certain cost today. Nor have they abandoned totalitarian administration of scarcities like health care and retirement income, nor addressed that the scarcity of these services (not commodities, but services which require people, which cannot be solved by increases in production, only that increases in production in one commodity industry can drive down the quality of people in another service industry. I do not think that the influence of, or driving force of the left’s ambition of social status equality versus freedom from poverty is adequately discussed in the literature. Since tomorrows luxuries become today’s commodities, poverty is constantly redefined, and status redefined, and redeveloped on a constant basis. Status is their objective, not redistribution alone. Nor do we sufficiently discuss the fact that people do NOT integrate, do not acculturate but hunker down in their own communities. And where they do integrate, it’s a status ambition by the middle classes, and not integration so much as cooperation. In fact, the general shift has been away from ‘becoming an american’ to living in the ‘american empire’ under the ‘american code of laws’, while retaining one’s cultural identity. This is, in many ways, a strategy for attainment of social status. Nor do we discuss the EFFORT required of those to whom we redistribute money on the maintenance of their property and our institutions – and their lack of effort expenditure even when they are property holders. Since American exceptionalism is likely to have passed it’s prime – the world has adopted western political, economic, and production technologies in what will (for IQ, geographic, and cultural reasons) likely be a permanent global labor class, which will put permanent economic pressure on our middle and lower classes – we will not be able to assume a world of infinite inter-temporal redistribution based on the assumption of growth any longer. If we can reinstitute mandatory savings instead of inter-temporal redistribution, and temporal redistribution into savings rather than consumption, we can probably correct most of the errors that socialists have burdened us with, and put the “saving-sensitiblty” back into the cultural vernacular. Redistributing earnings into savings is a form of reallocation that is both logical and moral in a society that employs fiat money borrowed against the future efforts of the working classes. But monetary redistribution is one thing. Risk redistribution is another. Inter-temporal monetary and risk redistribution are something else altogether because they are incalculable. (Taleb/Mandelbrot/Hakey/Mises). Conservatives and libertarians on the other hand, must understand that the market itself (not trade, but the market) as well as the institutions of property and contract and objective truth, are all forms of regulation.

    [callout title=The Market Is A Form Of Regulation]Conservatives and libertarians on the other hand, must understand that the market itself (not trade, but the market) as well as the institutions of property and contract and objective truth, are all forms of regulation.[/callout]

    Markets as we understand them are distortions of human behavior. Even the competitive benefits of the market are obtained by the efforts of people to circumvent the market converted to good use. Western civilization differs from other civilizations by it’s consistent application of the gladiatorial rules to market exchanges – they are presumed to be fair. And by fair we mean, that one can only win if the other wins as well. There are limits to the fairness of market activity: if one attempts to circumvent the market’s purpose for existence (prosperity) and the reason markets were created (to take advantage of trade routes conquests) and whom they were created by (the fraternal order of soldiers, which is our cultural source of individual responsibility), then the activity is not a market activity and instead is either Fraud or Theft. Not morally, but materially. Because the market is PAID for via foregone opportunities to commit fraud or theft. These are material costs. So there is no such thing as a ‘free market’. We pay to create it by foregone opportunity. It exists because we register these costs of foregone opportunity as rules of the market. And a market can only exists where trade routes are paid for and sanctioned by a division of labor’s specialists at holding land and trade routes: the risk taking soldiers. George Soros and Goldman Sachs circumvented the market, and privatized wins while socializing losses. This is not a market activity. France nationalized the Rothschild’s, and it’s a miracle that England did not nationalize Soros’ money because it privatized wins and socialized losses. The purpose of markets is not to replace the military class with the banking class. It’s to make the banking class, the military class, the merchant class, the clerical class, the craftsman class and the laboring class all benefit by increased division of labor and knowledge that leads to increasing production (Yield per man hour) and decreasing prices. Socialists do not want to ENTER the market because they are afraid to lose – they are stuck in a world of trade rather than markets. This is their fundamental problem. The market is a Circus: a Gladitorium. It is a boxing ring. It is gambling. It is risk. The rewards of the market come from RISK – not TRADE but RISK. It is this market speculation that constantly leads to wins for the spectators. The difference between conservatives and liberals, between conservatives and socialists, is in the difference between the Market, risk and opportunity economy, and the Trade and craftsman economy – progressives are regressive Luddites just as was Marx: seeking to return to the trade economy rather than the market economy. To some degree liberals are the equivalent of color blind. They do not see that the benefits that they live upon are the result of material risk taking. Conservatives do. And it is convenient for them not to see it Liberals like Krugman are simply buried under silly cultural mythos that they mask as economic doctrine – confusing preference and cultural bias with market truth. Krugman’s only objective is to undermine the western white military hierarchy and replace it with the debt slavery of politicized bankers. Libertarians (Rothbardians) are simply buried under the silly cultural mythos that they mask as economic doctrine – confusing the practicality of a RELIGION that favors only one minority class, without understanding the opportunity and forgone opportunity costs, as well as material defense coasts to both capture land, maintain trade routes, and establish and police the rules of the market. LIbertarians (Hayekians) have not produced a synthetic strategy for implementing calculative (rational and calculable) institutions that can replace the political institution of legislative debate (non-rational and incalculable). Although they are probably the most sensible group in the economic sphere. This is a solvable problem some of us are working on diligently. Libertarians (Friedman Monetarists) have been proven wrong by current events, as was Keynes, for exactly the reasons Hayek demonstrated. They are too close the the science to see it’s costs – and too happy to have others pay for the tragic cost of their experiments.

    [callout title=It’s A Problem Of Institutions]The anarcho capitalist libertarians have developed this philosophical structure but it emphasizes free trade and personal property as a means of achieving a class-based exit from the influence of political institutions rather than the wholesale reformation of those institutions.[/callout]

    As Godel demonstrated and as Taleb says, there are a class of problems impervious to statistical analysis. Numbers and models are an extension of our senses. They are not descriptions of future courses of events. But rationality goes out the window under universal egalitarian democracy rather than meritocratic republicanism: as others have said here, progressives have engineered a dependent class, the inverse of the historical politically dependent classes, and that dependent class is accumulating political power slowly but constantly. And what they do not achieve by dependence they achieve by immigration. So, I see no reason to celebrate until we develop a Post- Conservative, Post-Classical Liberal, Post-Libertarian, Post-AnarchoCapitalist solution. That solution must achieve calculative temporal redistribution, savings rather than intertemporal ponzi schemes, and increase the complexity of government (market making) such that we have institutions that cannot pool their interests in order to change the government’s job from market making, to market exploiting. This is the great myth of left liberalism and right libertarianism: that the market simply ‘exists’ because of an invisible hand. Trade exists. A market of risk tolerance that allows the concentration of capital does not exist without the force of violence to prevent violence, and to compensate and punish for fraud. And only silly libertarians think so.

    [callout title=Fixing Liberarianism] For the anarcho capitalists to correct their system, requires they integrate the forgone opportunity economy into their articulation of the explicit economy.[/callout]

    The anarcho capitalist libertarians have developed this philosophical structure, but emphasize free trade (and personal property as a means of achieving a class based exit from the influence of political institutions) rather than the wholesale reformation of those institutions so that they do not have to escape those institutions. For the anarcho capitalists to correct their system, requires they integrate the forgone opportunity economy into their articulation of the explicit economy. And in doing so this would force them to realize that their principle of non-violence is simply a silly religious dictum, and a false starting point for any theory of market activity to give their ‘class’ power in society. Rather than understanding that their class must share power in society in order to create the very markets that they depend upon. My position is that we cannot fix those institutions without crisis or violence. But perhaps, the threat of violence can achieve the crisis which will allow the reformation of the institutions for the protection of all. This strategy would put the republic back into place, while realizing that a republic of farmers is a republic of equals, and a republic of an advanced industrialized society competing in globalized economy requires that we have a more complex political system than the farmer-system we inherited from the classical liberals who were our founders.

    [callout title=The Virtue Of Violence]My position is that we cannot fix those institutions without crisis or violence. But perhaps, the threat of violence will encourage the crisis which will in turn allow the reformation of the institutions for the benefit of all.[/callout]

    All we can know for certain is that the socialist method is, and always will be, a failure, given any significant period of time, and the calculative libertarian method will always be a success given any significant period of time.

  • Krugman Watch: Debt Totalitarian

    Default, Devaluation, Or What?

    Is there anything more to say about Greece? Actually, I think so.

    Krugman goes on to comment on the loveliness of more debt. Why? Because debt causes two systemic changes. First, it transfers power to the banking class and the state. Second, it replaces law, custom, and religion, as a means of social management. We have evolved three systems so far for managing society: first phase: religion and shared labor, second phase: law and taxation, and third phase: credit and debt. My Krugman wants us to enter the third phase without understanding the first: concentration of resources, the second: trade routes and markets, or escaping it’s claws. [callout title=Debt Slavery]Mr. Krugman your world view is full of debt slavery.[/callout] The truth is that we must keep each of these systems of social organization. Religion is a means by which we establish general goals for concentrating effort and resources. Soldiery and market making allow us to control land, trade routes, and to build markets and a division of labor. Credit and Debt let us build a more complex world of incentives and regulations on a more granular individual basis so that we may increase the division of knowledge and labor. But none of these systems is sufficient alone. A reader comments to this effect on Mr Krugman’s blog:

    Konstantin, New York, N.Y. May 4th, 2010 Mr. Krugman your world view is full of debt slavery. Greece should leave the tyrannical European Union and then if it wishes can devalue their currency but not too much.

    To which I responded:

    “Mr. Krugman your world view is full of debt slavery.” Quite true. But this strategy suit’s Mr Krugman’s desire to move society from upper class military control over trade routes for the purpose of creating markets, to working class bureaucratic control over individual lives for the purpose of creating the illusion of psychological certainty. In other words, from a growing to a dying society. Since we possess too little information to predict the future, we invariably make our judgements about the future according to our class and cultural metaphysical assumptions. We confuse these assumptions or ‘preferences’ for truths. But they are just ‘silly ideas’ writ large, whose silliness is obscured by ignorance, time and complexity.

    And unfortunately, it would be a full time job to criticize Mr Krugman’s silly logic. He complains elsewhere that the volume of criticism has increased of late, and that it’s from the Crazies. Crazies simply include a vast number of people in and out of the profession that see him as not an economists but a political hack. But I’m not sure that there is any better way of illustrating the foolishness of the left than to build a body of work that articulates one’s position by showing the consistency of errors in one’s opposition. And it’s entertaining as well as utilitarian. Unfortunately, I dislike the man.

  • The Keynesian Conversion Of The Responsibility Of The State

    Think of how much easier the job of government is, when instead of seeking competitive increases in production, it seeks redistribution and reduced unemployment. The first requires that you have some comprehension of your economy. The second requires that you have little to none.

    [callout title=The Net Effect Of Keynes]The net effect of the Keynesian revolution was to change the purpose of the government from one of concentrating capital such that the population would derive benefits from increases in competitiveness and production, to one of consumerism, whereby the citizenry is discouraged from saving in order to create consumer velocity.[/callout]

    The net effect of the Keynesian revolution was to change the purpose of the government from one of concentrating capital such that the population would derive benefits from increases in competitiveness and production, to one of consumerism, whereby the citizenry is discouraged from saving in order to create consumer velocity. We have accomplished that objective. We have converted to the consumer society and shipped the productivity of our lower classes offshore, and made the upper classes dependent upon the lower classes consumption. We have destroyed the cultural habit of saving. And with it, the culture of individual responsibility. Our whole country lives under the myth of prosperity without applying a discount to the increased risk we are exposed to by our hubris. The responsibility of the state is capitalization which reduces risk. Not consumption which increases it.

    [callout title=Callout Title]Think of how much easier the job of government is, when instead of seeking competitive increases in production, it seeks redistribution and reduced unemployment. The first requires that you have some comprehension of your economy. The second requires that you have little to none.[/callout]

    I am not against redistribution or the insurance-state. I am against the destructive state. And our state has become destructive. It has become destructive because it has become consumptive. And it justifies that consumption by leaving competitive increases to the private sector, despite the market’s incapacity for extraordinary investments. We need 200 nuclear power plants. We need a new power grid. We need to convert to electric cars. We need to rebuild the voting system and reform the houses of government. We need to increase research funding for hard sciences and decrease it for humanities and social so called sciences. We need to change the structure of the tax code. We need to change accounting procedures that allow causal laundering of money. We need to restructure corporate law so that we can de-corporialize the corporation so that it must serve customers or fail. We need to reform the banking industry. We need to privatize the administration of social insurance. We need to do a hundred other things that will create institutional improvements for the population to compete against other nations who have cheaper labor costs. Yet we consistently fall under the Keynesian spell, and distract ourselves from the meaningful work of building a competitive society.

  • Jefferson’s Virtue Of Violence

    Today, on United Liberty, the daily Jefferson quote was:

    “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” – Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush (1800)

    Freedom is created by, and maintained by, the use of violence, and a man’s capacity for violence is his political wealth. The promise he will use his violence to create freedom, is met with the lack of his need to use it for any purpose whatsoever. It is a wealth sparely spent with high returns.

  • Conservative Complaints About The Social Security Scheme

    The conservative complaints with social security are that it is not a fund, but a state-expanding tax. Nothing was paid into it, and therefore it is simply a current tax to redistribute from young producers to old consumers who failed to save. And secondly, that this tax also funds an intrusive and abusive government. These are structural complaints, not complaints about ambitions or outcomes. The original creators’ ambition for this tax was to create an insurance scheme for the minority of people who lived past 65. Except, people vastly live beyond 65 today. In other words, the tax went from low to high risk because of unforeseen consequences. The conservative objection to liberal hubris is that they are asked to absorb risk because of the STRUCTURE of this system, which is now a form of intergenerational welfare, rather than the form of insurance that it was designed to be. The solution to this structural problem is as follows: 1) to convert from an inter-temporal redistributive and high risk tax to a low risk insured savings program. 2) To change from income tax to balance sheet tax. 3) To have the government participate in, and redistribute, profits from the use of credit money – credit money which is borrowed from and secured by the promise of labor by the average person. This set of changes would eliminate benefits at a specified multiple of the mean. It would unfund government bureaucracy. It would insert more money into the economy as investment capital, and decrease the negative effect of inflating the monetary supply on savers.

    [callout title=It’s A Tax]social security … not a fund, but a state-expanding tax. Nothing was paid into it, and therefore it is simply a current tax to redistribute from young producers to old consumers. [/callout]

    The general argument against the correction of the social security system, is that if we increase the tax by 2% and change the age slightly, that the system as it stands would be fully funded. To which I’d counter, only if that 2% comes from balance sheet weight, not income. Because for a vast number of companies that are not subsidized by the financial markets, 2% would be half of their annual profits, and this failure would have to be built into the system. I see no reason to rely upon assumption that the 20th century, which consists largely of the greatest external advantage that a nation has ever experienced, can be used to project the future. It is not logical to ask decreasingly populous generations facing increasing worldwide competition to support a longer living and increasingly expensive class of retirees, when instead, retirees should have saved to lend money to the generations that follow. These advantage are not sustainable, and even if they are, the system currently asks all to risk in order to fund current government, rather than all to save, to insure their mutual success. The belief that we will continue our economic advantage is the myth of american exceptionalism. Savings is sustainable – in any culture. But not the assurance of worldwide competitive advantage which can be redistributed. As an entrepreneur, I do not fear the market. I fear that the government will extort enough from the entrepreneurial class that they will abandon their belief that they can outpace the predatory state. Tax individuals not by income but by balance sheet. Progressively tax companies for market participation. Eliminate the double tax system on dividends. Increase the tax on speculative returns.

    [callout title=Fears]I fear that western advantage, which was demographic, technical and military, will be neither demographic, technical, or military. And that the very institutions that were limited enough to guarantee us our freedom will be the institutions by which we are permanently enslaved and impoverished.[/callout]

    I fear that the bureaucracy, as in the UK, will become a predatory class living on a virtually enslaved population. I fear that western advantage, which was demographic, technical and military, will be neither demographic, technical, or military. And that the very institutions that were limited enough to guarantee us our freedom will be the institutions by which we are permanently enslaved and impoverished. It is easy to rate the success of any government by the direct redistribution divided by the cost of government employees, and seek to constantly improve the ratio, just as we do for non-profits.

  • Don Boudreaux Swings And Misses The Entire Point: Sovereignty

    Over on Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux attacks Arizona’s policy, and in doing so, falls into the abyss of economic tyranny: the justification of economic outcome over freedom and sovereignty.

    By demonizing immigrants, these politicians exploit voters’ misinformation about the economic consequences of the alleged devils.

    My response was:

    Don, 

    You’re confusing the priority of people’s perceptions of their economic consequences with the priority of people’s perception of their political and cultural sovereignty, as well as their perception of their associated status. These people [Arizonians] have been wronged. They have been wronged by a loss of sovereignty, and a reduction in cultural dominance, and wronged by an ongoing diminution of their status. And people will act far more passionately to defend their social position than they will to an abstract economic benefit. That was, and is, the entire reason behind nationalism. Or did you forget?

    When the use of economic outcomes becomes the primary criteria that one uses to determine all policy, then the economist makes a fundamental error because he ignores the most important of ‘animal spirits’: status and sovereignty. And then the methods of economics become either a religion, or the error of intellectual myopia, or of intellectual vanity.

    Otherwise, economic policies are the tools of tyranny, and the justification of tyranny.

  • The Virtue Of Violence

    The Virtue Of Violence: “We do not forego violence in exchange for democracy, we forgo violence in exchange for creating and accessing the market. Democracy is simply a means of hiring and firing the administrators of our markets. We do not exist to serve democracy. Democracy exists to serve the market. And should it cease to do so, it ceases the only reason for its legitimacy or use, and is simply a means of whereby the masses destroy the accumulated prosperity of the market in the greatest act of theft and ruin that a humans can perpetuate. If we are no longer cooperating in order to maintain our market. Then we no longer need to cooperate to maintain our government. And as such, we no longer need to restrain our violence, so that we may recreate a market and a means of administrating it. The principles of non violence and non aggression are a means of stealing from us whenever the market is circumvented by those we hire to administrate it. It is an act of deception and fraud. It is an infinite discount on our contribution of forgone opportunity for the purpose of creating the market. That is the true meaning of the word ‘freedom’: to spend the currency of our violence in creation of the market, our respect for property such that we may cooperate in a division of labor, our time and efforts in the creation of products and services to participate in the market, and our rewards for having done all of the above. Violence is the source of the market, and the market the source of our prosperity, cooperation, and happiness. Violence and it’s use in creating and maintaining the market, is man’s greatest achievement. Violence is a virtue because it is the amount of violence possessed by men, and their creativity in and capacity for using it, and the use of it to create the market, that is the prerequisite for prosperity, and division of labor.” And there is no other argument for the source of the market, our actions in maintaining it, other than we are slaves or children instead of free men, capable of any creative or destructive act we choose. And I will not surrender my violence, and pay the cost of forgone opportunity to create a market from which I, my family, my friends, my tribe, my culture, may prosper, so that someone may enslave me.” – Curt Doolittle Curt Doolittle’s writes on libertarian economics and conservative politics at Capitalism v3.0, and hosts the Libertarian And Conservative Roundtable news feed – a set of syndicated articles opinions and news in the english language from across the web. (From Our Facebook Page)

  • Violence Is A Beautiful Word

    Violence is a beautiful word. But its beauty is absent from our discourse. I’m going to put violence into libertarianism. I’m going to put violence back into politics and economics. Violence, violence, violence, violence violence.   There. I said it again.  Get used to it. I’m going to fix our civilization and its political system by revealing the elephant in the room. I’m going to talk about violence as a virtue.  Something to be cherished, and loved, and appreciated. Because the source of our prosperity is in our violence. Markets, Freedom, Property, the product of the organized use of violence. And no use of violence has ever been so peaceful, so fruitful or so enjoyable.

    Roman Warriors

  • Another Round On Paparazzi

    Peter Surda April 21, 2010 at 2:35 am

    However, it is still a person’s asset, regardless of price, because people ACT as if it is an asset, and that asset has material value to individuals, which we can determine by surveying the ACTIONS that people take, businesses take, regarding their reputation

    But this is valid with regard to anything, not only reputation. This does not help define property, it confuses. Any change has a negative effect on someone. Does that mean that any action whatsoever is a property right violation? This is one of the reasons why I reject the notion of immaterial trespass. Instead, I humbly propose that only those immaterial negative effects that are defined in contracts are to be prosecuted (i.e. contract violations). Furthermore…

    Property is a claim on an opportunity to make use of any object, material or abstract, upon which men can act.

    It is not necessary to own immaterial goods to make use of them, therefore from the existence of an opportunity you cannot imply ownership. As I said before, with immaterial goods, anything causally related is “making use of”.

    We can create representations of abstracts, can’t we? We’ve created plenty of them. I can stake a claim on land. I can form an abstract entity called a joint stock corporation, and then sell shares. I can marry someone and get a marriage certificate. I can get a receipt for a deposit. I can sign a contract. I can buy an option. I can wager a bet. Why can’t I stake a claim on a formulae? Or a brand or trademark? Or a design or patent? Simply because they require uniqueness against a broader pool of people, because are treated as first-come first-serve exclusivity, rather than an auction model, and because the market cannot expand to provide better and more accurate service than does the state. These registries try to prevent copying and bypassing investment (theft) rather than parallel innovation, which is in the market interest. Under the Hoppian property scheme land registries are maintained and protected by insurance companies and private firms instead of the state. But to limit the scope of property is to limit the competitive ability of groups to compete against other groups. The problem is that the government owns the registry and terms by which abstracts are registered, while denying the purpose for which we enact the registry: to encourage capital investment so that goods and services can be rapidly brought to market at lower risk rather than through direct subsidy. But in turn these devices can be used to prevent products and services from entering the market, and in particular, products and services that do not require capitalization, and that they too often endure long enough to create artificial monopolies. Book protections that persist beyond one generation of offspring of the author. Banks regulate their own ‘market’ of loans. Each stock market has regulations. Why can’t we have markets for other claims? Why can’t we auction off uses of a design, rather than simply deny competitors to the market. it’s the state monopoly that’s the problem. Material trespass and immaterial trespass are simply conventions driven by the ease of registry. In a man’s mind he can know his physical property, and know that any other object is not his physical property. If we could catalog ideas just as easily, would we not treat them as such? We do. We create ‘pointers’ to externally reference memories. They’re real world representations of abstractions. Is the purpose of the libertarian program to create a platform for cooperation and trade, to minimize the potential for government corruption, interference, theft, bureaucracy, waste, violence, class warfare, and exploitation using the evidence of how men actually act? Or is to create another silly religion that is contrary to the behavior of human beings, or is it just another absurd metaphysics like Marxism? A libertarian society must be one by consent – or we need to abandon the principle of non violence and implement it by force. And if it’s to be a society of consent, then it must reflect human behavior in order to gain consent. Human behavior, and the evolution of our knowledge, dictates that we leave the system for definition of property and the registry thereof open to innovation. Not closed, and limited to material constructs. The general body of arguments on this topic are reductio and illusory because of it. The real issue at hand is that in the division of labor, specialized knowledge is required to in order to innovate, and innovation in all but the black swan areas requires capital concentration, and markets are best served by their own division of labor in the act of policing fraud and theft, or even of registrations of claims against property. Government is not an innovative organ, and it is a corrupt and slow moving one. The issue instead, is to adopt a Hoppian division of labor and competition rather than a Rothbardian Luddite program, or a government-run monopoly program that by it’s very nature is expressly counter to the innovation, division of labor and specialization of knowledge needed to keep pace with our innovations, almost all of which, are currently ABSTRACTIONS. In this EXPANDING WORLD, the Hoppian model of privatization and risk management using insurance schemes rather than the monopoly of government is a superior answer than that of the Rothbardian Luddite model, which artificially Harrison-Bergeron’s” the civilization – to a man. If we can protect several property so that it can be invested in. We can protect abstract property so that it can be invested in. The institutional problem is registration and regulation. Not Rothbardian abstinence. And not to get a population to adhere to an absurd metaphysics. But to create institutions wherein real human beings can interact using real human innovations, almost all of which are abstractions, and most of which are now beyond individual comprehension. ( Property requires memory. Institutions are a form of social memory. Institutions educate indirectly. Memory becomes behavior. Behavior becomes normative.) Our problem is institutions, not beliefs. Actions not words. And any libertarian, and anarchic program that would simply force people to prefer to resort to violence to resolve differences, or which would impoverish the greater body of people by making them less competitive against other groups (which Rothbardian property would do) is simply to exchange the prosperity of the market for abstract registry of opportunities for the poverty of the bazaar society. It is regression. It is to limit man to the industrial age. It’s a Luddite philosophy. The anarchic research program’s undermining of the historic legitimacy of the state is separate from the use of non-state (insurance) institutions to maintain both real and abstract property. Focus on the right problem. Private, competitive, market institutions that divide knowledge and labor and provide service over government monopoly institutions that provide corruption, theft and incompetence.

  • An Example Of Libertarian Redefinition Of Property – Fraud In Action

    Property Rights and the Paparazzi by JEREMIAH DYKE ….. one cannot own his image or reputation, nor can he own an actual image, a photograph, of himself. Like the mental construction of memory which is a product of one’s eyes and mind, a picture is a product of one’s camera. The question of ownership begins first with the individual, then proceeds to his labor, then the equipment via exchange, and finally to the property from which that equipment is employed. If you don’t want to be photographed, then you must remain where you are veiled from the public. You do not own the rights of another’s’ flashing camera the same way you don’t own the right to another’s gazing eyes. You may only own, or rent, the space from which they snap their pictures. Therefore, what celebrities really need is private roads and private sidewalks from which they may oust those that take pictures. They want more privatization so that they may enjoy their privacy. If not, then their privacy is not something they truly desire.

    This is a mischaracterization of the problem of paparazzi. It is a rare celebrity that does not desire publicity. The problem for most celebrities is to get any and all publicity possible. Instead, the property violation occurs when the paparazzi interfere with a person’s actions and movement, obstruct their conversations and social meetings, invade their homes, or attempt to create news by antagonizing the celebrity. These are all violations of the persons freedom, and paparazzi are granted special dispensation by the state to antagonize celebrities. The violation then, is that the celebrity is prevented from protecting his freedom and property by the intrusive state that has granted the rights of theft to paparazzi. You further mischaracterize the nature of reputation. Reputation exist in minds subject to constantly updated information — in other words, it exists in a market that experiences fluctuations in price. As Rothbard says, a reputation’s daily market PRICE is not controllable. However, it is still a person’s asset, regardless of price, because people ACT as if it is an asset, and that asset has material value to individuals, which we can determine by surveying the ACTIONS that people take, businesses take, regarding their reputations – PR firms are expensive (Mine is too). Hence, profiting by manufacturing damage to a person’s reputation is simply an act of theft. And therefore, if paparazzi are creating news by interfering with the celebrity, then they are engaging in theft. If they are capturing celebrity actions without interfering, then they are simply communicating an observation. Defining property according to your choosing is simply an attempt at fraud. Defining property according to the analysis of human actions is rational, scientific, praxeological, and consequently Misesian. Defining property according by any other arbitrary or constructed means is simply fraud. I do not mean to discount the other principles that Rothbard added to our toolkit – tools which I am using above. Nor to disagree with the value of privatizing what is currently public property. However, this rather foolish constructivist approach to private property is the reason we are frequently disavowed, and perpetuating this kind of error does us no good, not the least of which is because it is entirely FALSE. Constructivist views of private property are an attempted act of fraud. Property is not the name of material objects. Property is a claim on an opportunity to make use of any object, material or abstract, upon which men can act. Either that, or libertarianism is not a science of Human Action, but a silly metaphysical cult no better than the patent absurdity proposed by Marx, and a vast scheme of fraud and theft that we wish to foist upon a skeptical civilization which will have none of it. Instead, the anarchic research program has been terribly valuable in debunking the myth of good government and directing us to focus on the coordination and calculation problems rather than attempting to improve the political institutions – invalidating more than a century of self-congratulatory work on the merits of democracy. But conservatism lacks an argument sufficient to combat the constant evolution of socialist ideas. Libertarians are by and large the though leadership of the conservative movement that resists socialism. Libertarianism contains the necessary elements to provide that argument. It would be far better that we should focus on providing it, rather than perpetuate nonsense which undermines our ability to do so.