Author: Curt Doolittle

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: “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. 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.

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.

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.

Walter block sent out a survey to the Mises blog in support of some research he has been doing. In it, he asks, what problems should Austrians solve? I read the list, and, thought that almost none of the categories of interest were actually problems that needed solving. The problems that economists need to solve are not those which derive from the antiquated process of pooling, or aggregating quantities into categories. We know that aggregation of categories a failure as a strategy. We know that we must apply statistical methods across periods of differing utility and differing sentiments in order to find correlations from which we can deduce theories of causation. It is a loose set of tools for a complex world. The problem is to define institutions that would allow us to posses knowledge of human activities so that we can measure distortions of policy. The problem is institutions and data. It is not how to further plumb the depths of error – to divine nonsense from the nonsensical. The problem is our institutions.

Leftists wish to remake society. They want to return us to the “homogenous tribal redistributive society” (HTRS) on a large scale. They will fail. They have failed. They cannot make a homogenous redistributive and tribal society from a multicultural empire of vastly unequal groups of people who who act as competing groups of people. ( See Putnam’s article on the impact of diversity ) The only result of any government over this diverse set of people will be a totalitarian one. While in our fantasies, we believe that we could have immigrated only a certain class of people, or a certain race of people, or both, but the continent is too large, and the chance to profit by importing cheaper labor in each generation diluted the chance to become a large, powerful and single-class-single-race society. The import of the vast numbers of Europeans who then in turn used the new land and ready capital to produce cheaper goods to ship back to europe at a discount was not an insignificant cause of the collapse of european civilization and the resulting european civil war we call the world wars. Status is epistemologically necessary social construct — we couldn’t live without it — and Status also controls access to mates, networks, and opportunity. Since a large and diverse population would doom most people in the population to a status discount in exchange for economic solidarity, they fracture into factions where status within the factional group gives them access to mates within their group, opportunities within their group, and influence in their group. In other words, this factionalization creates an increase in the opportunities for any individual to obtain status. (Islam and Buddhism solve this problem by making status spiritual rather than material. This is the ;primary attractiveness to these religions. They create mental rather than material status. Jews work the inverse methodology: the achieve status by group persistence. Whites are torn, and that is their problem. ) Each little faction in the world seems to desire that they make their whole society homogenous, equal and tribal. OUr tribal instincts, and instincts they are, compete with our status instincts to form an equilibrium between the comfort necessary to maintain a group, and the innovation needed to strengthen the group. We call these the masculine and feminine, but that is to apply gender bias to a problem where gender is meaningless. The only societies who achieve the comfort of tribal equality do so by embracing that feminine tribal homogenous egalitarian principle at large, and oppressing attempts at disruptive status attainment, is the poor, ignorant, and despotic monotheistic societies. And in doing so they embrace the virtueless cycle of degenerative decline. So no, liberals cannot remake society. And if they succeeded we would simply decline in prosperity. They would not make the utopia that they dreamed of. Or rather they might make the feeling of coming utopia, but actually cause decline. Whereas conservatism forces us to face material reality and in doing so we create a utopia we had not planned to. But conservatives cannot remake society either. We never could. Conservatives live by the fantasy that they can create a society where they can legitimately rule, without violence, by merit alone, and that merit the act of denying the accumulation of power, by the force of rules of consent, rather than the promise of violence if those rules are broken. In other words, conservatives who are not willing to use violence to maintain the rules are attempting to get others to pay the costs of maintaining those rules. In more economic terms, conservatives are as unwilling to pay the costs of preventing the accumulation of political power, as liberals are unwilling to pay the costs of enforcing the extraordinary discipline needed to control breeding rates, to work and save, and to build a meritocratic society. So, in this light, conservatives are either foolishly believing the documents of their religion of the American Founding Documents If someone breaks the rules you must resort to violence. The purpose of the rules is to avert violence. The threat of breaking the rules is that we will return to our use of violence. On a regular basis we allow liberals break the rules. Conservatives do not use violence against the state because it would be violence against their church. Yet liberals use violence and protest and insurgency and capital disruption and undermine the constitution, undermine the courts, by-pass the legislature. And conservatives sit by, wondering why their god does not enforce the scripture of the founding documents. Conservatives believe that we can aspire to make everyone noble – a member of the fraternal order of soldiers of equal suffrage. They believe that we can live according to the founding principles of the american republic, rather than those documents only survived seventy years, until the civil war. Afterward it became a useful myth by which the attainment of power could be justified by popular consent. The American founding civilization died with the civil war. Since 1914 we have taken over the role of the british empire. Our ‘god’ died with that war. For a brief period in human history, we created the illusion that a majority of people could join the civic republican tradition. Any man who could fight and could own a bit of land, could call himself noble. Because of our vast division of knowledge and labor, which has freed us from physical labor, and which rewards merit, status, and prosperity to the result of genetic gifts, our citizenry is no longer equal enough to form a large class of lesser nobility and soldiery, that is the social construct necessary for political unity, and cultural and territorial expansion, and the maintenance of an empire. There is no equality of man. There never was. There never shall be. We are unequal. We are unequal in physical ability and intellectual ability. (( Human capital is an asset that is worth investing in: when educated in large numbers, african americans only improved in IQ slightly, they did improve. )) We cannot have a government of equals unless that society is extraordinarily small and homogenous. The republican form of government was always a minority form of government. It was simply a meritocratic minority form of government, that desired a constant expansion of and rotation of the elites in order to keep the homogenous society competitive and the elites prosperous. To attempt to make a homogenous tribal redistributive society out of an empire of heterogeneous is simply an impossible act. THe question then, is do we fragment the empire so that each fragment may have a homogenous tribal redistributive society, or do we rule the empire in self-defense, to protect ourselves from it? Any group that wishes to maintain power must in the end do so by its willingness to use violence. Any group of meritocratic individuals must maintain power or become the subject of extortion by less meritocratic groups : usually the priestly class or their modern version the public intellectual class. THis is another instance of the ancient battle between those who coerce by words and those who coerce by force, and those who coerce by trade. Conservatives are, by and large, the remnants of lesser nobility. They practice military epistemology. (( Military epistemology is the most accurate epistemology because the outcome of taking risks is very high. Nassim Taleb discusses this topic in The Black Swan. )) The questions we must answer are : 1) Whether we will use violence to maintain the meritocratic society, or become enslaved by the Bonapartist (( Bonapartism: democratically elected totalitarians )) ambitions of the politically active minority. (Contemporary Russia is a Bonapartist state.) 2) Whether we will break the nation into regions which may choose different approaches to government and allow people to vote with their feet, or whether we will stay an empire and attempt to force people into the Civic Republican Model. (( Immigrant urban areas will choose Bonapartism, the south, and middle of the country will choose meritocracy, and the west coast democratic egalitarianism – at least as long as the center of world trade remains the pacific rim. ))

I love reading the UK press, because by and large, the quality of discourse is far beyond that of what occurs in the US. I posted on the IEA Blog, this response to the statement that, coarsely written and paraphrased here as ” Yes the Lib Dem’s may achieve power, but anything is better than ten years of substantial unemployment.” I’m a little cautious about sounding like a critic when I actually think that the IEA produces great thought. But it is far less work to criticize a good idea, than it is to refute an ocean of fantasy and ignorance. Hence I apologize if I come off a critic rather than an advocate.

Unemployment results from the government’s confusion between consumption and production in that they assume that consumption is equal to production. Their policy of general liquidity that diverted capital from production to consumption and created both recursive asset inflation, and a reduction in competitiveness. This is the broken joint in Keynesian logic. It assumes that increasing liquidity can be put to increases in production. Production means that an activity increases output while decreasing man hours, and costs. The problem for any state is to put captial, not behind consumption, but behind increases in production that cannot be achieved by the private sector. … This concentration of capital will create new jobs, and ongoing competitiveness, from which redistributive capital can be siphoned. Private sector production increases will lead to some unemployment. Uncontrolled breeding and immigration will lead to unemployment, and particularly disadvantage second quintile workers. (A step above the bottom). So the state can divert this process by participating in funding international (export) competitiveness. The state must adopt a policy of investment, not liquidity or redistribution. Because only investment allows redistribution. (And the government, which consumes such a vast amount of GDP is simply a redistributive system.) A free market is a bounded market, because there are LIMITS to private investment. Since all borrowing is, under fiat money, borrowing from the middle and lower classes, and they (as we have just demonstrated) carry the risk of borrowing, then the reward for that investment should be returned to them. As such the state should borrow to create productivity increases (power, transportation, technical innovation, resource exploitation, and education) and return a portion of the profits to the citizenry as redistribution. Laissez faire both puts the citizenry at risk without reward, concntrates capital in the hands of a state sponsored class, and deprives the citizenry of opportunities. That is how to prevent ‘ten years of very substantial unemployment’. The party that accomplishes it is meaningless. THe party that ignores it is meaningless.

Being a conservative simply means taking a gradual approach to social change and particularly with respect to the financial, family and military traditions that affect status and political power, which they are skeptical of. Conservatism means being skeptical that our visions of the future will come true, and looking at the world as what people ACTUALLY DO not what we WISH they would do. In that sense, conservatism is historically scientific even if linguistically archaic. Conversely, while liberalism is linguistically modern, it is utopian, idealistic, contra-observation, contra-history, and therefore anything but scientific. The differences between these two philosophies are vast and numerous, but the one that is most important, is the difference between the reliance abstractions from experience in conservatism, and the reliance on abstracting experiences in liberalism. This may seem a complex idea, but liberals try to extrapolate the daily experience into the extended order of human cooperation. THis is called ‘induction’. Conservatives synthesize the actual experience of aggregate human activity from history. This is called ‘deduction’. Induction is a process that we are not sure, despite the vast effort of philosophers, exists. In other words liberalism if faulty on scientific grounds. It is a religion. This language problem has always been an issue for conservatives. Liberal dictums may sound scientifically sound if one induces from experience. Conservative (dictums) are sensible when one deduces from abstractions of history. And everyone must use these shortcuts, because too few of us possess the knowledge to make rational judgements and therefore must rely upon basic principles when making decisions. In fact, rational thought is applied to the vast minority of choices. Most decisions are made by habit. The rest according to shortcuts. For the vast majority of people from either conservative or liberal, neither induction or deduction is a rational process of choice, but instead, a process of identifying analogistic sentiments: it’s the act of pattern recognition rather than reason. Pareto called this process of pattern recognition “residues and derivations”, others called them “Metaphysical Judgements” or “Sentiments”. Contemporary thinkers and public intellectuals call them “beliefs” or “biases”, or “science or religion”. And our language incorporates these different sentiments. Our arguments do as well. Our narratives, myths, popular fiction, entertainment, status aspirations do. But so do your political rhetoric, which, because reason would be a technique unavailable to the masses, rely entirely on a complex web of constantly warring sentiments wherein the citizenry seeks confirmation bias, rather than a simple argument consisting of reason, where the citizenry seeks both consensus and falsification of their biases. In other words, where people are skeptical – conservative and rational. Utopianism is a technology that people use during periods of prosperity. Because we have been artificially prosperous due to the discovery and exploitation of a continent, we as a nation are notorious for predicting an optimistic future that cannot or has not occurred. The public dialog over the causes of our prosperity is often inaccurate and self-congratualtory rather than factual. We have transformed our culture of evangelical christianity into one of evangelical democratic secular humanism. Conservatives are skeptics. They may speak in antiquated language, because antiquity is their source of their language. They may fail to articulate their position effectively in contemporary terms because of that language, but regardless of the source of their language, the content of their language is strategic, intelligible and rational. And it is not just a language, but a methodology that represents their strategy for social order. They ACT conservatively, think conservatively, and treat the world conservatively. This conservative strategy and conservative activities are why conservatives are, in general, more prosperous – and frankly, happy. And the sacrifices that they make in order to be prosperous are material to them. They remember them. And therefore they resent those sacrifices being ’spent’ by others who do not make the same sacrifices. Monetarists and capitalists are not conservatives. They may hide under conservatism. But they are not conservatives. The conservative class is a military, middle and craftsman class and it always has been and always will be. It is the ‘residue’ of the european fraternal order of soldiers at the bottom, and at the top, it’s a ‘residue’ of the middle class movement that revised and adopted civic republicanism during the enlightenment as a way of transferring power from the kings and church to the middle class. it is an alliance of the military and middle class. Liberalism (socialism, communism) is a ‘residue’ of a union of the priestly cast and the peasantry. Academia is simply an outgrowth of the church. The peasantry has always allied with the church, and the church has always had power because of it’s support by the peasantry. And that said, we do not have a separation of church and state. Our state religion is now democratic secular humanism. We are now a state-run-religion using the myth of division of church and state to oppress (or reform) religions so that we can have a state sponsored church. That’s it. That’s the articulated conservative position. The republican party collects conservative coalitions. The republican party is not a conservative party. conservatives join the republicans because they have no choice. They see the party as corrupt. People are complex and only join parties because of limited choice mandated by our ‘winner takes all’ form of government, which fosters class warfare. In fact, all political decisions exist on a spectrum or bell curve. There are a myriad of political decisions to be made. There are a myriad of people with different abilities to understand each political opinion. Each person is interested in a myriad of decisions. Parties are collections of people with opinions. Very skilled people tend to be highly unsatisfied with party choices. Very unskilled people tend to simply support their party of nearest interest. Parties therefore pick platforms that make enough people happy that they can get into power. Arguing that conservatives want to keep things asa they are, is a silly argument. The objection is simply illogical. The question instead, is whether liberals propose a solution that conservatives can live with, and wether conservatives can propose a solution that liberals can live with. The difference between social classes are differences in Time Preferences (between “consume” or “capitalize”, or gratification now versus gratification later). Longer (lower) time preferences are only possible if you have the ability to comprehend long term time preferences. This is another reason why social classes are organized by intelligence, and why a market economy tends to organize us into economic classes according to our application of intelligence to the satisfaction of OTHER PEOPLES WANTS, instead of our own. Time preference affects not only a dimension covering an individual’s perception of gratification. It’s a second dimension that describes whether his gratification now or later is served by providing solutions to himself or to others. This is the moral lesson of Adam Smith – that capitalism creates a virtuous cycle. If we had listened to the liberals in the last century we would have ended up like either Russia or China. If we had listened to conservatives we would not have had our progressive social changes, but we would not have corrupted our financial system using Kenesnian inflation. It’s the competition of ideas that gives us the choice as a body politic. It is the combination of LIBERAL OBJECTIVES and CONSERVATIVE METHODS that provides the means of achieving shared goals. Lets say that again. Liberal objectives are moral desires. Conservatives methods are moral means. It requires both these tools to achieve moral ends. The problem is, conservative methods take time because they require the learning and adaptation of people to calculative processes. These processes have nothing to do with religion. Christianity is largely a religion of the poor. Protestantism is perhaps the most important religion for generating wealth in the west as it is a class religion. Secular humanism is a feminine religion just as Aryanism (expansionist civic republican tradition of the initiatic fraternal order of city-defending soldiers) is a masculine religion. We do not need all to believe one thing, share one goal, work according to the same rules. If we did, we’d break the principle of the division of knowledge, labor, time, and intelligence. WHat people really want when they seek universal agreement is to concentrate labor, knowledge, time and intelligence on their goals at the expense of other people’s goals. Since people are unequal in their ability, in their class goals, in their cultural goals, in their age and experience, in their knowledge and in their intelligence, then we must divide up our actions into bits and pieces which we cooperate with each other to achieve. Democracy as we have implemented it is a winner-take-all political order. It foments class warfare. It does not foment class cooperation. We need a government that is a return to the division of labor and division of classes and time preferences. Democracy is a failure as we have implemented it. Because we confuse the value of the transformation of power inherent in democracy with the universal aspiration of classes, cultures, ages, generations, and abilities.

I read a number of the UK papers every day online. They are better than US papers for a variety of reasons. (( In the current ‘intelligence system’ it’s recommended that americans read Al Jazeera, Pravda, China News Daily, BBC News as well as the NYT. All are biased but the important issue is to know how biased our own papers are. )) US papers in general, formed to create homogeneity in the community. That community-centricity is why they’re going out of business in this post-community era. The web allows communities to have disparate voices (like normal people do) rather rather than having a self-centered referee edit, and dramatically bias their opinions toward the fantasy of democratic secular humanism. UK papers are more like the web: they represent factions. Our only ‘faction’ is the financial press. The rest, of the papers are almost universally are left-leaning along with our universities, that by and large, teach the religion of democratic secular humanism, as do our grade schools – a notion notion that has something to do with the fact that our children start to lose competitive ground in education about the time we start teaching them the religion of democratic secular humanism. If a religion has such a negative competitive impact can it be useful for any productive reason? Is not the measure of any philosophy the competitive standing of it’s practitioners? Of course, these ‘priests of democratic secular humanism’ attribute the a supposed american exeptionalism to their religion. But american exceptionalism is clearly false. Differences between US and european productivity are accounted for by differences in the number of working hours. While this productivity generates a lower cost of living in the united states, and while american government consumes less of the GDP than governments do in europe, and while americans live generally better lives, even if they live RISKIER lives, than do europeans, there is no exceptionalism to the culture that is caused by democratic secular humanism. American exceptionalism, which is almost entirely the product of selling off a continent, the military strength to do it, the system of private property rights that allows us to do it quickly and easily, and the use of those profits from selling off the continent being directed to the maintenance of the system of international money, defense and trade and the demand for our primary product: “dollars”, and the profits made by selling those dollars because of that militarily constructed system of money, trade, and soldiery. In other words, “property”, which is the prerequisite for trade, and the conversion of violent efforts at acquisition to peaceful efforts at production and trade, is created by vast military expenditure. The system is prolonged like any social system, by the promise of violence if it is broken. Unlike other systems, it is a system that increases production and makes the ‘pie bigger’ rather than decreases production by wealth transfer. Militarism for the purpose of ENFORCING PROPERTY RIGHTS is part of capitalism’s virtuous cycle of dividing labor, increasing granularity of property rights and types, increasing production and decreasing prices, instead of the use of violence to abuse the system of property rights. Militarism is, and can be, a good thing, depending upon how a culture defines it’s property rights. And the more granular the property rights and the better enforced, the more prosperity that people in a culture can generate by virtue of being ABLE to calculate USES of that property. People are not pacifist by nature. Humans are the most successful super predator that has ever occupied the planet. People are pacifist because they are weak. (( See Kagan in Power and Weakness, as well as Sorel in Reflections On Violence, as well as Keegan’s History Of Warfare )) They are predatory by nature when they are strong. Only by maintaining violence over this system do we make the system one where participation in the game of the virtuous cycle is the only possible solution to the improvement of one’s life and resources. And membership requires two payments: respecting property and control of, and responsibility for, your breeding. So, in today’s Times Online there is another article about the desire of the Taliban to start peace talks with americans. The reason for these talks is that Pakistan is no longer allowing the taliban safe haven, and that they are perfectly willing to wait until the Americans leave to reassert their power over their society. By giving the americans a reason for virtuous exit they buy themselves time to regroup, rebuild their numbers, rebuld the poppy and heroin trade, rebuild tehir finances, and retake social positions in the gangster state of afghanistan. America took over the British Empire, it’s trade routes, naval bases, currency position, after the first world war. Americas policy difficulties stem almost ENTIRELY from british and french colonial history – the foolish organization of territory by other than tribal boundaries, in the foolish presumption that humans do not act, and prefer to at, according to tribal preferences. If America STOPPED maintaining that system, does anyone live under the illusion that there would not be VAST and VIOLENT attempts at filling the vacuum of power? It would be the greatest commercial land grab in human history. It would be bloody. It would be violent. It would involve massive wars, starvation, trade interruption, an the only choice for those that choose not to participate would be to participate or be doomed to poverty and ignorance. As an island nation lacking the resources to support itself, with a culture of feminized men so comfortable in their weakness that they have lost the Civic Republican Tradition of the Fraternal Order Of Soldiers (where the British ‘mates’ cultural concept comes from) how would the UK fare in this new world? It would collapse into either switzerland or return to it’s historical position as a backwater. Just as there are plenty of silly americans in daily press, there are an almost unlimited of silly, ignorant, self deluding brits commenting as well. And these comments are important because they express popular sentiment. One of the comments left on this article is by a nobody named Peter Codner who aside from being a barrister and apparently confusing analytical psychology for something other than another post-christian cult of absurd metaphysics, states that “The semblance to Vietnam which was an humiliating defeat for the americans is uncanny. the yanks will run away.” While I understand that short time preference is a result of social class – meaning that we can educate people to use advanced tools and logic but not if we do not extend their time preference so that they can think beyond their experience, and learn that their experience and ability to comprehend that experience is profoundly limited – I fail to understand how one can live in today’s society and not grasp the problem of extending time preference so that we see all actions and outcomes in both their short, medium and long term contexts. Running from an unnecessary battle for political reasons is very different from both running away from your history, and your own failure as a nation, and your responsibility as a nation for the problems you created. The Yanks won almost every battle in Vietnam. The loss was political, because of home political tensions not a military or economic defeat. And it still achieved it’s strategic ends. As did subverting the soviets in Afghanistan. Democracies lack the stomach for sustaining war. And they do so because of people like you. Of course, such sentiment comes comfortably to Brits, who lost their entire empire trying to stop Germany from taking it from them. Frankly the world would be better off if we had let them. Certainly Americans would be – we would not have to become an empire and live under a government-of-empire, if we did not have to take over the British empire when Britain collapsed, like reed. We would not have to protect a world trade and financial system that only served to inflate our entablements. We would not have to deal with the after effects of poor British (and French) judgement that left behind a post colonial Network of violence and poverty around the world. Brits are a silly, petty, pointless people who inhabit little more than an empty client state living off it’s heritage, and propping up it’s ridiculous system by immigrating it’s way into a temporary fictitious prosperity, by fomenting consumption at the expense of it’s heritage and culture, at the expense of producing increases in productivity, where the government consumes 50% of GDP, the military is only slightly less of a Potemkin village than is the laughable Canadian. I expect this kind of behavior of the french, who ceased being a world power when the effects of killing off their aristocracy and descending into Bonapartism ( democratically justified totalitarianism ) and are happy today to simply rest on past glory, consume their accumulated historical investment in a single century, and who because of it are simply obstructionists – obstruction is the only political power they have – so it is the political power that they exercise. Brits are happily self-congratulatory to live under the US common man’s soldierly umbrella of protection, and his society’s necessary militarism while criticizing him on a daily basis. (( What will happen if the middle-american cultures who supply military talent ever figure out how much contempt that they are held in both by their coastal and international critics? )) A “thank you” might be more appropriate than your petty slander. But then again, while no man is a hero to his debtors, a decent man does not slander his debtors. Only an indecent one. False wisdom is the last refuge of the weak whose current technique is to hid behind the cloak of intellectual and moral fraud. But then, isn’t that the purpose of all religions?