Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

ROTHBARDIAN ETHICS ARE A PARASITIC SCAM.

Rothbard’s ethics are just another a parasitic scam seeking to replace low transaction cost state parasitism, with high transaction cost universal parasitism. Aristocratic Egalitarians (protestants) had it right: universal responsibility for the universal suppression of all involuntary extractions, thereby forcing every living soul to compete in the market for goods and services, where his efforts produce a virtuous cycle.

1) We can describe all involuntary extractions of property as one of the following: Criminal, unethical, immoral, and conspiratorial (statist). Attached is one of my diagrams that illustrates this spectrum. The curve on the right is the DEMONSTRATED demand curve for liberty. Because it represents the REPRODUCTIVE return on forgone opportunities (opportunity costs).

2) All costs are opportunity costs. That definition of property is the human behavioral definition of property, not some artificially constructed definition of property that was created to justify aggression against property by non physical means. (Which is the very purpose of Rothbard’s argument.) If all costs are opportunity costs then it is not possible to make the argument for bribery except as an excuse to justify theft. (and it is an excuse to justify theft, which is why it’s almost universally rejected except by social outcasts.)

The human intuitive perception of property, the human normative description of property, and the reproductively and cooperatively NECESSARY and non-arbitrary definition of property, is defined by the requirements for decreasing transaction costs of cooperation. From the most severe and direct (crime) to the most indirect and imperceptible (displacement via outbreeding or immigrating. A fact which is illustrated in the diagram.)

3) As I’ve said. Either the NAP is insufficient, or the definition of property rights is insufficient. I’m able to construct an argument that the NAP is sufficient as long as the definition of property rights is DESCRIPTIVE.

But it is not possible to rationally choose an arbitrary description of private property limited to that which is necessary for economic production (private property) and its dependent ethics, and not ALSO leave unanswered the further definitions of property in all its forms that create the trust necessary for rational risk taking in a polity.

My original assumption was that first mises made the error because of his obsession with commodity prices, which are a reductio example of property, and that rothbard further expanded that error with his appeal to predatory extractive ghetto ethics, as an group evolutionary theory. And I can forgive both authors for such errors. We cannot expect all men to be wise in all matters.

But as time has progressed I’ve understood the damage that has resulted from the emphasis on a FAILED minority strategy (low trust society), to a successful majority strategy (high trust societies) in producing both eugenic reproduction and expanding wealth.

4) What is circular reasoning, is the arbitrary definition of rothbardian private property rights as a means of justifying involuntary extraction via PRIVATE SECTOR PARASITISM, as a means of replacing involuntary extraction via STATE PARASITISM.

Rothbard’s ethics, statism and socialism, are parasitic. ROTHBARD’S ETHICS ARE PARASITIC. Only high trust property rights are fully productive and NOT parasitic. ONLY those high trust ethics. ONLY THOSE AND NO OTHER. Northwestern europeans managed to almost exterminate all involuntary extraction and forcing all human action into the market for goods and services. All of it. Forbidding all other means of free riding.

Apriorism is an interesting tool for deceiving mediocre minds via overloading. It works in mathematical philosophy for the same reason it works in ethical philosophy: because these reductive arguments rely on aggregation of concepts that obscure the causal properties. So, yes, rothbardianism is a parasitic scam.

5) If we can get past that point we will get to the dispute over whether it is rational for people to exchange pervasive parasitism, pervasive transaction costs in daily life, for limited parasitic rents, corruption and conspiracy via the state.

CLOSING

All costs are opportunity costs. Humans DEMONSTRATE that they behave this way in all circumstances. And it is rational for them to do so. And irrational for them not to. And Rothbardian ethics are an attempt to trade one parasitic scam for another. Nothing more.