Author: Curt Doolittle

THe NYT Opinion page includes recommends Germany leave the Euro? (Referring to a posting elsewhere.) Yes, it makes sense. Earlier last month I wrote a series of letters and posts recommending Germany pull out of the Euro myself. Mediterranean Europe and Germanic europe are too different in culture, social structure and values. Restore the DM. Leave the Euro to the southern countries who need it, and have similar social values, and are willing to fund those social values. Currencies as they are currently used, are the primary means of social insurance and redistribution. People are naturally gregarious to their own ethnic groups, and are naturally not gregarious with what they see as competing groups, and in particular, groups that they see as a permanent drain on their resources. Because currencies are a means of social insurance they are inseparable from the social orders that employ them. Countries need their own currencies. The spanish, italians and greeks can then maintain their historical poverty born of their less productive lifestyles, without impoverishing the north. Besides, the north has a new permanent semi-revolutionary underclass it is supporting at home to deal with. THe USA has a similar problem. It is a domestic empire over somewhere between four and six separate cultures, with entirely different economic interests, and cultural interests, and political friction between them is becoming intolerable. The only reason that america government has functioned since the 1900’s, is because of the two party system, and the south’s rejection of the republican party. With the south now more pragmatic, this prior balance has been shattered, and the country is increasingly a north and west against a south and interior. For exactly the same reasons as europeans face these problems. It is all well and good to believe in the myths of egalitarian secular humanism, while you’re living in a temporary era of post-war, then post-soviet prosperity. But western civilization no longer has it’s economic advantage over the rest of the world. The west will be permanently poorer, even if retaining it’s ordinal status, for some period of time, simply due to the northern european people’s ancient tendency to eschew corruption. Since a currency is a reflection of social values, nations need their own currencies. The euro was a failure. Return to the DM.

The war period has been highly controversial, and unfortunately led to a radical minority taking control of our government, and that minority is creating policy that is against the will of the majority of the people. This is another example of the dangers of war. Countries overreach during war. Empires overreach. Democracies, counter to conventional wisdom, are actually very willing to wage war. Yet they are unwilling to continue them. In a democracy, an exaggerated counter reaction develops in response to warfare, because only exaggerated reactions are possible, when the nation consists of opposing forces whose extreme elements determine the candidates. Extremes breed extremes by creating a dichotomy of choice between dramatic positions. These positions then empower the radicals. There is no failure to understand this trend in history among political scientists. There is every reason to advocate it among political theologians. This is because there are very few political scientists that measure what people actually DO, and many political theologians who recommend what people SHOULD do. Evidence is what it is. Democracy is a dangerous construct when government is a debate over the reigns by which one economic class or philosophical class can oppress the other, rather than forming a government where each class has control only over those issues where their class has demonstrated accomplishment. This was the reason for the property requirement in the USA’s founding. While property may be an insufficient requirement in modern society that is no longer dependent upon farming, we do not have houses of government that represent classes and we need a means of empowering houses and regulating participation in the, and we must return to that state of affairs, or continue our decline and class warfare. As I have stated before, we are all unequal in our ability to create violence. Some of us petty interpersonal violence, some of us rabble and protest, some of us revolution and civil war. I only constrain my violence because I feel the state acts justly. But we are nearing a point where I feel that the state has become a means of class oppression, specifically designed to doom me to poverty and dependence in old age, and to do my heritage, my class, and my people to servitude under a false argument for morality. And while I have rejected their please twice now, the next group of people that offers me money to raise a revolution will find me a willing advocate of bloodshed. War is dangerous because it makes a polity and it’s state fragile, and allows radicals to obtain purchase amid the chaos and dissatisfaction, which in turn leads to oppression, which in turn leads to civil war. While the myth of the general strike is a commoner’s revolution, the myth of a violent minority creating a coup is the nobility’s revolution. And I’m getting very close to changing from a public intellectual to a violent revolutionary. It is only marginally more interesting to be personally acquisitive, run companies, and write for a living than it is to wage war. And it is becoming painful enough to pursue the former, that the latter becomes more enchanting by the day. We have an entire american civilization around the great lakes that is in decline, and like china, have coastal areas that oppress the interior. And a southern border under assault because of fear by those in power to protect the southern states. That is our nation’s fragile position. It simply requires fomenting local interests against a universal federal government, and restructuring our government so that it is either representative of the different nations that make up the American empire on the north American continent, or that we destroy our imperial government and restore power to the regions. The world has adopted commercial capitalism. We have completed the act for which our federal government was created: to sell off the american continent. We no longer need to be the world’s policemen. And we are no longer competitive enough and possessed of enough advantage that we can continue to do so. Now we find ourselves the citizens of a corrupt and declining state. It is time to let local areas prosper, and return to the practical matters of civic interest in local development and politics away from our fascination with theocratic democracy, socialism and empire.

The first problem with laws is that they do not die with the fools who wrote them.

I was very proud of the people in our company today. It’s the best feeling in the world. Great work on great accounts for great clients by great people.

Making dinner. Starter of Local Chardonnay, olives, crackers, baked garlic and olive. Main of sunflower seed and orange encrusted Tilapia, with endive and tomato salad, and asparagus with oil and cayenne pepper. For dessert, coffee served with powdered donut balls, strawberries and mint chocolate sauce and shaved bitter 70% cocoa. Just needed to cook tonight. One of those life’s little necessities.

A more analytical understanding of Greenspan: First, If you read enough of Greenspan, he tried to master the processes by which businesses actually made decisions, to a degree that few economists ever attempt. He was intimately aware of the daily needs and habits of business. He was intimately informed in a way few others seem to have been. Second, he actually believed the new devices for distributing risk (along with the formulae of the quants) would work as prescribed. Third. like most people of the Regan/Thatcher era, he was trying to counteract socialist influences in society. They had very clear memories of the pre-johnson era and also had the unfortunate experience of living through the 1970’s, which was about as depressing and hopeless as the times we face today. It was from this contrast that they took their motivation. We forget that in retrospect, these people were trying to use monetary policy to reconstruct prior libertarian values. They hoped to rebuilt a society of individual responsibility (and ownership) using a tool which accomplishes the opposite, even if they felt using that tool was acceptable if it was only used for the short term. It is in these three errors that Greenspan built his house of cards: first, business can use credit to privatize wins and socialize losses, and did so. Deep knowledge of business is good, but deeper knowledge of human nature is even better. Personally I am not sure this device to retrain people out of socialistic beliefs would not have worked had the state provided direct liquidity into competitive innovation in the Indian model rather than general liquidity, and regulated banking such that all originated loans must remain with their originators. In effect libertarian values need to come from somewhere. They are not terribly natural to man. And liberty has always, throughout history, been the objective of a minority. (PLease don’t beat on me for advocating state intention, i”m not attempting to do so, only explain what would have been possible in context.) Second, the new devices and formulae were erroneous, and for commonly stood austrian reasons: the quantitative content of these devices is inseparable from the individual knowledge of the loan’s originator. Very little debt is predictable under duress, and it cannot be aggregated, because fundamentally all credit consists of unique categories, because these categories are determined by knowledge only available to the originator. Third, the influence of these people on the momentum of the bureaucracy, was insufficient. And that is the real Misesian/Rothbardian problem. To enact such a thing at scale would require political force actively despised by the field’s advocates. Describing an ideal state of affairs is an impressive and important research program. It has yielded most of the answer we are looking for in solving the problem of economic, political and social theory. People in our libertarian camp, have not supplied yet a sufficiently POSITIVE argument for political economy. Hoppe is closest. Hayek tried desperately. But Mises, Hayek, Parsons, and Popper all failed to provide a sufficiently positive argument. It certainly appears that Keynes did find a sufficiently positive argument even if it was an erroneous one. (Although the debate is open on whether he would have approved of how his ideas were used.) But more importantly, libertarians are a minority. We have always been a minority. And we are likely to continue to be one. We have a philosophy of the entrepreneurial class. And as a class philosophy it is an insufficient philosophy as currently constructed. That is, unless we understand that in this division of labor we need at least three philosophical frameworks: one for each class. As such, while Greenspan failed, I don’t blame him for failing, any more than I blame Rothbard, Mises, Hayek, Popper or Parsons for failing. It is becoming clear that the dominant political structure of the future consists not of democratic capitalism, nor social democracy, but of totalitarian capitalism, because only totalitarian capitalism can concentrate capital in sufficient quantity and rapidly in time to maintain the status of elites in one nation against those of others. And if we think that there will not be political elites who profit from their position, then we do not understand the history of mankind.

A Little Family History

For those that don’t know family history, here is a little of it from memory:

1) our direct ancestors can be traced to the 1400’s. We know the lineage and location from that time, and there are period maps that include the homes and names of these individuals. It appears that our ancestors were part of the Norman conquest in 1066 – reasonable documentation exists at least to infer it. There is some ‘constructed’ evidence that Doolittles were part of ‘Rollo And His Vikings’ invading northern France.

2) The national geographic society’s “Genographic Project” will do a genetic test for $100 that will show your maternal or paternal genetic history. Those I’ve seen so far don’t contradict the hypothesis. Nothing can truly prove it however. https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/participate.html

We should note that current genetic mapping of the UK, shows that nearly all brit’s are of Celtic descent. and very few scandinavian despite the mythology of viking invasion. Most Icelanders are of mixed scandinavian and irish gene pools, apparently because the scandinavians picked up Irish women on the way to settlement. The very northern islands off of scotland are heavily scandinavian. But that is a rarity. Most brits are Celts.

3) There is no good history of the origin of the Doolittle name. Lots of ideas, but mostly the work of bad amateur historians. It’s actually kind of fun to collect all the hypotheses people in the family have.

4) There are multiple historical mentions of our family name. Mostly as members of armies, including letters and memoirs. Our ancestors were often literate. There is a record of at least one monk donating his goods to the church as he joined the monastery. (A monastery was the closest thing to a fortune 500 company in medieval times. It wasn’t that you needed to be religious, they were centers of industrial production, because they were centers of capital.) There is another mention in memoirs from the Napoleonic era of a a quiet and small soldier named Doolittle, ‘who was short and stocky’ listening to some fool rant intolerably and then dispassionately, and calmly killing him for the crime of being too annoying to have in camp.

5) Historically, English society was fully militarized, (leading to the mercantilist English State where the state became a commercial empire) and Doolittles appear to have been sergeants and captains, assumedly all the way back to the Norman conquest: essentially, the military’s ‘middle managers’. There are claims in the family literature to being ‘lesser nobility’ but think of it more that our ancestors were middle class, and responsible for small groups of men in battle, and had that more moderate position in society.

6) There is a good book about the Doolittles of Lescestershire that is available on amazon or from the publisher. Reading it can make history feel very real.

7) living in central England, (the Midlands) our ancestors were part of the losing side of the English civil war. As middle class business people and craftsmen, farmer and small home business owners, and summer soldiers, it was ‘safer’ and more profitable to move to the colonies where land was effectively free. While much has been made of ‘puritans’, the fact is that most ‘puritan’ immigrants were losers of the english civil war.

8) Three branches of the family split during that time as individuals moved to ireland, europe, and america. All american Doolittle’s are descended from Abraham Doolittle. He was the first sheriff of the New Haven Colony. He became a minor legislator in Connecticut. His tombstone is in the small (and somewhat seedy) town north of New Haven. (As an aside, it is somewhat criminal that Connecticut, and in particular the Connecticut River Valley, which in the 1700’s was considered ‘the finest and most beautiful place ever inhabited by man, and possibly the best place and time ever to live as man’ now is home to some of the most horrid, poor, hopeless, nihilistic, drug and crime ridden cities in America: Danbury, Meriden, New Haven, Bridgeport and Hartford.) He had wives die in childbirth, fought in wars, and was approximately age 20 when he arrived and took on these duties. That is another statement of the difference in our times. He was a man when most of us are still boys.

9) As immigration to the colonies continued, land prices increased, and so many of the early immigrants to New England like the Doolittles, sold their holdings in new england and moved prior to the revolutionary war, to the Ohio river valley with it’s exceptional farm land. They settled, and dispersed to the rest of rural america from there. The family penchant for military service seems to have further distributed our genes around the country over the following two centuries. A google map of the name ‘doolittle’ will show a concentration in new england, and the corresponding westward migration. (Another good book is the “nine nations of north america” which accurately breaks the US into separate cultures, and explains regional differences in social and political preferences.)

9) Class values, along with the IQ to carry those values are (whether people like it or not) inherited, and society is often organized according to IQ, family values and physical fitness. Most Doolittles have, over the centuries, maintained a certain class position. Understanding family history is an interesting way of seeing how families maintain social positions over centuries. We have produced a significant military commander, a poet, a few minor politicians, an awful lot of small business people, and a plethora of soldiers. We are an ongoing testament to our ancient history. “Men with IQ’s over 125 invent machines, Men with IQ’s over 105 repair machines. Men with IQ under 105 use machines.”

10) There is an old book on ‘Ancient Families Of New England’. Doolittles are one of the early political families mentioned in the book. It is in some new england libraries. During this period, because we preserved colonial records, there is a solid understanding of 17th and 18th century in the colonial period. It’s fascinating. As a humorous bit of trivia: there was a genetic study conducted in the early 20th century during the Eugenics movement that purports to show the Doolittles as social malcontents in Vermont as ‘Building Better Vermonters”. This book is sometimes available on the web. It turns out that the authors of the study, in order to obtain the consent of the family it actually interviewed and documented, which was NOT a Doolittle family but another name and family altogether (Dooley I think?), changed the name to ‘Doolittle’ to hide their name. And having done so, quite by accident, stigmatized the family in that area of Vermont, and doomed them to long term ostracization. Bad press matters.

11) Like most people of Norman cum-protestant ancestry, Doolittles do not seem to breed in great numbers – we are still a relatively small family. (Normans were very good administrators. Which is one of the reasons they were good soldiers.) One of the reasons that protestants were middle class, and catholics poor, seems to stem from this control of breeding, and the requirement that a man be able to support his own home before marrying and having children. “He who breeds wins”. We have not been winning the battle of numbers so to speak.

12) Doolittle Family crests are likely fakes. There are at least three common representations of the Doolittle family crest, and all are fictitious. There is no record of any promotion to nobility of any Doolittle family member that we are able to find in pre-colonial history. Very often, late in history, the middle class, as it rose to replace the landed nobility in political power, especially in france, but no less in england, purchased ennoblement by donations to the crown. Others simply fabricated them out of false claims. If you want to represent the Doolittle family in a crest, then the Saint George’s Cross, and the English and American flags are about as close as you can get, because from our family history’s perspective, we are the makers of those flags.

(There is one from ireland I think, that has roosters, and one from England I think, that has three silver spheres on stripes. But I have seen no evidence that these are anything other than fashionable fabrications.)

13) In the early 1900’s, a number of Doolittle women started working on the Doolittle Family History. This book is now in at least eight large volumes. It is available from the family genealogist. It costs real money. But it is very fascinating to read. REaders must remember that in the 1800’s the enlightenment was ending, and northern european civilization was attempting to cast off the last vestiges of catholicism and to develop an new history for itself. This period is called ‘romanticism’ as if it was a fashion, but it was effectively a failed attempt to recreate a european religion from the remnants of our polytheistic germanic past. (this is what the greeks did in the hellenic age, having lost reading and memory of Mycenean greece – they reinvented themselves after their ‘dark age’.) Instead of succeeding in creating this new religion, the commercialism and materialism of the english merchant class prevailed, and England (ie:Athens – the naval merchant state) and Germany (ie: Sparta – the farming Army State) went to war, creating the Great European Civil War that we call the “world wars”, and ending the attempt to recreate a new northern european model and mythology. The James Bond character is an ‘Ode To Lost Empire’. To some degree, these ancestry efforts are an ode to lost ‘identity’. Our time, as a family who rowed the oars of society’s trireme, preserved it’s liberty, and crafted it’s goods, may have passed.

14) The Secretary of the Doolittle Society will give you a printout of your entire family history back to the 1400’s if you ask (and pay for it.) You can contact him and update your family data. He can be reached at http://members.cox.net/edoolittle2/

15) The book “The Doolittle Family In America” can be found on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&index=books&field-keywords=Doolittle%20family%20America.

16) In Index Washington, on the opposite side of the country from the Plymouth Colony, is a small park named “Doolittle Park”, in memory of it’s founder – now forgotten other than for the bronze plaque that states his name. The village has been advertising, hoping to attract people to move there, since it was in danger of losing it’s charter during the 1990’s because so few people live there. The village was used either for mining or logging. It’s little more than a signpost. The park is little more than a patch of dirt next to the river, not even sufficient for grazing a few sheep, cows or horses. The remnants of small summer camping huts line one of the feeder creeks leading to the river.

Some Advice I Found Valuable:

“Knowledge of your ancestors can not only make history seem real and tangible, but it can be used as a guide by which to judge your journey through life. It’s folly to take pride in their achievements, you should instead take pride in the record yours: Leave the world better than you entered it. If possible, do better with your life, and build as good or better a character than did your ancestors. And at the very least, do nothing to besmirch their honor if they had any. By knowing and improving on the record of your lineage, you can make the best of what you started with, and add to your ancestor’s history. See yourself in them, and you will better understand yourself. They are you. You are them. “

http://members.cox.net/edoolittle2/For those that don’t know family history, here is some from memory:

1) our direct ancestors can be traced to the 1400’s. It appears that our ancestors were part of the Norman conquest in 1066 – reasonable documentation exists at least to infer it. There is some ‘constructed’ evidence that Doolittles were part of ‘Rollo And His Vikings’ invading northern France.

2) The national geographic society will do a genetic test for 100$ that will show your maternal or paternal genetic history. Those I’ve seen so far validate this hypothesis. https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/participate.html

3) There is no good history of the origin of the name. Lots of ideas, but mostly the work of bad amateur historians. It’s actually kind of fun to collect all the hypotheses people in the family have.

4) There are multiple historical mentions of our family name. Mostly as members of armies. But there is a record of at least one monk donating his goods to the church as he joined the monastery. (A monastery was the closest thing to a fortune 500 company in medieval times. It wasn’t that you needed to be religious.) There is another in the napoleonic era of a a quiet and small soldier named Doolittle, listening to some fool rant for hours then killing him for the crime of being too annoying

5) Historically, english society was fully militarized, (leading to the mercantilist English State) and Doolittles appear to have been sergeants and captains: essentially, the military’s ‘middle managers’. There are claims to being ‘lesser nobility’ but think of it more that our ancestors were middle class, and responsible for small groups of men in battle.

6) There is a good book about the Doolittles of Lescestershire that is available on amazon or from the publisher. Reading it can make history feel very real.

7) living in central England, (the Midlands) our ancestors were part of the losing side of the English civil war. As middle class business people and craftsmen, farmer and small home business owners, and summer soldiers, it was ‘safer’ and more profitable to move to the colonies where land was effectively free. While much has been made of ‘puritans’, the fact is that most ‘puritan’ immigrants were losers of the english civil war.

8) Three branches of the family split during that time as individuals moved to ireland, europe, and america. All american Doolittle’s are descended from Abraham Doolittle. He was the first sheriff of the New Haven Colony. He became a minor legislator in Connecticut. His tombstone is in the small (and somewhat seedy) town north of New Haven. (As an aside, it is somewhat criminal that connecticut, and in particular the Connecticut River Valley, which in the 1700’s was considered ‘the finest and most beautiful place ever inhabited by man’ now is home to some of the most horrid, poor, hopeless, drug and crime ridden cities in America: Danbury, Meriden, New Haven, Bridgeport and Hartford.) He had wives die in childbirth, fought in wars, and was approximately age 20 when he arrived and took on these duties. That is another statement of the difference in our times.

9) As immigration to the colonies continued, land prices increased, and so many of the early immigrants to New England like the Doolittles, sold their holdings in new england and moved prior to the revolutionary war, to the Ohio river valley with it’s exceptional farm land, settled, and dispersed to the rest of rural america from there. The family penchant for military service seems to have further distributed our genes around the country over the following two centuries.

9) Class values, along with the IQ to carry them are (whether people like it or not) inherited, and society is often organized according to IQ, family values and physical fitness. Most Doolittles have, over the centuries, maintained a certain class position. It is an interesting way of seeing how families maintain social positions over centuries. We have produced a significant military commander, a poet, a few minor politicians, and an awful lot of small business people. We are an ongoing testament to our history. “Men with IQ’s over 125 invent machines, Men with IQ’s over 105 repair machines. Men with IQ under 105 use machines.”

10) There is an old book on ‘Ancient Families Of New England’. Doolittles are one of the early political families mentioned in the book. There is a genetic study conducted in the early 20th century during the Eugenics movement that purports to show the Doolittles as social malcontents. This book is available on the web. It turns out that the authors of the study, in order to obtain the consent of the family it actually interviewed and documented, which was NOT a Doolittle family but another name and family altogether, changed the name to ‘Doolittle’ to protect the not-so-innocent. And having done so, stigmatized the family in that area of Vermont, and doomed them to long term ostracization. Bad press matters.

11) Like most people of Norman cum-protestant ancestry, Doolittles do not seem to breed in great numbers – we are still a relatively small family. (Normans were very good administrators. Which is one of the reasons they were good soldiers.) One of the reasons that protestants were middle class, and catholics poor, seems to stem from this control of breeding, and the requirement that a man be able to support his own home before marrying and having children. “He who breeds wins”. We have not been winning the battle of numbers so to speak.

12) Doolittle Family crests are likely fakes. There are at least three common representations of the Doolittle family crest, and all are fictitious. There is no record of any promotion to nobility of any Doolittle family member that we are able to find in pre-colonial history. Very often, late in history, the middle class, as it rose to replace the landed nobility in political power, especially in france, but no less in england, purchased ennoblement by donations to the crown. Others simply fabricated them out of false claims. If you want to represent the Doolittle family in a crest, then the Saint George’s Cross, and the English and American flags are about as close as you can get, because from our family history’s perspective, we are the makers of those flags.

13) In the early 1900’s, a number of Doolittle women started working on the Doolittle Family History. This book is now in at least eight large volumes. It is available from the family genealogist. It costs real money. But it is very fascinating to read. REaders must remember that in the 1800’s the enlightenment was ending, and northern european civilization was attempting to cast off the last vestiges of catholicism and to develop an new history for itself. This period is called ‘romanticism’ as if it was a fashion, but it was effectively a failed attempt to recreate a european religion from the remnants of our polytheistic germanic past. Instead of succeeding, the commercialism and materialism of the english merchant class prevailed, and England (ie:Athens – the naval merchant state) and Germany (ie: Sparta – the Army State) went to war, creating the great european civil war, and ending the attempt to recreate a new northern european model and mythology. James Bone is an Ode To Lost Empire. To some degree, these ancestry efforts are an ode to lost ‘identity’. Our time, as a family who contributed to the oars may have passed.

14) The Secretary of the Doolittle Society will give you a printout of your entire family history back to the 1400’s if you ask (and pay for it.) You can contact him and update your family data. He can be reached at http://members.cox.net/edoolittle2/

15) THe Doolittle Family In America can be found on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&index=books&field-keywords=Doolittle%20family%20America

We Doolittles have a two thousand year history of being soldiers. So spelling, which is a dainty thing after all, isn’t as important as killing people, breaking things, and blowing stuff up. There is a particular honor in that. And we seem to survive our battles.

However, to keep that honor intact, please change the title of this group from “The Doolittle Familey” to “The Doolittle Family” There is no E in Family. It will also help prevent the more educated part of the family from changing their name. 🙂

I’ve not run across Andy Hallman before. But he posted a blog entry today that is critical of Hoppe entitled A Libertarian Against Free Immigration. Andy States

Neither in this section nor anywhere in the book does Hoppe ever stop to consider that the “millions of third-world immigrants” would be much better off under free immigration. Granted, we should consider the effect of potentially large mass migrations on all the people affected by them, such as the people paying for the welfare state. But to totally ignore the fact that millions of people would almost certainly be better off from the policy is hard to understand, to put it mildly.

When the retort to this, is that they would be better off at other peoples expense – people who did not make the decision voluntarily to aborb that expense. If the wealthy world gave all it’s riches to the poor world, then the poor world would be better off, but there would rapidly cease to be a wealthy world. The correct answer is to export the technology of our institutions for a PROFIT, which would create long term prosperity for the third world, AND the first world. Because it is institutions that create prosperity, in particular, institutions of truth telling. Too few people remember that the Russians, recognizing their inability to govern themselves, asked the Danes to come govern them. One of the better decisions in political history. I responded too broadly for the simplicity of the article. Andy makes a number of errors, the fist is the christian error of giving away what is not his to give, because he did not earn it, the second is more complex, which is not understanding the short and long term costs, and the third is a misunderstanding of the problem of political economy that Hoppe is answering:

Hi, I think you’re confusing multiple concepts. The Hoppe/Rothbard system is just that, a system of interdependencies. It’s an attempt at an explanatory theory based upon an analysis of an ethics of property. (Which Rothbard attributed to natural law and Hoppe to a variant of natural law using a different method of proof (argumentation). Hoppe is answering the problem of maintaining a CIVILIZATION, and the retention of freedom within a civilization, and the quality of life that comes from freedom. (Freedom to DO something, not freedom FROM something – other than violence and coercion.) In your analysis above, you are saying that SOME benefits come from taxing immigrants in the short term. But you have not answered the cost of those immigrants, both in the short and long term. And failing to do so is why you are making such a hasty conclusion. Hoppe, and Weber and others (myself included) would argue that time preference (shorter and higher, versus longer and lower) is part of the division of labor in society, as well as an indicator of class. Time preference may not be a preference but a bias, as it’s a very likely a statement of at necessity. Since humans have different abilities to forgo gratification, since it requires more knowledge and greater intelligence to make longer forecasts, since we learn at vastly different rates, since goals are transmitted intergenerationally, and most importantly since habits and production processes with different periodicity appear to be cognitively incommensurable, it is NECESSARY that we form a division of knowledge and labor in society because it’s all we CAN do, as people with unequal ability. Even if we can educated some people to have increasingly lower and longer time preferences, we cannot teach everyone to have the longest time preference, because they are not able to achieve it, and the division of labor and knowledge appears to require different time preferences. Since the nobility as a class profits from ‘owning society’ it has the longest and lowest time preference. Hoppe himself has that time preference – because like everyone back to the Greeks, we are trying to solve the problem of politics – cooperation rather than conflict. THe assumption here, which appears to be justified, is that a society with longer time preference accumulates all forms of capital for longer term use and creates a more prosperous society that is DURABLE. THis also brings into question whether property rights perpetuate across generations, which would be necessary if a society is to accumulate social order as one of the forms of capital. It’s not uncommon to make a mistake on the value of immigration, because the debate is still open on immigrants. If you immigrate talent (like we did from europe after the fall) then you benefit because you did not pay to create it, and did not take the common with the elite. But if you immigrate talent, even for jobs that your people do not want to do, and especially if they have values that conflict with the values that made your civilization possible, it’s not clear at all that immigrants are a value. In fact, it appears that they’re no different from printing MONEY and inserting it into your economy. No small number of great thinkers have worked on this problem and there is no consensus. However, Hoppe might answer, (and I would) that you cannot have facts without a theory. And unless you can explain the theory which your facts supposedly support, then there is no way of knowing that you’re talking about the same problem, you’re just using CORRELATION, not CAUSATION. (This is the premise of the Mises->Rothbard->Hoppe argument.) Hoppe is giving us a theory of human cooperation and social order. In my own work I agree with Hoppe. I have altered his argument slightly to additionally rely upon calculation and incentive, and added group behavior to it, to better support less individualistic assumptions about human nature which works against the market as much as it works in favor of property. But this is an improvement upon Hoppe’s work, not in any way a refutation of it. The point is, that you don’t refute a Hoppian argument (which is a christian noble’s argument about civilization as much as it is a rothbardian middle class argument about individual rights) with a short term utilitarian expression of tax revenues, because either you are unknowingly supporting his argument, or you haven’t espoused a theory sufficient to compete with the broader theory, and instead are arguing irrelevant and perhaps unrelated facts, that can only be made relevant by the elucidation of a replacement theory. At the very least, you may be describing NOISE not SIGNAL (see Mandelbrot and Taleb) without such a broader theory. (Which is what you’re doing, really, but that’s part of your intellectual development just like it was for the rest of us.) And your theory would have to say that you agree with the USE of GOVERNMENT VIOLENCE to steal property, potential, and freedom from the current citizens of your country to give to immigrants for the sole purpose of empowering government such that it can profit from violating those rights, whether it be out of ignorance, or (as Rothbard and others have stated) because of a misguided application of Christian egalitarian principles, or because of a human foible that makes us feel good about being charitable with public property because we get a social and emotional benefit,a s well as temporary status increase, from giving away what is not ours to give. I’ve tried to lay out a line of reasoning for you in short form, but may not have succeeded. If not, I’ll try to answer what I can for you. Having spent most of my life trying to find an answer to the problem of society, I think hoppe has taken it the farthest. If you assume that we should and can burn accumulated social capital in an effort to make current life better for the global underclass, then you are operating by different PREFERENCES, not by different TRUTHS. And truths are what make argumentative persuasion possible, But you MUST be taking from your citizens, and from their ancestors, to redistribute to your immigrants. THe arguments about productivity increases of immigrants are NOISE if they impose longer term costs on the social order. They are not SIGNAL. They are temporary fluctuations gained by arbitrage, and the theft of property from citizens, not trends to be extrapolated, and upon which we can make value judgements about a theory of political and social economy that is yet to be stated except as a set of “Derivations” (Pareto), or more abstract metaphysical assumptions about the nature of man, or cognitive biases due to incomplete knowledge of human social processes (Popper). For example, what is the cost of making it affordable for your children not to have jobs in their teens, and thereby learning work habits prior to entering the adult work force (the cost of prolonging childhood)? What is the cost of a 20% minority that does not integrate? Or one that proposes a different system of laws? Or one that does not value freedom? All costs are just the choice between one set of costs and another. But those costs have long term consequences. And the measurement of alternate timelines is extremely complex. Cheers. PS: I have a google alert for all articles referencing Hoppe, so that I can educate people about his work, and that’s how I found your posting.

Moreover, neither Hoppe, nor rothbard (nor mises, popper, hayek or Parsons) have answered the problem of the costs of creating property in the first place, and the opportunity and time economies. Rothbard’s analysis is specious because the island does not exist, and violence over property is rife and most often between groups, not individuals in the same tribe or family. The question is, “why don’t I kill you if you if you take my stuff”, or “why don’t I kill you if you take my opportunities away”.