Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

TUCKER AS RATIONALIST IN AGE OF SCIENCE

(Note: I’m not anti-Tucker. I see him as a very good man with good intentions but part of a prior generation’s thinking whose time has long passed, and methods have long failed. But I have no reason to believe that he is anything other than a good man with good intentions. I like him quite a bit and always have.)

—“The media is a business meaning that they can’t coerce you, tax you, bomb you, deport you, kill you. All they can do is write articles and make shows that sell advertising. And you are willing to celebrate a would-be dictator because he foils some reporters???”—Jeffrey A. Tucker

(a) Regarding the media, are you rationalizing what the media can do, or are you relying upon empirical evidence of what the media can do? Because the evidence is that they create opinion in sufficient voters to do precisely what you say they cannot. (b) I have a hard time seeing the difference between the current president and a trump presidency or any other presidency in the absence of rule of law. And given the evidence of (a), its logical to prefer a president who will continue to undermine (a).

Liberty is produced by rule of law(universal application) demanding the total prohibition on parasitism(imposition of costs) in the private (morality) and public (liberty) spheres of action, constructed by individual enforcement of norms, individual enforcement of law under universal standing, organized enforcement of the law under an independent judiciary, and organized prevention of usurpation of that law by the militia.

And liberty is (again, empirically not just rationally) a preference of and only of a limited number of individuals in limited family structures, with limited cultural traditions, with limited legal traditions. All others systematically seek to undermine it in every polity on earth.

Man was not kept down and oppressed by his betters. Man was incrementally civilized by his betters, much against his will. He was forced to abandon murder, violence, theft, fraud, fraud by asymmetry, fraud by indirection, fraud by obscurantism, free riding, privatization of commons, socialization of losses, conspiracy, conversion, immigration, war, and conquest.

By being forced to abandon all unproductive and parasitic actions, the only venue left for man was the burden of participation in the market through productive, fully informed, voluntary exchange free of imposition of cost by externality.

But the arts of production are difficult, and the arts of lying, defrauding, cheating, stealing, blackmailing, free riding, privatization of commons, socialization of losses, conspiracy are much easier.

Liberty requires meritocracy and meritocracy is not a matter of belief it is a mater of ability.

Genes matter. Open immigration is empirically destructive. While we can estimate the decline in anglo intelligence since 1850, we can measure the decline in French intelligence due to immigration just since 1950. The Flynn effect can be reversed through degradation of the gene pool.

It is the gene pool that establishes the degree of liberty, the degree of truth telling, the degree of productivity, the norms and traditions of a polity.

It is a romantic amateurism to pursue liberty as a philosophical choice – a religion or cult – versus an empirical problem to be solved.

The age of rationalization has ended just as the age of mysticism ended. The current era is one of science: requiring both internal consistency(logical and rational) and external correspondence(empirical) as well as existentially possible (operationally articulable) and morality (voluntary transfers) bounded by full accounting (of all costs to all capital) and parsimony (defined limits of falsification).

Time for the adult version of liberty: Aristocratic(meritocratic) Egalitarian(meritocratic) Eugenic(meritocratic) Nomocracy(rule of law) assisted by a market for the production of commons using the exception of legal dissent, rather than the requirement of universal assent by majority rule.

Trump is a tool of progress. That is all. Liberty requires progress. Moreover it requires we repress the rates of reproduction of the underclasses who will not and cannot participate in liberty.