Curt Doolittle

Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

  • DELONG AND PAUL KRUGMAN AND THEIR ANTI-EMPIRICAL ECONOMICS RE: Brad, I would cou

    https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/friedman-ideas-great-recession-by-j–bradford-delong-2015-03BRAD DELONG AND PAUL KRUGMAN AND THEIR ANTI-EMPIRICAL ECONOMICS

    RE: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/friedman-ideas-great-recession-by-j–bradford-delong-2015-03

    Brad,

    I would counter, as I have since 2009, that you and your intellectual kindred fail to grasp that politics is moral not merely empirical. That humans are tribalists not universalists. That universalism suits the interests of the academy’s revenues, but not the interests of all polities. That human morality is roughly translatable into a prohibition on free riding. And that under plenty, humans share excess in exchange for status, and under duress humans punish free riders.

    What you have seen in the great recession is a evidence of moral expression that will always exist under democratic polities that are able to express moral instincts. Under the great recession we are punishing free riders build up under the era of plenty.

    You may call this irrational. But the use of this moral intuition is doing precisely what those who carry that instinct intuit that it should: punishing free riders – even and extreme personal expense. The middle class votes against its material interests out of altruistic punishment of free riders.

    Until we find an institutional means of controlling free riding, we will continue to see this behavior in high-trust high-altruistic-punishment societies. And it is only high trust high altruistic punishment societies that matter. Because they are always the only societies with wealth to distribute. Since those societies are the only ones that produce excesses.

    I will not live long enough I think, to restore morality to economics. But at some point someone will. Because good economics is empirical. And empirically – humans do, and must, act morally. And morality is a synonym for the prohibition on free riding.

    Democracy is incompatible with your interpretation of ‘good’ economics. And economics without morality is not scientific, but ideological and dysgenic.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-04-05 14:23:00 UTC

  • Can we get a facebook label for ‘Russian Troll”?

    Can we get a facebook label for ‘Russian Troll”?

    Source date (UTC): 2015-04-04 03:53:00 UTC

  • THE PUBLIC IS IGNORANT, TRUE. BUT…. (from elsewhere) One minor correction. The

    THE PUBLIC IS IGNORANT, TRUE. BUT….

    (from elsewhere)

    One minor correction.

    The budget consists roughly of 1/3 defense, 1/3 mandatory payments (Social Security and Medicaid) and 1/3 discretionary payments (everything else).

    We finance 1/3 (the military), and inflate it away. The world pays for our military through indirect taxation on the price of oil bought in dollars. This was the invention that the Nixon administration achieved with the Petro-Dollar and it was how we were able to run up the credit to defeat world communism under Regan.

    So technically speaking, 1/2 is discretionary, 1/2 is for redistribution, and the remainder – the military – is effectively free.

    Possessing this knowledge radically alters your perception of the world.

    It is why Iran wants nuclear weapons – to control oil, and to create a bourse, and to capture that ability to tax currency for itself.

    Sophisticated people in the world are not stupid, nor necessarily selfish. They merely take advantage of stupid people.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-04-03 16:48:00 UTC

  • true

    http://www.aei.org/publication/the-public-thinks-the-average-company-makes-a-36-profit-margin-which-is-about-5x-too-high/Painfully true.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-04-03 16:33:00 UTC

  • LATEST ARTICLE ON UKRAINE: The Commons That Is Not In Ukraine. If you use google

    http://zaxid.net/n1346373OUR LATEST ARTICLE ON UKRAINE: The Commons That Is Not In Ukraine.

    If you use google translate you can get the gist of it.

    Thank you Andriy Drozda 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2015-04-03 03:58:00 UTC

  • Untitled

    http://zaxid.net/n1346373

    Source date (UTC): 2015-04-03 03:55:00 UTC

  • see how this cultural marxism plays out. As I keep pointing out, the rhetoric in

    http://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/30hzi2/white_men_should_never_hold_elected_positions_in/cpsngd5—“Let’s see how this cultural marxism plays out. As I keep pointing out, the rhetoric in the West is evolving just as it did in S Africa: Freedom -> Equality -> Special Treatment -> Reparations -> . . . . Kill the Boer”—- Roman Skaskiw

    Source date (UTC): 2015-04-01 01:26:00 UTC

  • Untitled

    Source date (UTC): 2015-03-31 20:04:00 UTC

  • Untitled

    Source date (UTC): 2015-03-31 19:56:00 UTC

  • Untitled

    https://m.youtube.com/?reload=7&rdm=1gawgd7ee#/watch?v=FUjkZKT1rq4

    Source date (UTC): 2015-03-31 19:40:00 UTC