Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

http://www.thedailybell.com/editorials/35519/Wendy-McElroy-Relationship-of-Politics-to-Morality/#comment-1516520727MORE EVISCERATION OF ROTHBARD AND MISES

FROM THE DALY BELL

(Continued Debate)

http://www.thedailybell.com/editorials/35519/Wendy-McElroy-Relationship-of-Politics-to-Morality/

OPPONENT’S POSITION

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—“” I don’t know Rothbardian ethics, but I do know Rothbardian economics as an extension of Miseian economics. Ratiocination is the process by which a conscious animal, known as a human, attempts to substitute his present circumstances for better future circumstances. It is a means. Subjective valuation is what determines the ultimate judgments of value, the ends for which means are selected; so, any institution which purports to push people into or away from certain behaviors relies on a necessarily arbitrary application of force.

We can ask, for instance, why a Christian takes the time to go to church on Sunday, which is time that could be better used producing the material factors of wealth or by relaxing, to which the Christian can only respond that the ends satisfied is not an earthly one. This is not irrational and in fact, based on the premise that a Christian god rewards his followers who worship him in the afterlife, is quite a small opportunity cost for such an eternal payoff.

The problem is epistemological. The universe is filled with an infinite amount of data of which the human senses can only filter a tiny portion. Given this limitation for humans as to knowing the ultimate ends sought by nature, he must substitute his own and rely on his experience to give him feedback about its efficacy and whether it was desirable.

Thus, when you say, “it is rational,” or “it is not rational,” what you mean is that based on your premise about desirable ends, the means taken would be ineffective.

I believe Rothbard merely made his ethics an extension of subjective value theory. Given the unknowability of the ends of nature, and given that any consciously derived ends must be individual and that any application of force is thus made arbitrary, the question becomes, when is force acceptable among peaceable human beings?

Granted that anarcho-capitalism would not be a utopia; but, given the oft-proved aspect of human nature that power corrupts and bureaucracies create crazy incentives to be a parasite, it would certainly seem a clever alternative to the ever failing institutions of top-down hierarchy.””—

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CURT’S RESPONSE (Devastating as it is)

—“I don’t know Rothbardian ethics,”—

NAP where property is defined as IVP. It is pretty hard NOT to know them since one of the reasons “Libertinism” is attractive is its simplicity. However it’s simplicity is seductive since we europeans are cognitively biased to altruism, which while increasing trust and economic velocity also makes us vulnerable to everything from pseudoscience to ideological conversion. Rothbardian ethics originated in the ancient Levant, and were reinforced in the ghettos. Crusoe ethics ironically, are an analogy to the ghetto, where the sea performs the function of the wall, and non-aggression is imposed by the people outside the wall (the authorities).

–church—

People go to church so that the feel the pack submission response – its a reward. All congregational religions are based upon this human preference. Islam is the best example because it places the most emphasis on repetition. The longest surviving cults require the greatest behavioral investments from their members, in exchange they obtain psychic benefit of pack response. Or as marx would say, security from “alientation”.

–the problem is epistemological– AND –economics– AND –rational–

All of misesian economics and praxeology is constrained to the materialist in scope and recognizes only that which is open to intersubjective testing – as a means of ignoring subjective values (because they are invisible to other parties). That doesn’t mean only material things have value, it means that only material things exchanged are visible to analysis.

However the existence of the praxeological hypotheses depends without exception, on the marginal indifference of human choice in the aggregate: that we are extremely similar, and can sympathize with (meaning *understand* one another’s choices if they are explained to us). Without this a praxeology would be impossible.

It is non-rational for individuals to choose to live in a low trust polity,and humans demonstrate preference for moving to high trust polities, OR to authoritarian polities that use violence to create order where high trust is impossible,

The “economic way of thinking” requires that for every proposition you supply the equilibrating limits that govern it, not treat it as an ideal without limit. This is a superior definition to that of considering a chain of opportunity costs alone. It is true that we must consider not only opportunity costs, but that those opportunity costs cause accumulation of opposite opportunities that equilibrate against the initial action. Just as locals oppose the Free State Project, once it has any impact whatsoever.

–utopia–

Fallacious argument. It does not matter whether it would be a utopia. The question is whether it would be possible or whether it would be preferable. And all the evidence from all possible sources overwhelmingly demonstrates that rothbardian ethics are not reducible to a law sufficient for the formation of a voluntary polity that would be preferable for all but criminal fringe, and even for that criminal fringe, such a polity would be persecuted and prosecuted, Furthermore, that since governments hold other governments accountable for the actions of peoples over which they have no control, that polity would rapidly be rendered impoverished as other than a financial center. and as a financial center it would only survive in the service of black markets.

So Rothbard, like all the monotheistic philosophers before him, creates little more than a distracting cult narrative with the promise of salvation. But like the gnostics who argued the malfeasance of Jehova, Rothbardianism is in reality, seducing one into economic, social, political, and even genetic suicide.

The conservatives, who lack a rational language for their antiquarian social order, cannot articulate why they are repulsed by rothbardiansm, but because they have been acclimated to mental models that extrapolate individual actions into social consequences, they correctly see rothbardian ‘libertinism’ as unethical, immoral, and destructive.

The only ‘liberty’ that has gained an traction has been classical liberal constitutionalism which constrains the government. Rothbardianism has been a 40 year record of failure. A disaster. A self congratulatory cult where members gain a sense of solace and superiority in empty verbalisms. Rothbardianism has harmed the brand of “liberty’ so seriously that every institution other than “the fruitcake fringe” has tried to distance itself from the term ‘Austrian’, and has attempted to liberate ‘libertarianism’ from its association with the fruitcake fringe – something which we should crown Tucker with laurels for. And Likewise, Misesian economics, and praxeology as currently constructed are pseudosciences, conflating axiomatic and consistent statements with scientific and correspondent statements to seduce those who understand the meaning of neither. (Something which I have written about extensively.)

–I believe rothbard–

Rothbard was a member of the cosmopolitan enlightenment and his purpose, as was the purpose of all members of that philosophical movement, was to advance cosmopolitan (jewish enlightenment) inbreeding tribal philosophy of the ghetto to a majoritarian universal philosophy, just as the germans beginning with Kant proposed their inland nuclear family cultural philosophy as a majoritarian universalist philosophy, and just as the French proposed their inland traditional family cultural philosophy as a majoritarian universalist philosophy – all of them in reaction to the anglo enlightenment which was an attempt to seize political power from the landed aristocracy in both its church and private government forms, by creating a corporation controllable by the emergent middle class of bankers, traders and manufacturers.

(in other words, try not to imagine too much, and to read more widely. Rothbardians are similar to marxists and cults in that they read within the cult literature and hypothesize themselves, despite their pervasive ignorance rather than study economics, philosophy and history.)

Conservatives understand as much about morality as we understand about economics. We are wrong. Rothbard was wrong. Mises was wrong. Hoppe is wrong.

The only liberty that is possible is the the one the protestants and their ancestors invented: the suppression of criminal(thefts) AND ethical(deception) and immoral(externalities) actions under the the common law. This is the only possible means of reducing demand for the state. And the only means of obtaining ethical and moral property rights under the law, is ethical and moral homogeneity.

Under polycentric law, we may construct different **contractual rights**, because of the complex risks involved in the mitigation of disputes in different patterns of sustainable specialization and trade (PSST) but we cannot construct polycentric ethical and moral standards, since this merely increases the demand for authority.

So no, rothbardian and misesian attempts to preserve dualist ethics, and dualist culture, are just another example of the attempt of a group – in this case the cosmopolitans – just like the french and the germans, to assert their preferred evolutionary strategy, that is a bias in favor of their reproductive strategy, over that of other groups just as surely as colonization and war are attempts to do the same. And given the lack of success of the cosmopolitan strategy prior to the enlightenment era, and that in the enlightenment era that cosmopolitanism has produced not only “Rothbardian libertinism”, but Straussian neoconservatism and Marxist socialism, and Frankfurt school’s postmodernism and progressivism, are reflections of that attempt to preserve poly-moral and poly-cultural, and poly-legal rules, and has produced the equivalent of colonization or warfare by a destructive philosophy not seen since the invention of monotheism. Rothbardian Libertinism is just another excuse to create multi-culturalism, and turn the west into a factionalized Levantine polity. And we know how badly that turns out. These are bad ideas.

That we should reverse the corporeal state and return to the common law as our anarchic form of government. That we should re-institute local regiments or militias for defense in an era where we possess small arms capable of defeating an aggressor. That we should privatize public services. That we should replace a monopoly legal regulation with competing insurance organizations. That we we should return to small homogenous nations with different preferences. These are all true. They reflect our aristocratic egalitarian heritage – the heritage that gave us and maintained our freedom.

That we should construct poly-moral multi-cultural society is nothing more than an attempt to devolve us into levantine primitivism. And it is contrary to the theory that we can reduce all rights to property rights, since we PAY FOR NORMS every time we do not take an opportunity to lie, cheat, harm or steal or make choices that force others to pay our costs.

So Rothbardianism must be discarded as another product of cosmopolitanism that has conducted yet another destructive ideological war from progressive, libertarian and conservative to reduce us to primitivism.

Return to the liberty of aristocracy. The only liberty, and the only anarchy, that is, was or ever will be, possible.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev Ukraine